Exhibitions
Events
On display
WORD Festival Christchurch: Bloomsbury South
Cover Image for Bloomsbury South: The Arts in Christchurch in 1933 - 1953 by Peter Simpson (2016)
Peter Simpson
Talk
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
$19
From 1933 to 1953, Christchurch was the arts capital of this country, home to an extraordinary range of creative men and women. Peter Simpson has told their remarkable story.
Rita Angus, Leo Bensemann, Colin McCahon, Allen Curnow, Denis Glover, James K. Baxter, Ngaio Marsh and Douglas Lilburn; The Group, the Caxton Press, the Little Theatre, Landfall and Tomorrow… From 1933 to 1953, Christchurch was the ‘Bloomsbury of the South’, where painters, writers and musicians lived, worked and loved together; fought, championed and influenced one another. Peter Simpson, who has told their remarkable story, talks to Paul Millar.
To be followed by the official launch of Simpson's new book, Bloomsbury South: The Arts in Christchurch 1933–1953 with Auckland University Press at 5pm.
Related reading: Talk, Publishing, WORD Festival
Exhibition
Bloomsbury South: The Arts in Christchurch 1933-1953
5 September 2016
A selection of ephemera, books, sheet music and art brought together to mark the publication of Bloomsbury South: The Arts in Christchurch 1933-1953 by Peter Simpson.
Collection
Rita Angus Cass
This work by Rita Angus has come to symbolise the hard-edged clarity of the Canterbury school of landscape painting. It was made following the artist’s ten-day visit to the remote high country railway settlement of Cass in 1936 with painters Louise Henderson and Julia Scarvell. The Canterbury style was also associated with an atmosphere of isolation and emptiness, often emphasised through small signs of human occupation and intervention placed within a much larger natural environment. While these aspects play an important role in Cass, the work also benefits from a sense of expectation, as we wait, with that solitary, overcoat-clad figure, for the train to arrive.
(Absence, May 2023)
Commentary
To Colin McCahon
James K. Baxter’s 1952 poem ‘To Colin McCahon’ is an important marker in the long and sometimes tempestuous artistic relationship the two men shared. On an immediate level, the poem is a response to McCahon’s painting There is only one direction (1952), which he presented to Jim and Jacquie Baxter to mark the birth of their daughter Hilary after they had named McCahon her godfather.
Notes
Heck yeah, that happened!
Our very own Art-tastic by our very own Sarah Pepperle won TWO awards at last night's New Zealand Book Awards for Children & Young Adults at Te Papa!!!
Notes
This is ART-TASTIC!!
Our ART-TASTIC art activity book for kids has been nominated for the New Zealand Book Awards for Children & Young Adults! Ka rawe, nice one us! #NZCYA
Notes
Christchurch Art Gallery scoops major Australasian design awards
Congrats to our publishing team of David Simpson and Sarah Pepperle for a night of bests at the Museums Australasia Publication Design Awards at a gala event in Alice Springs last night. The Gallery won best magazine (Bulletin), best book (Us v Them: Tony de Lautour), best children's book (ART-TASTIC) and best in show (Us v Them)!
Notes
Bishopdale School Rulez
These Year 6 students at Bishopdale Primary School have knocked it out of the park with their AMAZING glitter artworks from our new ART-TASTIC activity book.
Article
An invitation to participate
You might be well aware of fanzines as a form of analogue self-publishing in and around your own arts community. Or they might be somewhat peripheral to the particularity of your engagement with the arts.
For the uninitiated, the word fanzine is often shortened to zine, and is pronounced 'zeen', as in 'magazine'. This abbreviation doesn't merely signal a growing ubiquity, or an economy of syllables for those (like myself) who say or write the word a lot, it also speaks to the shift away from fandom to a growing eclecticism – bringing the lie to anyone attempting to describe zines as a genre.
Article
The book as alternative economy and alternative space
In Printed Matter's 1981 mail-order catalogue, artist Edit deAk enthusiastically described the 'many hands at work in the process of making and marketing the book'. Turning the spotlight on individuals and groups involved in the production, distribution and sale of books by artists, deAk likened independent art publishing to activities 'like filmmaking or rock 'n' roll music.' While such comparisons with filmmaking have been relatively scarce over the past few decades, artists, publishers, designers and critics have continued to draw parallels between art publishing and independent music.
Article
Tomorrow, Book, Caxton Press, Landfall
In the decades before and after the Second World War, Christchurch experienced a remarkable artistic efflorescence that encompassed the visual arts, literature, music, theatre and the publishing of books and journals. And the phenomenon was noticed beyond these islands. For instance, in his 1955 autobiography, English publisher and editor of Penguin New Writing and London Magazine, John Lehmann, wrote (with a measure of exaggeration, perhaps) that of all the world’s cities only Christchurch at that time acted ‘as a focus of creative literature of more than local significance’.
Article
Going online
I’ve never actually seen the Mona Lisa, and it’s a fair bet that most people reading this article haven’t either. Yet, according to Wikipedia, the painting is ‘the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world’. So how to account for the fame of an artwork we haven’t seen? And what have reproductions of Da Vinci’s sixteenth-century portrait got to teach us about time-based art and the online environment in 2015?