Whakaaturaka
Exhibitions
Taiopeka
Events
E Whakaaturia ana Ināianei
On display
Friends Trip to Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington
Art in Parliament
Wellington Club - Wellesely Room
Friends
20–22 November 2026
$375 Friends Member Exclusive Event
Explore the Wellington art scene with the Gallery.
This November join us for a special weekend in the capital city, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Check out the packed itinery below.
Friday 20 November
Activities begin at 12.30pm
We meet at the Beehive for a guided tour of the Parliamentary Collection, one of New Zealand’s most significant art and heritage collections. This private art tour of Parliament will be led by the curator of the collection.
Visit The National Library where the original documents of the Declaration of Independence of the United Tribes of New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi and The Women’s Suffrage Petition are on display as well as other exhibition spaces.
The New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata will host us for a private viewing of the exhibition Philip Trusttum: Tail of the Comet which will have just opened. Also on view Terry Stringer and Lois White: A Portrait. Refreshments will be served
Saturday 21 November
Activities begin at 10am
In the morning we will visit the cluster of dealer galleries in the central city, which will include talks by the dealers and artists at various galleries.
Lunch will be arranged for the group.
The afternoon begins aboard a bus to visit the Wellington Club and a private hosted tour. The Wellington Club is housed in a Miles Warren building on the Terrace and has its own art and artifacts collection as well as changing exhibitions.
Following this, we head to the Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi and a visit to the Sirwhana Spong Exhibition.
The bus then takes us to a private home and collection with a tour of the art followed by drinks and refreshments.
Bus back to the central city for an evening of free time.
Sunday 22 November
Activities begin at 10.30am
We will visit City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi which will have recently opened after two years of closure. To celebrate the opening they have a major new exhibition from one of the most significant UK artists of the 21st century, Cornelia Parker.
This is Parker’s first solo public gallery exhibition in Aotearoa New Zealand. Taking over the entire gallery, it features over fifty artworks, and includes sculpture, installation, video, works on paper, photography, photogravures, and a new series of paintings made on glass. We will have a guided tour and an opportunity to revisit the works at your leisure.
The tour ends after the exhibition tour, leaving you free time to visit Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui-Central Library (newly reopened), Te Papa Tongarewa, other points of interest or Wellington cafes and shops.
Trip inclusions:
- entry to all exhibitions and tours
- hospitality at collection visits
- lunch on Saturday
- transport on Saturday afternoon
Flights, accommodation and meals not listed above are excluded
Spaces are limited...book early!
Related reading: Friends
Notes
How to Book Friends Tickets
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- Find the event you’d like to book for on our website www.christchurchartgallery/friends
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Don’t forget we’re here to help so get in touch if you have any problems!
friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz | 03 941 7356
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.
