Sylvia Ken

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Sylvia Kanytjupai Ken (born 14 March 1965 in Amata, South Australia) is an Aboriginal Australian artist. Her painting Seven Sisters won the 2019 Wynne Prize from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Ken grew up in the Amata community in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands and went to school there. After leaving school, she began painting and also worked with batik on silk. Since 1999 she has created Tjukurpa paintings, which tell Creation stories. She started exhibiting in 2000 as her stories gained attention. She was a finalist in the Telstra National Indigenous Art Award in 2013, 2014 and 2018. In 2016 Seven Sisters was shown at Short Street Gallery in Broome. Her works have been shown in Olsen Gallery in Sydney and Jan Murphy Gallery, and have appeared at auctions, with a record price of $5,102 USD for Seven Sisters at Deutscher & Hackett in Melbourne in 2018. In 2019 Seven Sisters won the Wynne Prize for a Creation story about the Pleiades and Orion (Nyiru); the sisters travel across the night sky to avoid Orion. Her work has been exhibited across Australia and in Singapore and is held in national and international collections. A planned Hong Kong fair in March 2020 was canceled due to COVID-19.