Become a Friend

Get Involved

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.

Get Involved

Friends membership perks:

* Join us for talks, studio visits, 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-newsletter

* 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 the Auction Event.

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: Bojana Rimbovska, Charrette van Eekelen, Ina Johann, Julieanne Eason, Sue Le Mesurier, Ruth Leslie

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!

Join today and make friends through art!

Download a membership form

Pay via online banking
Friends of Christchurch Art Gallery
06-0821-0970127-000
Reference: Membership and your name (Renewals ONLY)

Contact the Friends

Friends of Christchurch Art Gallery
PO Box 2626
Christchurch 8140
New Zealand

p: (+64 3) 941 7356
e: friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz

The office is staffed on a part-time basis, but email and phone messages are checked regularly.

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.

Continued

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.

Continued

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…

Continued