Whakaaturaka
Exhibitions
Taiopeka
Events
E Whakaaturia ana Ināianei
On display
Introduction to Art History
Buck Nin Green Valley 1965. Acrylic on board. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, transferred from Christchurch City Libraries Ngā Kete Wānanga-o-Ōtautahi, 2025.
Talk
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free
Join curator Melanie Oliver and explore Māori art and architecture through the research of art historian, curator and academic Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Ngāpuhi, Te Aupouri, Ngāti Kuri).
Mane-Wheoki was a leading figure in Aotearoa New Zealand for his work writing, teaching and curating Māori art histories. This was a passion that developed over time and paralleled the growth of an art history specific to this place, that reflected and drew on the art forms, narratives and knowledge that had existed in Aotearoa for over 800 years. Developing his research focus from Victorian church art and architecture to Māori artists and art over his career, Mane-Wheoki began to chart a unique genealogy, aesthetic and philosophy that continues to be explored by art historians in Aotearoa today.
In this, the first of three sessions on Art Histories of Aotearoa, Oliver will share examples of key artworks and exhibitions that reflect Mane-Wheoki's research.
Presented by the Friends of Christchurch Art Gallery.
Related reading: Friends, Free event
Exhibition
Living Archives
25 October 2025 – 8 March 2026
Archives that tell stories about artists and history in Aotearoa.
Interview
Living Archives
Archives are collections of knowledge used to tell stories about artists and history. By drawing on the legacy of art historians Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, Julie King and Karen Stevenson, Living Archives focuses on intergenerational relationships, artistic lineage and creative networks. Gallery librarian and archivist Tim Jones and curator Melanie Oliver sat down to talk about archives and art history as they prepared for this exhibition.
Notes
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Notes
Underworld 2 by Tony de Lautour
This article first appeared as 'Painting offers a multiverse of symbols' in The Press on 21 June 2017.
Notes
Walk the Beat
Volunteer guide Rod McKay talks about his life, being an art tourist, and guiding Gallery tours.
Notes
The Art Whisperer
Christchurch Art Gallery volunteer guide Bella Boyd talks about her love of guiding, her favourite works in the Gallery collection and interpreting art with poetry.
Commentary
Mediating Reality
In the late 1980s, a significant shift for photography in Aotearoa New Zealand was identified in two art publications. The essays and images in these books showed how artists were utilising new strategies, breaking away from the prevailing documentary photography tradition that was, and still is, widespread in Aotearoa. Six Women Photographers (1986) was edited by artists Merylyn Tweedie and Rhondda Bosworth for Photoforum; and Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography (1989) was the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Gregory Burke for City Gallery Wellington. The artists included in both publications questioned in various ways the assumptions and rules of image making, manipulating the media and making a political move from the standpoint of taking a photograph, to making one. No longer was a photograph considered a truthful representation of reality. Instead, photography was seen as a product of, and a participant in, current social and cultural values.
Commentary
Do You See?
With the death of Julie King late in 2018, art and art history in Aotearoa New Zealand lost one of its great champions and major scholars. Julie was born in Yorkshire and grew up and was educated in Alnwick, Northumberland; she moved to Christchurch in 1975 to take up a role lecturing in the newly formed art history department at the University of Canterbury. She retired three decades later, having pioneered the teaching of New Zealand art in Canterbury.
Collection
Julia Morison Dulia
In the early 1990s, Julia Morison used gold and shit in many works, exploring the idealised and base elements of human experience. She drew on the Jewish Sefiroth as a model for thinking about the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical. “Personally, I need to put some kind of order on experience for sake of sanity and negotiation,” she said. “The Sefirothic structure, or Tree of Knowledge, is really a metaphorical file and folder system for all; a conceptual paradigm for understanding everything. Putting that at the core of my practice gives me the freedom to admit everything and anything, micro and macro, metaphysical and corporeal, as legitimate content. It also gives me an interface to compose works.”
The title of this work, Dulia, is a Catholic term for worship given to saints and angels. Here Morison has pressed gold and excrement on to handmade paper balls, which are threaded together like the beads of a catholic rosary—an invitation to meditate on the relationship of the sacred and the profane, on a monumental scale.
