Megan Dunn takes a long look at the art in the Auckland Hospital collection and finds out that yes, there is art, even in intensive care – but the price of seeing it is everything. I got the pamphlet in the mail back in January. It says after someone close to you dies it is … Read more
There have been calls for major institutions like Auckland Art Gallery to do better in identifying LGBTQI+ or LGBTQI+ associated artists. New Auckland Art Gallery director Kirsten Paisley believes it’s ‘a conversation that needs to happen’. Writer Samuel Te Kani digs into the complications below the surface of the erasures of a queer New Zealand art … Read more
We get a handle on the artists and artworks that shaped this decade in Aotearoa. As 2019 draws to a close, the four nominees for this year’s Turner Prize subverted the competition – they asked to receive the award as a collective. Meanwhile, at Art Basel Miami Beach, a banana taped to the wall sold … Read more
Spinoff Art editor Mark Amery and photographer Ebony Lamb pay a visit to the internationally celebrated jewellery couple at their colonial cottage above Island Bay. The white horses are galloping in from the Cook Strait as photographer and singer-songwriter Ebony Lamb (Eb and Sparrow) and I roll in to Island Bay, to the home and … Read more
Lana Lopsesi on tatu maker Julia Mage’au Gray, the revival of Melanesian female tattoo practice, and an exhibition paying homage to her remarkable work. I remember turning up before the chaos. It was just me and Julia Mage’au Gray. Her daughter Vasa had run out to get some gloves. Looking at my body, she asked … Read more
Party Line is a new audio work by Evangeline Riddiford Graham that reinvestigates the Cartwright Inquiry, medical mispractice and misogyny through the lens of the #metoo era. In a red room six handsets dangle from the ceiling on their spiral cords. I pick up one and hold it to my ear. “I feel so ashamed, … Read more
‘Like Escher, if he was more into dicks than staircases.’ Poet Hera Lindsay Bird celebrates the work of New Zealand artist Hannah Salmon, aka Daily Secretion, who creates portraits of angry ‘alpha men’. Like most teenage punishers who took art history in high school, I spent years resentfully analysing the composition of Colin McCahon paintings … Read more
Megan Dunn looks back on this year’s Auckland Art Fair and what the fair means to New Zealand art galleries, buyers and artists. A curator friend recently said to me, “everyone loves to hate art fairs.” True, but only because everyone loves to go to them. In 2018 there were over 260 art fairs in … Read more
The Monday Extract: Dutch émigré artist Theo Schoon was an anti-Semite and a shithead in so many ways, but he was also a brilliant artist who recognised the beauty and power of Māori art at a time when few Pākehā gave it a second thought. His biographer Damian Skinner reckons with a ghastly genius. In the summer … Read more
Te Papa curators talk about the artworks in the national collection that make them swoon. Curators! What do they do all day? No one knows. Certainly much of it is spent in soul-destroying forensic analysis of catalogue numbers; many turn to drink. But sometimes, in quiet, precious moments, they get to do what they got into the curating racket … Read more