Mary Eagle
Mary Eagle is an Australian art critic, curator and art historian, the author of books, articles and papers on Australian art and artists.
Early life and education
Eagle was born in Bairnsdale, Victoria in 1944. In her late 20s she took a Bachelor of Arts double degree in History and Fine Arts in 1975 at the University of Melbourne where the ethnographic teaching of University of Melbourne historian Greg Dening was formative in her ideas. There also, she researched the George Bell school for an Honours degree from which The George Bell School: students, friends, influences was published in 1981.Historiographical researcher
Eagle's research, beyond her biographies of artists, promotes the decolonising art historical narratives, especially through her interest in art of Asia, the Australian First Nations, and in women in art. Montana notes her 1987 article in the Australian Journal of Art her observation of "the lack of value given to the Japanese fine arts in colonial Australia," and supports her claim that Japanese art during our period was commonly regarded as 'mere' decorative art.Eagle's PhD thesis was awarded by the Australian National University in 2005; her A history of Australian art 1830-1930: told through the lives of the objects, was humanist in focus and history-based. It dealt with visual representations by Indigenous Australians and European-Australians of sequential themes,' to the present, 'of land-claims, cultural allegiance, and cultural reformation.' The abstract explains that the study incorporates:
...a multiplicity of human perspectives; the obverse of a history based on the operation of abstract forces. Traditionally, the histories of Australian art have been divided by taxonomies of race and civilisation. Without doubt the division had effect in the past assessment of art however there was every reason why it should not govern a revised history. The context for re-imagining the past is that, in our own time, the Aboriginal people's capacity for cross-cultural expression, via a dialogical mode, has earned their art a prominent place in contemporary art world-wide. Rather than writing theoretically, the solution was to build an alternative history on the basics, on specific information about objects and the contexts of their production. The fate of the objects subsequently - the collecting of them, and their periodic assessment over time, became a means of incorporating the explanations of art history and anthropology without having to endorse the viewpoint of either. Aboriginal art was observed to take a dialogical mode from early on, whereas art in the western mode has only recently - under globalisation- shown signs of a comparable self-objectification leading to a dialogic.
Daniel Thomas, taking issue with the notion that "Aboriginal art has been absent from Australian art histories" cites Eagle's tracing in her PhD thesis of the inclusion of Aboriginal bark paintings in international Expos in the 1850s and the drawings "by an Aboriginal artist" lent to the 1854 Melbourne Intercolonial and the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle, and Aboriginal material as a routine Australian contribution to international Expos, including the 1939 New York World Fair in the twentieth century.