DOB: 1942

BORN: Mosquito Bore, Utopia, Northern Territory
LANGUAGE GROUP: Anmatyerre
COMMUNITY: Utopia, Northern Territory

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Gloria Petyarre/Pitjara (1942–8 June 2021) is widely recognised as being one of the most significant artists of the Australian Aboriginal Art movement. Gloria commenced what would become one of the most influential careers of the movement by participating in the Utopian Women's Batik Group in 1977, which was launched by the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA). This ambitious project sought to collect and record the cultural significance of the women’s ceremonies of the Utopian Aboriginal Lands of the Eastern Desert – ceremonies that had hitherto been shared through a common language group. The artists from Utopia had no history of association with ‘dotting’, which had evolved from the epic creations that storytellers made directly into the surface of the desert using sticks and hands, or raark (crosshatch), which had evolved from the rock art sites throughout the vast Arnhem Land escarpment.

Gloria is internationally recognised for her exquisite ‘Bush Medicine Leaves’ paintings, which share the story of the bush medicine leaf ceremony, where the women collect the leaves that have fallen from the Kurrajong trees and boil them up to make bush medicine. In 1999, Gloria’s ‘Leaves’ won the prestigious The Wynne Prize – an Australian landscape painting or figure sculpture art prize. As one of Australia's longest-running art prizes, The Wynne Prize was established in 1897 from the bequest of Richard Wynne and is now held concurrently with The Sir John Sulman Prize and The Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.