Overview
Featuring over 300 artworks by 120 Māori artists, Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art will be the largest exhibition in the 132-year history of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. The major exhibition is set to open at the inner city gallery on Saturday, 5 December 2020 and will be free to the public.
Toi Tū Toi Ora will celebrate a vast range of contemporary Māori art from the 1950s to present day, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, clay-making, jewellery, photography, digital media, film and installation art. It will also present a number of new site-specific commissions, including collaborative work from wāhine artist collective Mata Aho, painter Emily Karaka, master weavers Matekino Lawless and Christina Wirihana, and contemporary carver Reweti Arapere. A Toi Tū Toi Ora satellite site is also in works for the Britomart precinct.
Aimee Ratana, Potiki Series, 2005.
Auckland Art Gallery Director Kirsten Paisley says, "This ambitious intergenerational exhibition will be a spectacular celebration of the dynamic and changing expression of contemporary Māori art. Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art is monumental in its storytelling and its scale and speaks to the very core of the Gallery's purpose as a bicultural place for the championing of New Zealand art."
Image: Robert Jahnke, Ripeka whero from the Te Ripeka series, 2015, cropped.