Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
What’s On
Raymond McIntyre: A Modernist View
Dynamic and progressive paintings and woodcuts from one of Aotearoa’s New Zealand foremost modernist artists.
Living Archives
Archives that tell stories about artists and history in Aotearoa
Whāia te Taniwha
Māori artists consider the enduring relevance of taniwha in Aotearoa.
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Late night Wednesday until 9pm
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Free entry, free wifi
Interview
Texture of the Time
John Miller (Ngāpuhi) is a special figure in Aotearoa, having photographed protests and important events throughout the country from 1967 right up until the present moment. His work covers everything from the 1960s and 1970s anti-Vietnam war and anti-nuclear protests to the 1975 Māori Land March, 1977–78 Bastion Point occupation and 1981 Springbok Tour protests, as well as many more examples of civilian dissent. John uses the camera as a witness, capturing moments of collective voice in action, and he also honours the people who have led the charge for changes in thinking and our society. Looking at his work is like walking through our history backwards into the future. Curator Melanie Oliver sat down with activist John Minto and photographer Conor Clarke (Ngāi Tahu) to talk about John Miller’s work.
Commentary
In Plain Sight
Margaret Lady Frankel (née Anderson) (1902–1997) is always listed as a founding member of the Christchurch artistic collective The Group, and is best remembered for her leading role in securing Frances Hodgkins’s Pleasure Garden painting for the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in 1951. However, despite exhibiting more than 100 works, including paintings, drawings, prints and pottery, in the city over a thirty-year period, her art is virtually unknown – hidden in private collections or perhaps lost – and consequently her wider contribution to The Group continues to be overlooked.
Commentary
The Meeting of Two Queens
A blue dot – warm, mid-blue – that repeats across Tongan artist Kulimoe'anga Stone Maka’s ngatu tā'uli Toga mo Bolata'ane (Tonga and Britain) (2008–10) recalls the first time the artist saw blue eyes.
Commentary
Ilam and Bulletin
This issue of the magazine is the final one to be designed by the students of the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury. Bulletin’s relationship with Ilam began back in 2014, when senior lecturer in design Aaron Beehre proposed an internship programme that would allow his students to work on the magazine under his supervision. With Aaron as art director, the first issue of the magazine produced at Ilam was B.175, still in the large square format designed in 2008 by Strategy. With a few issues under their belt, Aaron and his students redesigned Bulletin into the current iteration of the magazine, which we launched in March 2016 shortly after our reopening post-quake. At the time, then director Jenny Harper hailed it in her foreword as the “first edition of Bulletin in a new world”, and most importantly with “more pages for art”.
My Favourite
Reuben Paterson - The End
I am a clown. I spent my whole life perfecting the art of idiocy, learning my trade outside the Gallery on the corner of Worcester Boulevard and Montreal Street – cutting my teeth as a street performer. Then one day, I was invited to step inside the Gallery, to write about art. Naturally, I felt nervous, but excited.
Notes
Ivy Fife
The Gallery has been actively acquiring good strong examples of artworks by Ivy Fife that show her at her best over the past two years with an aim to have her better represented in the permanent collection. Four paintings and two linocuts have been acquired, works that will easily hold their own alongside examples by her Canterbury contemporaries Bill Sutton, Rita Angus, Leo Bensemann, Doris Lusk, Louise Henderson and Rata Lovell Smith.
Notes
Paratene Matchitt (1933 - 2021)
Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery recognizes the passing of Paratene Temokopuorongo Matchitt (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Te Whakatōhea and Ngāti Porou).
Collection
Rata Lovell-Smith Looking North from Clifton
An early advocate of regionalist painting in Waitaha Canterbury during the 1920s and 30s, Rata Lovell-Smith’s paintings were admired by the Shurrocks. They owned her 1929 painting Back Country, Lake Selfe Area, which they gave to the Gallery and can currently be seen in the exhibition He Kapuka Oneone—A Handful of Soil upstairs. Lovell-Smith relished the Canterbury landscape, particularly the foothills and mountains inland such as those seen in the distance of this view overlooking the Ōtautahi Christchurch suburbs of Southshore and New Brighton.
(Dear Shurrie: Francis Shurrock and his contemporaries, 8 March – 13 July 2025)