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Director's Foreword
Director's Foreword
Fundraising is an ongoing activity for most public galleries, and it’s no different here at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. We are extraordinarily lucky to have a wonderful group of supporters behind us, whose generosity has made it possible for us to generate funds above and beyond our normal budgets and running costs. This additional funding is used to support ambitious acquisitions for the collection, or to fund important publications or large-scale exhibition projects. But at our Foundation’s recent annual Gala dinner, we asked our guests to get involved with something a little different.
Artist Profile
Unfamiliars
One size doesn’t necessarily fit all. Amongst other ideas, our current exhibition Dummies & Doppelgängers explores how imagined or altered identities can help artists construct worlds that better accommodate them or others. Here, the exhibition’s curator Felicity Milburn considers how this dynamic plays out in the work of two of the featured artists.
Interview
Down the Waitaki Awa
Pouarataki curator Māori Chloe Cull talks with artist and designer Ross Hemera (Waitaha, Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Māmoe) about his life and work.
Commentary
Opening the Archives
Amongst the regular books, artist books and rare books, the Robert and Barbara Stewart Library and Archives also contains a treasure-trove of letters, diaries, photographs, newspaper cuttings, videos and more. These fascinating objects shine a light on the lives and careers of many of the artists in our collection, telling us how they developed their works, how they related to their contemporaries, even where they went on their holidays. They are used a good deal by curators and researchers – and you can see some of them in our current exhibitions He Kapuka Oneone and One O’Clock Jump – but they usually live well out of sight.
Article
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil
Our expansive collection exhibition explores the fundamental role whenua plays in the visual language and identity of Aotearoa New Zealand. Acknowledging Māori as takata whenua, the first peoples to call this land home, themes of kaitiakitaka, colonisation, environmentalism, land use, migration, identity and belonging are considered through collection works, new acquisitions and exciting commissions. Painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, moving image, printmaking and weaving by historical and contemporary artists are brought together to reveal how land has been a material and subject for art in Aotearoa for hundreds of years. Here, the Gallery’s curators each take a closer look at a key work from the exhibition that tells us something about our complex relationship with the whenua.
Interview
Practice, Poetry and Precision
Artist Yona Lee has been preparing something very special in her Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland studio – a new commission that honours the history of the Gallery building, Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Lee took some time away from her workbench to speak with lead curator Felicity Milburn about her dream of filling the under-stairs space with water and light.
Commentary
For the Price of a Pint of Beer
One of the joys of working at a public art gallery is the opportunity to really get to know an institution’s collection. I still remember, as a newly appointed curator of works on paper at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, coming across a cache of the brightest, most colourful and energetic prints I had ever seen among the Rex Nan Kivell collection of modern British prints. Given to the Gallery in 1953, the sheer breadth and depth of Nan Kivell’s incredibly comprehensive gift, especially when combined with the works he gave to Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, makes this a collection of British linocuts to rival those in major collections throughout the world.