Heritage et AL

The positionality of women artists in the Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland art scene from just over a century ago is complex. By the close of the 1920s, women were certainly not excluded from published literature nor from exhibition spaces.  However, the trend of the twentieth century tended toward situating men such as John Weeks or Colin McCahon, to be the drivers of art history in Auckland, often at the expense of marginalising the influence of women artists. Praise was spread more lavishly for male artists than it was for women, and the notable attention paid to women in early pieces of art literature was much less frequent.  Women in the 1930s and 1940s possessed excellent artistic capabilities that were (at least) comparable to their male counterparts. Yet, women faced persistent challenges of getting the recognition, exposure, and financial reward that they deserved. The art scene was dominated by male commendation and talented women were often ignored or marginalised, with app...

Image: Angela Morton Room artist files. Writer Peter Shaw has called artist files an essential part of our sense of history. "What were the things that reviewers were looking for at a particular time? What was the context in which the works were produced? These are endlessly fascinating questions, and unless you have artist files carefully collected and organized  by someone you lose all of that."* Over 700 files for individual Aotearoa artists are held in Takapuna’s Angela Morton Room Te Pātaka Toi Art Library. These can include exhibition catalogues, small printed artworks, posters, CV’s, reviews and interviews. The bulk of the material was collected from 1980 to 2010 and provides important documentation about well-established and lesser-known artists.  Shaw used our artist file for Pauline Thompson when curating the major retrospective of her work, Combined Cosmologies , held at the Pah Homestead. He said: "If the files weren’t there my picture of her work, her word...

Popular throughout Europe from the late thirteenth to the sixteenth century Books of Hours were prayer books intended for devout everyday folk who wanted to follow the Church’s programme of daily devotions.  They always included a series of prayers to the Virgin Mary but also varied in the choice of other saints recognized and in the number, size and quality of illustrations. These books could either come readymade or be specially tailored to a person’s own circumstances and interests. Ref: Catholic Church, Rossdhu Book of Hours, 1475-1500, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 7-C1906.