Written by DCist contributor Paul Ghosh-Roy.

The aboriginal culture of Australia is said to date back 50,000 years — the longest continuous culture of any people on earth. Dreaming Their Way, an exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, celebrates this tradition and the contributions that contemporary female aboriginal artists have made to the various styles of aboriginal painting.

Among this variety of styles, the “dot style” depicts both figures and abstract concepts using small circular dots of various colors. Widely represented in this exhibition, dot style paintings range from the wildly colorful, with deep blues, purples and pinks, to stark black and white. People and animals, such as indigenous Australian kangaroos, emus and wallabies, appear as often as the traditional Australian landscape, such as Billabongs and sand hills.

More pervasive in the paintings is the concept of the Dreaming, one of the core spiritual aspects of indigenous Australians. The Dreaming or Dreamtime is difficult to express in English, but simply stated it encompasses concepts of both creation and death, ancestors and the present, all simultaneously. Titles of some of the works provide a descriptive example of these themes explored by the artists, such as Bush Plum Dreaming and Milky Way, Seven Sisters Dreaming.