Become a Friend
There's an art to being a Friend of the Gallery - and joy in being connected to a community of art lovers! As a Friend you'll be part of great talks, events and gain a special insight into what's happening at your gallery.
Friends membership perks:
- Join us for talks, studio visits, private home art viewings, regional and national tours and social gatherings
- Receive exclusive special offers from the Gallery’s Design Store
- Enjoy 10% off your purchase at The Thirsty Peacock (onsite restaurant/cafe)
- Keep in touch via the Friends monthly E-newslette
- Get inside information on what's happening at your Gallery
- Receive the quarterly Bulletin, the Gallery's award-winning magazine
Where your Friends support goes:
Your friendship helps to support the Gallery's collection and publications. We also run fundraising activities to assist the Gallery, including our Auction Events.
Upcoming Friends Events
Click here for information on upcoming Friends events
Past Friends Events
Click here for photos of recent events
If you would like to watch the recording of the Julie King Memorial Lecture with Dr Deirdre Brown, click here
Friends Executive Committee
President: Sarah Anderson
Vice President: Marianne Hargreaves
Treasurer: Mark Flowerday
Administrator: Annie de Senna
Committee: Julieanne Eason, Ina Johann,
Sue Le Mesurier, Ruth Leslie, Bojana Rimbovska, Charrette van Eekelen
Friends annual membership fees
Double $90
Individual $65
Student $40
Family $90
(2 adults & children up to 18 living at the same address)
Membership can be for you, or a gift for art lovers that keeps on giving—it lasts a whole year!
Contact the Friends
Friends of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
PO Box 2626
Christchurch 8140
New Zealand
p: +64-3-9417356
e: friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz
The office is staffed on a part-time basis, but email and phone messages are checked regularly.
Related
Event
Julie King Memorial Lecture: Lissa Mitchell
THROUGH SHADED GLASS
As one of Aotearoa’s most knowledgeable and experienced photographic historians, Lissa Mitchell turned her attention to the early women photographers in this country in a new publication Through Shaded Glass – women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860-1970 (Te Papa Press). Her research for the book represents a significant milestone in foregrounding the involvement and photographic work of over 190 women makers of photography in Aotearoa prior to 1960. She spent years locating names, photographs and researching lives while exploring photographic practise where women have made strong contributions but have been sidelined or overlooked in this country’s photographic histories to date. These include collaborative working practises, photographers and the Second World War in New Zealand, non-binary practises, and the involvement of Māori women in making early photography here.
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.
Interview
The London Club
In September 2017, Gallery director Jenny Harper, curator Felicity Milburn and Jo Blair, of the Gallery Foundation’s contracted development services, Brown Bread, went to London, taking a group of supporters who received a very special tour of the city’s art highlights. While there, they further developed the Foundation’s new London Club. Recently they sat down together in Jenny’s office…
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
President's Letter, June 2017
The new 6pm timeslot for the Friends Speaker of the Month series is proving popular, and it has been great to see so many of you coming out to hear from our fantastic speakers.
Notes
President's Welcome
The new year started with the Friends’ fantastic summer trip, visiting exhibitions at two of Canterbury’s regional art galleries.
Notes
President's Welcome
As we approach the first anniversary of the reopening of the Gallery, it seems like a good time to celebrate a year’s progress in the life of the city.
Notes
President's Letter Summer 2015/2016
This quarter the Gallery will reopen. It has been a long time coming by anyone’s standard. Although we have maintained connections through the award-winning Outer Spaces programme and nomadic, trailed around temporary gallery spaces; being able to once more step into the Gallery’s own space is an exciting prospect. I am not alone in looking forward to having the Gallery back in its rightful setting and reacquainting ourselves with the fabulous art we collectively own.
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.