| For those living outside the Lone Star state, the idea of organizing a significant show of contemporary Aboriginal art within the regional center of San Antonio might not seem apparent. Such reservations melt upon entering the newly installed Lam Collection of Aboriginal Art, inspired by the creative spirit of philanthropist and art patron May Lam and orchestrated by the University of Texas at San Antonio, located at the 1604 campus some 22 miles northwest of the city’s center. Traveling there by car, one gets an immediate sense of the great expanse of Texas, open sky, and growing pains evidenced by a highway system struggling to support tremendous growth. | 
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Collette Braha
Ningura Napurrula, Untitled, 2005. Acrylic on linen, 153 x 91 cm. Courtesy of The Lam Collection of Aboriginal Art.For those living outside the Lone Star state, the idea of organizing a significant show of contemporary Aboriginal art within the regional center of San Antonio might not seem apparent. Such reservations melt upon entering the newly installed Lam Collection of Aboriginal Art, inspired by the creative spirit of philanthropist and art patron May Lam and orchestrated by the University of Texas at San Antonio, located at the 1604 campus some 22 miles northwest of the city’s center.
Traveling there by car, one gets an immediate sense of the great expanse of Texas, open sky, and growing pains evidenced by a highway system struggling to support tremendous growth. As one engineers this modern city, coping with realities of congestion, construction and infrastructure repair, she or he is keenly aware of the culture of American suburbia.
The 20-minute drive is a paradoxical prelude to the new collection, in that it forces one to think about distinctions between environments, as well as personal relationships with environment. The experience functions as a reminder of connections between land and mankind, and thus invites thought on how one impacts the other. This idea of a terrain’s ability to expand human experience, or in the case of The Lam Collection, enhance it, is what resonates upon entering UTSA’s Main Gallery.
Through the display of approximately 50 works of painting, sculpture, and basketry, one intuitively grasps a sense of Aboriginal Australia as artist motherland and formative landscape. This is especially true for the non-traveler, for the person who has not yet glimpsed the extensive coastline, hiked any of her arid, rocky, or forested terrains comprising the four major areas where Aboriginal work is found.
Color is a key element evoking this sense of formative landscape inherent in the Aboriginal world. In fact it is the collection’s sense of the earth, reddish, and portrayed through use of more traditional color, that establishes a uniting force that anchors and binds art pieces to one another, as well as to the collective whole. Though some are painted on a diversity of traditional media to include carved bark and wooden poles, others reflect contemporary art markets. Painting on canvas, enables art to last as it goes out into the world. Of these works, by predominately women artists, nearly half incorporate canvas, silk, paper and ceramic on which acrylic pigment is painted to a dramatic effect using intricate dot patterns as well as liberal line.
Perhaps what is most striking about The Lam Collection is its articulation of unique personal vision informed by cultural legacy. Depicted images are abstract, symbolic, and rooted in central themes of relationships between elements of nature, human life, the actions of Ancestral Spirits and the ever constant but changing terrain. Aboriginal art in general has drawn international attention for what The Lam Collection catalogue refers to as “aesthetic inventiveness, respect for cultural traditions, and active discussion of the role of the arts in daily life and in the historical record.”
Curator Scott A. Sherer describes the vitality of Australian art as being housed in its continuity of culture from its 40,000-year traditions to contemporary times. “In a global world, these paintings demonstrate that these communities maintain their cultural heritage, though in fragile conditions,” he adds. “A regional center like San Antonio is an important venue for thinking about global issues.”
