Whakaaturaka
Exhibitions
Taiopeka
Events
E Whakaaturia ana Ināianei
On display
Reuben Woods: Street Art
Klaudia, The Little Street Art Festival 2024
Camron Hunt, The Little Street Art Festival 2025
Jessie Rawcliffe installing a Gazer for The Little Street Art Festival 2023
Friends
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
$5 Friends / $10 Non-Members / Students with ID - Free
The Little Street Art Festival has become a big deal in Aotearoa and Ōtautahi specifically - large scale murals are evident across the cityscape. But, street art is also founded on smaller interventions and material diversity that make use of the urban terrain.
In 2023, Watch This Space established The Little Street Art Festival, a unique platform that spotlights the varied approaches to urban creativity, from paintings to publishing, textiles and installations, often with participatory invitations. In this talk, Little Street Art Festival curator Reuben Woods will explore the inspiration for the event and the projects that have appeared across the city - providing companions to the larger murals and new ways of thinking about the spaces we occupy.
Reuben is an Ōtautahi-based art writer and curator, specialising in the field of urban art - creative practices spanning graffiti, post-graffiti, street art, muralism, independent public art and urban contemporary. He is creative director of Watch This Space, an urban arts trust that works to explore, document and celebrate urban art across Ōtautahi and Aotearoa through a variety of platforms. He has written for a range of publications, including Art New Zealand, the Gallery's Bulletin, the Nuart Journal and Backstory: Journal of New Zealand Art, Media and Design History. He curated SHIFT: Urban Art Takeover at Canterbury Museum in 2023 and in 2024, co-authored Ghosts on Every Corner with Ghostcat.
Related reading: Graffiti, Friends
Commentary
Post More Bills
Perhaps no other art movement has undergone the expansive shift that urban art has experienced since the turn of the millennium. Today the subversive, disruptive and anti-institutional origins of graffiti and street art sit alongside, perhaps even behind, contemporary muralism, street art festivals, blockbuster museum exhibitions and urban art auctions. When considering this evolution from rebellious outsider forms with strong do-it-yourself ethics to an increasingly nebulous contemporary identity, aspects of Ōtautahi Christchurch’s recent and somewhat unexpected urban art profile provide the chance for reflection.
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.
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Another Brick In The Wall
Coming across an undamaged, fully standing, curved brick wall in the battered eastern suburbs is something of a rarity.
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Aw, bless their little aerosol-coated hearts
Let it not be said that Christchurch's vandals, ahem, street artists, lack a sense of community spirit.
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.
My Favourite
My Favourite
I’ve been continually fascinated by the plethora of creative interventions inserted into the wasted post-quake city. A number of works have offered sharp reminders that what we have been witnessing in the past five years is not normal.