Blue Art Journal: Rise of the Global Indigenous
Join us to celebrate the launch of Blue Art Journal, a new publication in Australia dedicated to critical writing about local and global First Nations art, craft and design.
Image: Edward Poitras, Coyote, 1995 (Installation shot, 1995 Venice Biennale).
Blue Art Journal’s first issue, published in February 2026, features a new tide of First Nations voices from across the coastlines of so-called Australia, through the waters and islands of the Pacific to Turtle Island and back again.
Our connections go well beyond the imagined cartographic boundary zones that have been imposed on our peoples. Throughout the world, Indigenous peoples continue to build on a history of solidarity with each other by recognising our shared struggles against colonial systems, but most importantly our shared celebrations of survival, resurgence, and cultural continuity.
Contributions from the Global First Peoples across the planet remind us we are all living under the same sky, through their appreciation and evaluation of visual arts, craft and design.
-Guest co-editors Hayley Millar Baker & Erin Vink “Welcome Letter”, Blue Art Journal, Issue 1
The event will use Professor Gerald McMaster’s essay within Voume One ‘The Indigenous Turn’ as a prompt to reflect on how representation of Indigenous art and artists has increased within global arts practices and why a platform like Blue Art Journal is a necessary part of this rise.
Presented by Blue Art Journal, in collaboration with The Power Institute, the Chau Chak Wing Museum and the Biennale of Sydney.
People
Daniel Browning
Professor of Indigenous Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Sydney, Daniel Browning is Bundjalung and Kullilli writer, journalist and radio broadcaster. In a 30-year media career with Australia’s national broadcaster, Daniel read news for youth network triple j, presented and produced curated international award-winning programs on Indigenous art and culture every week for 15 years on Awaye! and established Word Up, a shortform podcast on the revival of Indigenous languages. The former Editor Indigenous Radio at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Daniel also hosted The Art Show from 2021 until 2025. In 2010 he was appointed guest editor of a specialist Indigenous issue of the contemporary art journal Artlink, and was invited back to edit four subsequent issues of what became the annual Artlink Indigenous. His first book, Close to the Subject: Selected Works, which catalogues his freelance writing on the arts, as well as poetry, memoir and his first play, won the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. In the same year Daniel was also the recipient of the Indigenous Writing Prize, a category of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. A finalist in the June Andrews Prize for Arts Journalism in 2024, he jointly won the Walkley Foundation’s inaugural Arts Journalism and Arts Criticism Prize in 2025 with ABC colleagues Rudi Bremer and Teresa Tan. His writing on contemporary Indigenous art has been published widely both nationally and internationally in ArtReview, Art Basel, Gradhiva, E-flux, The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, Overland, The Guardian, The Age, Afrikadaa, Harper’s Bazaar, Conde Nast Traveler and the precursor of Blue Art Journal, Art Monthly. His critical essays have been published in magazines and exhibition catalogues for state and national galleries and in monographs including the latest, Tony Albert’s Not A Souvenir, published by Thames and Hudson.
Jocelyn Flynn
Jocelyn belongs to the Notsi language group from Niu Ailan province, Papua Niugini with Anglo-Celtic lineages. Currently based in Magandjin, she is a curator, arts writer, and is currently Assistant Curator at UQ Art Museum. She has previously held positions in the Asian and Pacific Art team at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, as well as in commercial, institutional, and community art spaces in programming, education, and collection management roles. Her texts have been published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Museum International, Runway Journal, among others. Photo credit: Joe Ruckli.
Georgia Mokak
Georgia Mokak is the First Nations Outreach Coordinator at the National Association for the Visual Arts, advocating for cultural leadership and sector development.
Warraba Weatherall
Warraba Weatherall is a visual artist, lecturer, and PhD candidate, who is currently based in Brisbane, Australia. Weatherall’s artistic practice has a specific interest in archival repositories and structures, which influence our contemporary understanding of history and cultural knowledge systems. His work looks at how forms of visual communication reflect and reinforce social power. Weatherall is passionate about shifting cultural norms within the Australian visual arts sector and contributes to the sector through artistic practice, education and curation.