Minnie Nelson Nakamarra

Minnie Nakamarra is the daughter of Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula and his wife Gladys Napanangka. She was born in Alice Springs Hospital on 29 August 1966. Mike and Dennis Tjakamarra are her older brothers, Candy her older sister and Emma her younger sister from the same mother and father. Her sisters Narlie and Maggie were the children of their father’s first marriage. They all grew up together in Papunya, where Minnie remembers staying close to her mother and father when they were painting, and all the kids helping them by getting paint, brushes and water for them.

Johnny Warangkula was one of the founders of the desert art movement and Gladys Napanangka was one of the first women to paint for Papunya Tula in the early 1980s in Papunya, so Minnie grew up with painting. She remembers that her father used to sing when he painted: “They both did. They used to tell stories and they told us all to be painters.” Minnie went to school in Papunya – and after school went home to watch her father painting. She later attended Yirara secondary college in Alice Springs. She returned to Papunya and worked in childcare and aged care. Minnie has four children: her son Robin, and three daughters Valerie, Stella and Evonn – all now grown up.

Minnie started as a painter by practising with her mother and father’s paints and brushes – she and all her siblings did this. She painted occasionally for Warumpi Arts in the 1990s but did her first painting in a long time in May 2007 when canvas and paints were being distributed across Papunya for the inaugural Papunya Tjupi: A New Beginning exhibition at Ivan Dougherty Gallery College of Fine Arts UNSW. Her small painting had a large impact and later she developed a print of the same design with UNSW’s Cicada Press. Minnie paints her father’s sites of Tjikari, Kalipinypa and Kampurrarrpa and his Water and Bush Tomato Dreamings are her usual subjects. Minnie’s daughter Valerie “paints sometimes”, the only one of her children to paint so far.