Makinti Napanangka (c. 1930-2011), painter, was one of the leading artists of the Western Desert. A Pintupi language speaker, she was born in the Karrkurritinytja (Lake MacDonald) region on the border of the Northern Territory and Western Australia. She and her family walked in to Haasts Bluff in the early 1940s, before the Papunya Tula artists' cooperative was established. She began painting at Kintore in the mid-1990s, encouraged by art coordinator Marina Strocchi. By 1996, when canvas was regularly distributed to senior women at Pintupi, she was painting in earnest. Her works are readily recognisable by their complex, sometimes rough patterns of pale lines, invoking the Lupul rockhole, women's body paint, spun hair string skirts and groups dancing, across an orange or ochre coloured ground with bursts of pink, blue-mauve and yellow. The Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria both acquired their first paintings by Makinti in 1997; in 2000 she was represented in the major exhibition Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Over the next decade she was named, again and again, one of the country's 'most collectable' artists. In 2008, she won the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. Now, her works are held by all major Australian collecting institutions.
