How a tiny gallery created an Australian oasis in ‘crazy’ Washington

Washington: While Anthony Albanese was shaking hands with Donald Trump in the White House, a few blocks away, Michael Reid and Toby Meagher were welcoming some of the top names in the American art world to a pop-up gallery of Indigenous Australian art.

The Stars Before Us All opened in mid-October just off a busy, sometimes chaotic corner in central Washington. When this masthead visited, the World Bank was holding its annual meeting nearby, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s motorcade was causing traffic mayhem.

Nonetheless, curious locals have found their way inside. “The sentiment from everyone who’s stepped in is like: you get this preamble about how things in Washington are kind of crazy, and it’s really nice to have something like an oasis,” says Meagher, director of Michael Reid Galleries.

Reid adds: “We had a woman come in this morning, formerly from the State Department, whichever one that is, and she was really excited. She said, ‘I was having a really bad day.’ And then she rushed up saying, ‘Thank you, I’ve been really energised’, and she’s looking at buying a work.”

The slightly soulless heart of downtown DC – with its government departments and large steakhouses – might seem an odd place for this commercial collection of more than 30 works from 20 Aboriginal artists.

It was meant to coincide with a landmark event in Indigenous art – the National Gallery of Victoria’s touring exhibition at Washington’s National Gallery of Art, The Stars We Do Not See, curated by Myles Russell-Cook.

But the US government shutdown put paid to that. Like the rest of the capital’s museums, the NGA is closed – with no reopening date in sight.

Reid and Meagher have tried to make the best of a bad situation. Directors of major museums have popped in, and serious figures from the American art world have travelled from New York -- people who may not have had time to do so had the usual institutional programming been in full flight.

“Strangely enough, among all the chaos and discombobulation, it’s actually working in our favour,” says Reid.

The guest of honour at the exhibition’s recent launch party was Regina Pilawuk Wilson, described by Reid as Australia’s preeminent living female First Nations artist. Her work Wupun, a painting of a sun mat, occupies pride of place in the intimate gallery.

Wilson has a special connection to Washington. In 2018, she painted two murals at the Phillips Collection in Dupont Circle, while her fishnet designs, inspired by traditional Aboriginal weaving, are featured in carpets throughout the Australian embassy.

Australian ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd, busy preparing for Albanese’s imminent visit, found time to meet Wilson and her family ahead of the exhibition’s opening, and show her the community hub and meeting room at the embassy, which is named in her honour.

Stars also showcases works by Gaypalani Wanambi – a Yolŋu artist from Yirrkala in northeast Arnhem Land, and the winner of the prestigious 2025 Telstra Art Award – as well as Kuninjku carver and painter Owen Yalandja and contemporary artist Christian Thompson, among others.

“We’re showing quite a broad range of work,” says Meagher. “We are trying to open an entry point for new North American collectors into First Nations art, and we want to show that there’s a real breadth that’s probably beyond what’s expected.”

Sales have been slower than initially expected due to the absence of the National Gallery show, but Meagher says there has been fresh interest from institutional collectors in the past week. The exhibition has been extended until November 9.

“It’s going OK, but there’s still work to do,” he says. “We have sold probably 65-70 per cent of the show now. Ideally, we would have been getting close to selling out. So we’re giving ourselves an extra couple of weeks.”

Indigenous art has found favour among some North American collectors, most notably the actor Steve Martin. The Metropolitan Museum of Art added new Indigenous artworks to its reopened Michael C. Rockefeller wing earlier this year, though they represented only a fraction of the Oceanic exhibit.

There have also been setbacks, including a poor Sotheby’s auction in New York last year, widely seen as having been held too soon after the death of well-connected dealer Tim Klingender.

Meanwhile, the NGV’s touring exhibition remains locked up inside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, waiting for politicians on nearby Capitol Hill to put aside their differences, reopen the government and throw open the museum doors.

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