Arts news for Sunday June 30

Pete Sephton was a friend of Barry Brickell's and is a trustee of Driving Creek. He's a screen print artist, very involved in the annual Coromandel Arts Tour in October and township support group Artists in the Making.

A landmark anthology Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another brings together the experiences of 27 mixed heritage creatives across Aotearoa.

The famous buddy road trip film Thelma and Louise is taking on a different life at the Civic Theatre in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland this month. Best friends and long-time creative collaborators, Julia Croft and Nisha Madhan are putting their own spin on the adventure crime tale, and in this version - as their title says - Thelma and Louise Don’t Die.

As the son of two of our most lauded writers, the late JC Sturm and James K Baxter, John Baxter (Taranaki, Te Whakatōhea) has long had hats to wear in being part of literary legacies. 

It’s being both Māori and Pakeha though, that has led to the naming of a rare exhibition of Baxter’s distinctive paintings at Toi Mahara gallery in Waikanae as Rua Pōtae.  

Baxter says Rua Pōtae was a term used in the 1940s and 50s for ‘he who wears two hats’.

A conversation with her five-year-old niece prompted Mandi Lynn to explore body shaming in a photo exhibition and short documentary.

Arts news for 23 June 2024

Lizzie Russell is the Owner/Operator of Tennyson Gallery in Ahuriri Napier. A beautiful spot in an art deco building on the corner of an iconic street in the city.

She tells Culture 101’s Maggie Tweedie about Hawkes Bay's famous Pecha Kucha nights and the gallery’s large collection of contemporary New Zealand Jewellery.

Ōtepoti Dunedin author Laurence Fearnley’s absorbing new novel At the Grand Glacier Hotel is, impressively, her thirteenth.

In its pages Fearnley beautifully articulates the awkwardness and beauty within ourselves. In essense, she is adept at expressing the frailty and gentle  wonder of our human condition.. 

In the novel Fearnley matches the inner thoughts of her protagonist to the surrounding environments of an old character-filled hotel, and her small trails through the grand, dramatic South Island landscape beyond.

As Aotearoa prepares itself to celebrate the official Matariki holiday RNZ’s Culture 101 takes a tour across the country to check in on how three leading figures in Toi Māori’s are celebrating.