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Enter and explore the powerful, ancestral world of the whare whakairo, or decorated Māori meeting house, with this engaging guide. Richly illustrated with more than 100 historical and contemporary photographs and original watercolour illustrations, The Māori Meeting House celebrates every aspect of these magnificent taonga (treasures) – their history and art forms, symbolism and cultural significance. In a clear, informative and personal narrative, Damian Skinner brings together existing scholarship on whare whakairo and his own reflections as a Pākehā art historian and curator, with reference to meeting houses from all over Aotearoa New Zealand and the world. The voices of carvers, artists, architects, writers, experts and iwi are woven into the text, to give every reader new ways of seeing these taonga – whether it is your first view or your hundredth. Equal parts history, personal essay and illustrated guidebook, The Māori Meeting House is an important contribution to contemporary discussions about Māori art and art history.
What is contemporary jewelry? What makes it unique? What distinguishes these objects and practices from other visual arts? Contemporary Jewelry in Perspective provides clear definitions, concise history, and cultural context for the form, along with abundant illustrations of an amazing range of work. Featuring notable contributors from around the world, it offers fascinating discussions on creating, collecting, exhibiting, selling, and wearing these pieces, as well as individual essays that present a global perspective on the art over the past 30 to 40 years. Jewelers, designers, students, collectors, and historians will find this essential reading. The book is a joint venture between the Art Jewelry Forum (artjewelryforum.org) and Lark Jewelry & Beading.
This is a simple and straightforward book on the painter Don Binney, who has been working with images of birds and landscapes since the early 1960s. Though he is a well known and popular artist, nothing has previously been written on him and this attractive and useful book will be of considerable interest.
Emigre artist Theo Schoon was fascinating, unorthodox, controversial, pioneering and at times reckless. His life intersected with important cultural periods and places, where what it meant to be modern in New Zealand were being debated and articulated in art, literature, music and theatre. The art he pioneered and promoted - Maori rock drawings, the drawings of a psychiatric patient, Maori moko and kowhaiwhai, the abstract patterns of geothermal activity in Rotorua - were decisive for many other New Zealand artists, including Gordon Walters. And his example, as an academically trained artist with a good knowledge of modern European art and a commitment to do whatever it took to pursue his artistic projects, was both an inspiring and a cautionary tale. Schoon's is a life less well known now than it deserves to be. This superb, highly illustrated biography by one of New Zealand's best art writers corrects that imbalance and examines Schoon's claims on the development of art and culture in Aotearoa in the twentieth century.
"In this book, the carver values the past, works within the communal framework of Maoritanga and respects the tapu nature of what he does; the artist looks to the present and future, practises as an individual within the studio and is concerned with the essential rather than spiritual nature of the work." --Dust jacket.
A History of Contemporary Jewellery in Australia and New Zealand: Place and Adornment tells the remarkable story of how two countries, far from the jewellery centres of Europe and NorthAmerica, have managed to contribute to an international art form, transforming jewellery from an imitation of European taste into an original expression of place. In this richly illustrated book, the first comprehensive history of contemporary jewellery in Australasia, authors Damian Skinner and Kevin Murray bring together detailed analysis of objects and historical sources to show how contemporary jewellery offered a way to negotiate relationships between settler and indigenous cultures, to find beauty in humble materials, to appreciate the natural environment, and to test conventions of art, gender and identity.
A group of New Zealand's leading cultural studies scholars provide their perspectives on the politics of display in this thought-provoking collection of essays. Philip Armstrong, Roger Blackley, Kyla McFarlane, Annie Potts, and Paul Williams, among others, showcase their thinking about cultural activities--looking and showing, viewing and arranging--that are deeply embedded in ideology. From the antique plaster casts held by Auckland Museum to the wild foods on New Zealand's West Coast, the essays pursue a variety of trajectories on how New Zealanders display themselves and what they profess and contest in their collective representations.
A History of Contemporary Jewellery in Australia and New Zealand: Place and Adornment tells the remarkable story of how two countries, far from the jewellery centres of Europe and North America, have managed to contribute to an international art form, transforming jewellery from an imitation of European taste into an original expression of place.
A major new history of craft that spans three centuries of making and thinking in Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider Moana (Pacific). Paying attention to Pakeha (European New Zealanders) , Maori, and island nations of the wider Moana, and old and new migrant makers and their works, this book is a history of craft understood as an idea that shifts and changes over time. At the heart of this book lie the relationships between Pakeha, Maori and wider Moana artistic practices that, at different times and for different reasons, have been described by the term craft. It tells the previously untold story of craft in Aotearoa New Zealand, so that the connections, as well as the differences and tensions, can be identified and explored. This book proposes a new idea of craft--one that acknowledges Pakeha, Maori and wider Moana histories of making, as well as diverse community perspectives towards objects and their uses and meanings.