April friends' night with special guest Jo Holder

This month we have invited a very special guest, Jo Holder, to speak about the work of Jack Green.

Jack Wongili Green: is a Garrwa man, born in 1953 and educated on country before working as a stockman. Later, Jack worked for the Northern Land Council and is a director of the Carpenteria Land Council. Jack has spent over 30 years fighting for the protection of his country and its sacred sites and founded the Garawa Rangers and Waanya/Garawa Rangers and continues this work today, for which he won the 2015 Peter Rawlinson Conservation Award. He began to paint in 2008 to get his voice heard, to show others what is happening to his country and people. His work is represented in the collection of the Australian National University and he has been a finalist in the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in Darwin (2016).

Jo Holder founded The Cross Art Projects, Sydney in 2003 to advance equity and social justice issues. She is the co-convenor of Contemporary Art and Feminism in collaboration with Jacqueline Miller and Catriona Moore and Future Feminist Archive (across regional NSW, 2015-16 and Future Feminist Archive Live! at Wollongong City Gallery, 2019). At the Cross Art Projects she has contributed Witnessing the Intervention, a series of exhibitions on the Federal Intervention into Indigenous communities and the counter argument for 'Voice Treaty Truth' (co-curated with Djon Mundine); mining and climate projects, including Particulate Matter: A fossil fulled future? (2020); and the exchange project Elastic/Borracha/Elastico: Dili/Darwin/Sydney (2014, Darwin and Sydney). Her social history projects include Re/construction (2020, with Sydney Trades Hall), a rereading of Jack Mundey and the 1970s Green Bans Movement and the Green Bans Art Walk (2011, Performance Space, Sydney). Jo Holder has held key curatorial roles in the public and independent sectors including as director of S.H Ervin Gallery, Sydney, and published several books on contemporary visual art and visual culture.

"In the top left sit government people, they far away, making the decision to take our Country and call it Australia. Then come the miners and settlers looking to take over our land. Us Aboriginal people were there ready to spear them to protect our country but they just keep coming, and they still coming today, more and more of them with their drill rigs and mining trucks, diggin' our scared places, suckin' the life from Garrwa, Gudanji, Marra and Yanyuwa country making it unsafe for us to hunt and fish and live in our own country." Jack Green on the artwork Sucking the life from our hearts, 2019.