The Stars Before Us All

Australian First Nations Art

February 12th - March 28th, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday February 12th, 5 - 8 pm

In collaboration with Michael Reid Galleries of Sydney and Berlin, La Loma is honored to present a traveling exhibition of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art.

THE STARS BEFORE US ALL is a group exhibition encompassing nine Australian First Nations artists. The works date from the 1990s to now, from the Central Desert to the tropical Northern Territory. For millennia, First Nations artists have shaped vision, story, and survival into profound artistic traditions. These paintings are colored in burnt umber and earth, electric maroon and punctuated dot-dot-dots—a radial, repetitive syntax mapping the nonlinear Dreaming, a sacred time of ancestral creation that underpins all law, identity, and connection to country.

It’s a rare event for the Los Angeles public to encounter a painting by Emily Kame Kngwarreye (b. 1910), the late, great painter of the remote Aboriginal community of Utopia in the Northern Territory. Kngwarreye, an Anmatyerre elder, began painting on canvas in her late 1970s and created a prodigious, breathtaking body of work that mapped her country, Alhalkere: its yam seed, seasonal blooms, and ceremonial cycles. Her rapid, layered fields of color, built through her signature 'dump dump' technique, translate her knowledge of land and history into luminous abstraction.

Alongside Kngwarreye’s iconic spatters, we witness the monumental contemporary salt lake of Timo Hogan (Pitjantjatjara), the intricate woven narratives of Regina Pilawuk Wilson (Ngan’gikurrungurr), and the frenetically detailed paintings of Betty Chimney (Yankunytjatjara). The show features the mythological storytelling of the late Rover Thomas (East Kimberley), whose painting traces the river he came to know as a young stockman, alongside the dynamic circular visions of Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan (Yankunytjatjara). La Loma is especially proud to present, for the first time in the United States, a densely layered dot painting of Raylene Walatinna, daughter of Betty Chimney, with whom she often collaborates. Walatinna’s work emerges from the APY Lands to chart the stories of her mother’s country with burnished ochre and reds of the afternoon desert.

La Loma is enthralled to bring THE STARS BEFORE US ALL to Los Angeles, in parallel to The Stars We Do Not See Australian Indigenous Art exhibition currently on view at National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C through March 2026, forming a dialogue between continents and connecting our collaborative and community-centric art practice to the manifold stories of Australia’s First Nations.

WORKS