Aboriginal Art Directory
A Technologist with a Passion for Aboriginal Art Energizes an Industry with Movable Type
Customer Profile
The Aboriginal Art Directory was the first website of its kind to develop a comprehensive list of Aboriginal artists throughout Australia. Created by David Atkinson, Kathryn Riley and Chris Edwards of Metis Internet Partners, the site enables art enthusiasts and prospective buyers to sort artists, art centers, galleries and museums by region, artist, or type of art. Metis Internet Partners, in conjunction with Central Art, also developed a comprehensive online directory of Aboriginal art symbols, which is available on the Central Art website. The directory decodes over 50 of the most common symbols found in Aboriginal art and their meanings.
When Technology Meets An Ancient Culture
David Atkinson founded Metis Internet Partners in 1999, during his first year at the University of Melbourne. “My friend and I decided that we could either get jobs working at McDonalds or start our own technology company,” he chuckles. And so they did. The two became adept at building websites and databases and implementing IT solutions; between classes, they deployed a number of web projects for their customers.
David moved to the desert after graduation, where he worked on a government project with Aboriginal communities within Central Australia. In the process, he discovered a large, disparate community of Aboriginal artists, many of them isolated in their communities, each one a day’s drive from the next settlement.
“Over the years, the Australian government has funded the building of art centers in many Aboriginal communities,” he explains. “They employ someone to manage the center, and provide paints and canvases and other art materials.” The centers offered a safe, welcoming environment that quickly became community gathering places. “Imagine these remote communities,” David says. "There might be 200 people with a single telephone.”We couldn’t have created a site like this with anything other than Movable Type. The site is so large and contains so many different components - it takes a simple yet powerful system to accomplish something this complicated.
- David Atkinson, creator of Aboriginal Art Directory
“Women especially have gravitated to these centers,” David says. "They’ve had an enormously positive effect on people’s lives.” Over the course of two years in the desert, David began to see technology through the eyes of people who had little technological knowledge and limited English skills. “Most of my time wasn’t spent with young, technically savvy people,” he explains. “ When I started looking for software applications to use, I found that most of it wasn’t easy to explain it to others.”
He began to envision a way for artists to be able to leverage technology to expose their work to a broader audience. To accomplish that, he would need to find a solution that would be powerful, yet simple to explain, set up, and maintain. “I realized that the central issue was the ability to communicate,” he says. “I was on a quest to find an application that was focused on communication first. The “bells and whistles” features could stay in the background.”
The Challenge
In 2003, after 6 months investigating different technology solutions, David discovered Movable Type. “MT is incredibly successful at making publishing simple,” he enthuses. “It was just what I was looking for - software built around the need to communicate.”
Movable Type enabled David to build sites that would enable users to publish information and update their sites long after he was gone. “The user interface is geared entirely towards publishing, and is so easy to work with that people are able to publish their information in a defined workflow that is easy and predictable.”
But David was only one person, and soon realized that he couldn’t build websites for all 100 art centers. “The problem isn’t only the technology,” he explains. “Most of the art centers that do have a website don’t know how to market it, or update it. They’re too overworked; managing a website is just one of 100 tasks they are expected to perform each week . Frankly, it’s no one’s fault, but even if you built a standard website for every art center, it simply isn’t a sustainable solution.”
To complicate matters, the long distances between art centers and limited oversight created perplexing questions of provenance and fair compensation. “A buyer coming into this market had no way of knowing where to start, or who to trust,” David explains. “There was no way to verify if an artist was being fairly paid, or if a dealer was on the up and up. Everything was disjointed.”
Over the course of several months, David and Kathryn began to ask themselves: how could we leverage our skills and knowledge of the Aboriginal art community to improve this industry? “What we wanted to do was to create a site where
people could find the information they need - learn about the artists, see the art, learn more about the region where it was made - so that they could make informed decisions,” he says.
The pair hit upon the notion of creating an online resource of every artist and business involved in the Aboriginal art industry. They painstakingly complied the data themselves - including background information on each of the artists - by hand. David recalls: “I had a day job and a night job - this was my late night job.” Fueled by his passion for the Aboriginal art community, he and Kathryn kept at it until they were done. “We wanted to help,” he says simply. “We thought this site could have a positive impact on people’s lives.”
The Solution
David and Kathryn built the Aboriginal Art Directory entirely in Movable Type. The Directory is actually several blogs all linked together, including a news archive, a gallery, and a powerful search engine. The site allows people to discover artists and artwork, browse articles about Aboriginal art, and exhibits and related events.
“Without Movable Type, I can’t imagine that it would have feasible to build this site,” David reports. “I couldn’t give Movable Type a higher award; I’m convinced that it can do anything.”
The gallery provides the opportunity for visitors to vote on artwork, and displays the works with the most votes at the top. This functionality demonstrates how the site can and does impact lives: an Aboriginal artist from regional New South Wales named Nyree Reynolds submitted her work to the site. Her painting, called “No longer a Mirage,” quickly rose to #1 in the voting.
To keep the directory above reproach, all listings are free, and the directory lists all art centers, galleries, artists and other related businesses on its site. The directory does not take fees or commissions from any of the sales generated through the directory. The expenses of running the site are covered by a minimal amount of advertising, and David and Kathryn never expect the site be a significant source of income.
“We really feel that it’s a blessing that we have an outlet to help create change. Even through we’ll never be directly involved in the Aboriginal art industry, we were able to develop something that will help it succeed. It was a labor of love.”
David and Kathryn plan to continue building sites in Movable Type, both for commercial projects and other social causes that they believe in. “Movable Type can give structure to the most creative project,” David says. “This is proof.”
