When Tony Albert was around six years old, he bought a plate with an illustration of an Aboriginal boy’s face on it from his local op shop. It was mid-1980s suburban Brisbane and although he had a large family with connections to the Girramay, Yidinji and Kuku-Yalanji peoples of north Queensland, seeing Aboriginal people or culture on TV was rare – so the plate “felt very special”, the 45-year-old artist recalls.
Over the years he collected more of these kinds of objects – cups, tea towels, trays, playing cards and figurines, all ostensibly depicting Aboriginal people and designs, but created by non-Indigenous people, often caricatured, exoticised or kitsch.
It wasn’t until in his teens that Albert started to understand the political connotations of these objects; in his 20s, he coined the term “Aboriginalia” to describe his collection and started using it to make art. It was a lightning bolt moment: “I felt like I’d found my medium,” he says. “There was something that was me that was really shining through in this work.”
More than 3,000 items from Albert’s Aboriginalia collection are showcased in his solo show Not a Souvenir, opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney on 21 May. In conjunction with the exhibition, the MCA is inviting the public to donate items to Albert’s vast collection now housed in his Brisbane studio.
The largest survey of Albert’s work to date, Not a Souvenir caps a banner two years for the artist, in which he served as the inaugural First Nations curatorial fellow for the 2024 Biennale of Sydney, in partnership with Fondation Cartier; and artistic director of the 2025 National Indigenous Art Triennial. In December, the French Ministry of Culture named him a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, an award recognising contributions to the arts in France and abroad.
Not a Souvenir was conceived in response to the MCA’s location on Sydney Harbour at Tallawoladah: a tourist-heavy site that has become an “epicentre for cultural commodification,” in Albert’s words – from souvenir shops selling fake boomerangs and replica tall ships docked at Campbells Cove, to colonial landmarks and Captain Cook cruises.
The exhibition includes an “Aboriginalia room” with hundreds of objects from his collection, along with an installation of more than 450 souvenir boomerangs, and scores of artworks in which items of Aboriginalia have been incorporated and transformed. Vintage velvet paintings of unnamed Aboriginal people – some sentimental stereotypes, some caricatures, some kitsch – have been overlaid with slogans such as “NOT A SOUVENIR” and “WELCOME TO COUNTRY / EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP”. A photo series features artfully arranged vintage tea towels and ashtrays, with lit cigarettes resting or stubbed out on Aboriginal bodies and faces.
A massive new text work, featuring almost 450 letters embedded with pieces of Aboriginalia, offers an unsparing, all-caps assessment of these objects, describing them as “PAINFUL REPRESENTATIONS OF A VIOLENT & OPPRESSIVE HISTORY” that “REDUCE DIVERSE CULTURES TO SIMPLISTIC, EXOTICISED ICONS” and “[REINFORCE] COLONIAL NARRATIVES THAT MARGINALISE US”.
“It is quite a heavy show in some ways,” says Albert, when we meet at MCA the week ahead of the show’s install. He’s running on the adrenaline of the Archibald Prize, which he and fellow Art Gallery of NSW trustees judged and awarded that morning – upbeat but fatigued.
Albert has been sifting through Aboriginalia on a daily basis for years, but he knows from experience that the items alone – in their original state – “are really confronting for a lot of people”. “People sometimes ask ‘How do you even come across this stuff? We never see any of it.’ Trust me, once [you’re aware of it], it’s everywhere,” he says grimly. Part of the power of his artworks is showing these objects en masse; inviting his audience to contemplate the sheer amount of this material that was produced, who bought it, and why.
He gestures to sentimental images of Aboriginal children painted on black velvet, in a glossy monograph of his work being published in conjunction with the exhibition. “There is a vulnerability there,” he says. “There’s an innocence. There is a NEED for these kids to be cherished and looked after.” There is a grim irony in the fact that these kinds of images were emblazoned on homewares and souvenirs during the era of the Stolen Generations. “Did it feed into the notion of it being OK to take children away from their families?” Albert ponders.
Grappling with these kinds of politics “can be overwhelming for people,” Albert says. “I’ve just had decades to decompress and contextualise these items.”
The result of this labour is a body of work that not only visualises Australia’s dehumanisation of its First Peoples, but – as Wierdi curator Bruce Johnson McLean says – “speaks back to those colonial histories and legacies, turning that conversation from one of disempowerment to one that’s very much of empowering Aboriginal people, voices, cultures, identities, knowledges”.
The exhibition also features significant non-Aboriginalia works from Albert’s 25 years of practice, including collages engaging with celebrated Australian modernist artist Margaret Preston’s appropriation of Aboriginal aesthetics; and his photo series Warakurna Superheroes, created in collaboration with children from the remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory, in which they wear homemade costumes while posing proudly on country.
Aboriginalia, however, is the focus. Reflecting on his deep and ongoing relationship with these often painfully racist materials, Albert says, “There are times, of course, it’s harder than others … but I have reconciled with this stuff. I can use it, I can abuse it. I can interrogate it. I can intervene with it without hesitation. [There’s a] comfort.”
Albert was born in Townsville in 1981, but moved around a bit as a child thanks to his dad’s army job. His father is a Girramay/Kuku Yalanji man from far north Queensland, and Albert has family in the Cardwell area, but he’s spent most of his life in Brisbane where his parents settled when he was young.
He and his sister were “brought up in the church”, Catholic, though he says his parents weren’t “uber religious” – it was more about the sense of community. “And childcare,” he laughs. “It seems weird, but looking back, I’m really grateful that we had that. It shapes your goals and values. There’s a sense of humanity and kindness.” Some of those Christian values, he adds, are “also blackfella values”.
These hard-baked values explain, perhaps, the gentleness that Albert exudes in person – in contrast with the fierce politics of much of his art. “I’ve had people meet me that have been terrified that I would be this very aggressive kind of person,” he says, “Like, ‘God, we thought you hated white people’.”
Albert’s gateway to art was a talent for drawing. It propelled him to take weekly art classes at a private college throughout his high school years, where he learned basic technical skills such as working with paint and colour. That in turn led him to the Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art degree at Griffith University – a life-changing experience. Having been one of two Aboriginal people at his high school (his sister was the other) and queer, feeling like “the outsider, and I didn’t belong”, he was suddenly surrounded by “like-minded blackfellas that loved art”. “I can’t remember a time I was happier,” he says.
Bruce Johnson McLean met Albert around this time through a traineeship program at Queensland Art Gallery. “Tony was the life of the party,” he recalls. “He used to carry around a boombox, and every event was an opportunity for karaoke. He’s always been somebody who’s overflowing with energy, and I think you get a sense of that from his work – there’s a sort of maximalist energy to it, and a generosity as well.”
He brings this generosity, and a certain gentleness, to his work with major institutions. “I hold an optimistic view of what art does and should do, and I’ve always thought that the forefront of these things happens inside institutions,” he says. “The best I can do is be at that table … [and have] those gentle conversations, quietly and strategically working from the inside to make change. And I think it’s happening.”