Whakaaturaka
Exhibitions
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Events
E Whakaaturia ana Ināianei
On display
Allie Eagle and Me
Allie Eagle and Briar March
Film
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free
A one off screening of this fantastic documentary, played in commemoration of the recent passing of artist Allie Eagle.
In the 70s and 80s artist Allie Eagle was a star in the Women’s Art Movement. She lived the radical feminist life, apart from men, and her work was animated by the political struggles of the feminist and lesbian rights movements. Thirty years later Eagle’s paintings are studied in New Zealand colleges and universities, while filmmaker Briar March is completing her last year at art school. The film March has made with Eagle is a suggestively unresolved mix of homage, collaboration and mutual interrogation. A Christian since the early 80s, Eagle now struggles with her earlier stance on abortion. We see Eagle working on a new painting, Tough Love, which shows a solo mother and child, and references her famous pro-abortion-law-reform painting This Woman Died I Care. March includes her own filmmaking activity within the frame, while questioning Eagle and her contemporaries about the ground that was broken for women artists by the feminist generation.
2004, 52 minutes
Related
Collection
Allie Eagle Self Portrait
Allie Eagle was a leading figure in Aotearoa New Zealand’s feminist movement of the 1970s. She had an acute awareness of current international trends in feminist art, and as an artist and curator she strove to give women more presence in the national art discourse – which was dominated by men. Alongside her own art practice, she curated exhibitions such as Woman’s Art: Six Women Artists (1976) and Olivia Spencer Bower: Retrospective (1977), bringing attention to a generation of emerging artists as well as the achievements of senior women artists, at a time when the focus was strongly on male artists.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Jane Zusters Untitled
Several decades separate Rita Angus and Jane Zusters, but both artists were interested in the theme of the domestic garden. Rita was a fiercely independent artist who worked hard to maintain her career and was a role model for later generations. In 1944 she wrote, “I hope that men of culture in NZ will come to understand the woman artist better. […] Some women do not, nor wish to paint as men do.” Rita and Jane’s works show the garden as a place of contemplation and retreat from the world. Rita’s parents’ garden at Waikanae, the subject in this watercolour, provided a much needed refuge for the artist on several occasions. The domestic garden was not only a place of healing and recuperation for Rita, but also an important source of material for her celebrated flower paintings and still-life subjects.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )