Born:                   early 1970s
Birthplace:             Marruwa, Western Australia
Organization:        Papunya Tula
Style:                  Western Desert art

Yukultji Napangati is an Aboriginal Australian artist. She is a painter of the Papunya Tula group of artists. She is part of a generation of female painters who followed in the footsteps of the original male Papunya Tula artists.

In 2019, US rapper Jay-Z, bought one of Napangati’s artworks, which was featured on an Instagram post by his equally famous singer wife Beyoncé in July 2021, attracting 3.5 million likes within a week.

Napangati began painting in the early 1990s. Before this, she had watched her brothers painting and later decided to try it for herself. She paints stories and songs from her and her mother’s dreaming. These stories are about her traditional country, around Marruwa, Ngaminya and Marrapinti.

Her paintings are shown in several public collections in Australia. Her work has been shown in over 80 exhibitions in Australia and overseas. She was a finalist in the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA awards), in 2006, 2009, 2010 and 2011. In 2012, Napangati won the Alice Prize, an award for Australian artists in Alice Springs. In 2018, she won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting.

In 2018 Napangati’s work was included in the exhibition Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia at The Phillips Collection.