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New Lead Curator Announced
News
Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū is delighted to announce the appointment of our new lead curator, Felicity Milburn.
Felicity impressed us with her strong curatorial vision, deep knowledge of New Zealand and international art, and clear and forward-looking understanding of the Gallery’s audiences.
Many of you will be familiar with Felicity’s curatorial work, and in particular how she led by example and excellence through the post-earthquake years when our building was closed. She collaborated with local artists to realise the Rolling Maul series in our temporary space throughout 2012. After we reopened, her work continued apace, speaking directly to children through Tanya Schultz’s spellbinding sugar landscape Pip & Pop: The newest new world, before spotlighting one of Aotearoa’s most interesting feminist artists in the acclaimed Jacqueline Fahey: Say Something! Currently pulling the crowds, her most recent project is the spectacular and immersive Wheriko – Brilliant! If you haven’t seen it yet you must; it’s a perfect illustration of Felicity’s skill in balancing the need for broad audience appeal with high-quality arts engagement.
Felicity also brings a proven record of art writing, research, collection development and cross-team collaboration. Her skills will be vital as we build the Gallery and its programme into Aotearoa New Zealand’s most essential and engaging art experience.
Related
Exhibition
Wheriko - Brilliant!
17 May 2019 – 16 February 2020
Artists play with shadow and light, transforming the familiar into the extraordinary.
Exhibition
Juliet Peter: Where the Line Leads
1 September 2018 – 20 January 2019
Delightful observations of character and place, from rural Canterbury to bustling 1950s London.
Exhibition
Jacqueline Fahey: Say Something!
22 November 2017 – 11 March 2018
Overflowing with love, conflict and quiet despair, Fahey’s paintings from the 1970s bristle with the intensity of domestic life.
Exhibition
Wayne Youle: Look Mum No Hands
14 April – 3 September 2017
Full to the brim with high energy, sharp-witted artmaking
Commentary
Power and Possibility
Jonathan Jones, art critic for the Guardian newspaper, described it as “a spectacle that displays the power and mystery of our planet”. Made more than forty years ago, Walter De Maria’s 1977 sculpture The Lightning Field remains one of the world’s most ambitious manifestations of light-based art.
Commentary
Her Own London
I laughed at your note. Our packing was not done until the last minute of the 11th hour, and when we at last got onto the train we could only think how lovely it was to do nothing and think about nothing. However, by now we realise we are really going to England. After 17 days at sea, out of sight of land, N.Z. seems as if it was in another universe.
Artist Profile
Doris Lusk: An Inventive Eye
In the strange, stunned afterlife that ticked slowly by in the first few years following Christchurch’s February 2011 earthquake, a curious note of recognition sounded through the shock and loss. As a massive programme of demolitions relentlessly hollowed out the city, many buildings were incompletely removed and lingered on for months as melancholy remains – stumps abandoned in a forlorn urban forest. Hideous, sculptural, beautiful; they bore compelling resemblance to a body of paintings created in the city more than three decades earlier.
Article
Sparks that fly upwards
Curator Felicity Milburn remembers five years and 101 installations in a gallery without walls.
Article
Street urchins, blue moons and rare visions
Even in a city where surreal scenes have become somewhat routine, the sight of the Isaac Theatre Royal's eight-tonne dome, suspended like a great alien craft, had the power to turn heads and drop jaws. Preserved inside a strange white shroud while the theatre was slowly deconstructed around it was a jewel of Christchurch's decorative arts heritage – a 105 year-old Italianate plaster ceiling featuring a circular painted reverie on the theme of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The dome, along with the rest of the theatre, is currently being restored as part of an ambitious rebuild that is expected to be completed in 2015 at a cost of over $30 million.
Interview
Rolling Maul
A lot of water, and Lord only knows what else, has flowed under the bridge since Justin Paton and I first hatched our plans for a fast-paced, post-quake showing of new work by local artists. Rolling Maul, so far, has been quite the antithesis of 'fast-paced', and despite our best efforts, it is yet to roll anywhere – rather it has been beset by the same delays, cancellations and frustrations as all of the Gallery's other in-house plans.
Our original concept, as outlined in B.165, was based around the use of one of Christchurch Art Gallery's ground-floor exhibition spaces, which we hoped to reoccupy as soon as they were no longer required as part of the City Council/CERA earthquake response. But as we are now only too aware, we won't be showing anything there any time soon.
Article
Séraphine Pick: assumed identities
The celebrated faces gracing two of the paintings in Séraphine Pick's Brooke Gifford Gallery exhibition late last year wore expressions that were hard to pin down. Defensive, evasive and devoid of their customary charisma, the only thing they clearly conveyed was their wish to be somewhere – anywhere – else.