Steve Martin Backs Indigenous Film 'Honey Ant Dreamers' on Western Desert Art Movement

When Steve Martin rode his bicycle to Salon 94 on New York’s Bowery in 2015, he didn’t expect to change the course of an entire art movement. But after seeing a painting by Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri—a Pintupi artist from Australia’s remote Western Desert—he bought it on the spot. That single act ignited a passion that would eventually lead him to become an executive producer of Honey Ant Dreamers, a groundbreaking feature film documenting the birth of the Western Desert Art Movement—told for the first time through a First Nations lens.

From Collector to Champion

Martin’s collection didn’t stop with one painting. Over the next decade, he and his wife, Anne Stringfield, amassed what insiders call one of the most significant private holdings of Aboriginal art outside Australia. Their acquisitions weren’t random; they were deliberate, rooted in a reverence for the stories behind the dots. Meanwhile, John and Barbara Wilkerson, who first encountered Aboriginal art in 1994 while visiting their son at Sydney University, built a parallel collection. Their original goal? To own a work by every founding artist of the Papunya Tula movement. They didn’t complete it—but what they did gather became foundational.

Their combined holdings—60 paintings from Martin/Stringfield and the Wilkersons—were exhibited together at the National Gallery of Australia in 2022, drawing crowds and critical acclaim. Critics noted something unusual: for the first time, major Western institutions were treating Aboriginal art not as ethnographic artifact, but as contemporary fine art with its own lineage, rules, and spiritual gravity.

The Movement That Changed Everything

The Western Desert Art Movement began in 1971, when a schoolteacher named Geoffrey Bardon encouraged a group of Pintupi men in the remote community of Papunya to paint their ancestral stories on plywood. What started as crude sketches soon became luminous canvases of ancestral journeys, sacred sites, and Dreaming tracks—maps of the land written in pigment and symbolism. These weren’t decorative; they were sacred. And they were revolutionary.

For decades, Western art markets dismissed this work as “primitive” or “folk art.” But the artists—many of whom had never held a brush before—were drawing on 60,000 years of oral and visual tradition. Their connection to country wasn’t metaphorical. It was biological. Spiritual. Inescapable. As Ningura Napurrula, one of the movement’s pioneering female artists, once said: “When I paint, I walk the land. My hands remember what my ancestors taught me.”

Why This Film Matters

Most documentaries about Aboriginal art are made by outsiders. They interview curators. They show museum walls. They talk about market value. But Honey Ant Dreamers flips the script. Directed by Trevor Jamieson, a Pitjantjatjara actor and storyteller, the film features no talking heads. Instead, it uses immersive visuals, ancestral songlines, and first-hand testimony from living artists and elders to tell the story from within.

That’s why Martin’s involvement isn’t just celebrity endorsement—it’s cultural stewardship. “I didn’t set out to be a patron of Aboriginal art,” he told The Guardian in 2023. “I just fell in love with something that had been hidden in plain sight. If I can help ensure this story isn’t told by someone looking in, but by someone who’s always been there, then I’ve done my part.”

A Global Shift in Recognition

The timing couldn’t be better. In 2024, the Tate Modern in London dedicated its entire Level 5 to Aboriginal art for the first time. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired 12 new works from the Papunya Tula artists, valued at over $2.3 million. Even auction houses are catching on: Sotheby’s reported a 40% year-over-year increase in Aboriginal art sales in 2023.

But money isn’t the point. The point is validation. For too long, Indigenous Australian art was seen as exotic, not essential. Honey Ant Dreamers insists otherwise. It positions the movement as equal to Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, or any other modernist tradition—because it is.

What’s Next?

The film is slated for a 2026 premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, with plans for a global rollout through Netflix and cultural institutions. A companion educational program, developed with the Desert Art Centre in Alice Springs, will be distributed to Australian schools. Meanwhile, Martin has pledged to donate 10% of his profits from the film to the Papunya Tula Artists cooperative.

There’s a quiet revolution happening—not in boardrooms or galleries, but in the desert. And for the first time, the world is being asked to listen—not to interpret, not to collect, but to hear.