DOROTHY NAPANGARDI is a Warlpiri woman born in the early 1950s at Mina Mina, west of Mt Doreen and Yuendumu in the Northern Territory of Australia. Living for the greater part in Alice Springs, Dorothy began painting generic ‘bush tucker’ designs in 1987. Working outside of art community pressures and politics allowed Dorothy to experiment with painting formats and explore new directions. Such developments throughout the 1990s, along with pilgrimages back into her heartland, undoubtedly sponsored a re-focus on the forms and structures of her jukurrpa and stories associated with Mina Mina. This culminated into the distinctive grid-patterned designs that Dorothy is now so widely recognised for including Salt Pan images and Digging Stick Dreaming
(Kana-kurlangu). In 2001 Dorothy won the coveted Telstra National Indigenous Art Award for a black and white work Salt on Mina Mina. In 2002 Dorothy was presented a major survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Today, Dorothy still resides in Alice Springs where she paints full time in her own studio . Her most recent paintings depict elaborate and elegant interpretations of country including concentrations of finely veiled grids over predominantly white or black grounds.

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