Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys
developed and toured by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

19 Gallery
part of the Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys project

Imogen Taylor and Sue Hillery: Double Portrait
an Adam Art Gallery commission

05.09.20 – 13.12.20

PRINT VERSION

*This programme may change due to factors out of our control. Visit this page regularly for the most up to date information.

Saturday 5 September, 2pm 
Mary Kisler and Kim Hill in conversation
Adam Art Gallery

Join Mary Kisler, curator of Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys, and Radio New Zealand journalist and commentator Kim Hill for a lively conversation drawing on Kisler’s experiences of researching Hodgkins’ life, work and travels, and responding to the paintings on display. Attendance limited, RSVP essential.

Sunday 6 September, 3pm
Christina Barton and Imogen Taylor in conversation
Adam Art Gallery
 
Join Adam Art Gallery director Christina Barton and artist Imogen Taylor for a discussion about her new work made for this occasion. Attendance limited, RSVP essential.


Lunchtime talks
12pm Thursdays throughout October

Thursday 1 October, 12pm
Model exhibitions I: Tane Moleta in conversation with Stephen Cleland
Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi

We launch our first two sessions inspired by 19 Gallery, a model exhibition space housing a suite of miniature artworks produced by 19 contemporary artists. For this talk Tane Moleta, Senior Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Digital Design Technologies at Victoria University, will discuss An Architecture of the Sea, a virtual exhibition involving writer Kerry Hines and artists Mizuho Nishioka and Wayne Barrar which was recently produced for ARS Electronica 2020.

8 October, 12pm
Model exhibitions II: Becky Hemus in conversation with Stephen Cleland
Zoom discussion, click here to join

For our second discussion, Auckland-based curator and writer Becky Hemus, co-founder of May Fair Art Fair, talks about the challenges of moving the inaugural young artists’ fair to an online format in the extraordinary context of Covid-19. Involving 20 ‘booths’ housing the work of 32 artists, Hemus will introduce May Fair’s aspirations to rethink the traditional art fair stand, including new ways of working more collaboratively, remunerating artists, selling artworks and commissioning associated writing.

15 October, 12pm
Pamela Gerrish Nunn: Frances Hodgkins and portraiture
Adam Art Gallery

For the first of three sessions focused on the work of Frances Hodgkins, lecturer, curator and researcher Pamela Gerrish Nunn discusses Hodgkins’ extensive contribution to portraiture. Nunn’s career as an art historian began in the UK in 1976. She came to New Zealand in 1989 to teach at the University of Canterbury, becoming professor of Art History and Theory in 2007. She now works in the Wellington region as an independent researcher and curator.

22 October, 12pm
Rebecca Rice: From Moeraki to Morocco − Hodgkins’ genre studies
Adam Art Gallery

Dr Rebecca Rice, Curator of New Zealand Historical Art at The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and a specialist in historical New Zealand art, considers Hodgkins’ approach to genre subjects, comparing her early depictions of Māori to later depictions of people produced in various European locations.

5 November, 12pm
Elizabeth Eastmond: Frances Hodgkins’s War Art − Houses and Outhouses, Purbeck
Adam Art Gallery

For the final talk in this lunchtime series Waiheke-based art historian Elizabeth Eastmond discusses a late series of paintings Hodgkins produced during WWII, prior to her death in Dorchester in 1947. Eastmond taught art history for many years at the University of Auckland, where amongst other courses she co-founded the Women in Art paper (with Cheryll Sotheran), the first in New Zealand to bring a feminist perspective to the discipline of art history.

Mondays 2, 9, 16, 23 November, 5–7pm
Re-reading Frances Hodgkins: a four-part workshop led by Christina Barton
Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi 

Join Christina Barton for a four-part workshop revisiting the literature on Frances Hodgkins to explore and unpack different approaches to the artist and her work. The aim of the workshop is to provide emerging art writers with tools to develop responses to the artist and her work and to use this reflexively to understand their own practices. A final session, ‘Re-writing Frances Hodgkins’ (23 November) will be an open forum where the results of the workshop will be tabled and discussed with invited guests, to test, question and model art writing now.  

To register for the event click here here (restricted to 10 participants). Priority will be given to participants who can attend all four sessions.

Homeward bound, a discussion
Milly Mitchell-Anyon, Raúl Ortega Ayala, Sam Clague, Vera Mey, Shannon Te Ao
Moderated by Stephen Cleland
Saturday 12 December, 4pm
Adam Art Gallery

Modernist art history has viewed Frances Hodgkins (1869–1947) as a trailblazer for leaving New Zealand to ‘measure herself’ against the best modern artists in Europe. Yet we now see her ambitions as colonial in that she believed Europe was the wellspring of high culture. To travel at the turn of the 20th century was no easy undertaking and for her leaving home was an extended and ultimately permanent process of expatriation. Today, as our borders close against a global pandemic, we are living through a new period of restricted travel which makes us wonder what long-term decisions artists are making about where to base themselves.

Where should our most ambitious artists be looking to live? How can artists succeed on the global stage from their New Zealand base? What role do artist’s residencies have in this climate? And should this period of restricted travel be considered an impediment to art production or, with many art professionals and artists having returned to New Zealand, could the crisis paradoxically serve to stimulate the local scene? What indeed will our global art world look like in the future?
 
Please join us as this panel of artists and curators reflect on the year that has been and consider these multifaceted questions and the future that awaits.

Contributors

Originally from Whanganui, Milly Mitchell-Anyon completed her MA in Art History at Victoria University of Wellington in 2017. She was the 2018 Blumhardt Creative New Zealand Curatorial Intern at the Dowse Art Museum in Te Awakairangi/ Lower Hutt and the 2019 Creative New Zealand Curatorial Intern at Dunedin Public Art Gallery. In 2020 Mitchell-Anyon initially planned to travel to the USA, but instead returned to Whanganui to found Swine, an art gallery established in the site of a former bacon factory.

Raúl Ortega Ayala completed his undergraduate studies in Mexico City, prior to undertaking an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in combination with Hunter College, New York City. He regularly travels to remote sites across the globe, many of which require complex logistics to access. For his recent project The Zone, Ortega Ayala travelled to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine on several occasions between 2012 and 2018 and produced a body of large scale moving image and photographic works that interrogate the specificities of place.

Sam Clague is an artist based in Pōneke. Since completing his BFA with First Class Honours at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 2015, he has produced work for many solo and group exhibitions across New Zealand and Australia. He recently returned from Germany, where he undertook the LIAP residency, supported by the Goethe-Institut.

Born in Pōneke, Vera Mey has been based in the UK since 2016 as a PhD candidate at SOAS, University of London. From 2014-2016 she was a curator on the founding team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and as part of this role managed an international artists’ residency programme. More recent curatorial projects include being co-curator of SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s – Now (2017) at the Mori Art Museum and National Art Centre Tokyo, Japan.

Shannon Te Ao (Ngāti Tūwharetoa) won the Walters Prize in 2016 for his works Two shoots that stretch far out (2013–14) and Okea ururoatia (never say die) 2016. Since then he has continued to build a substantial national and international profile. Despite all obstacles, during 2020 Te Ao presented his major his solo exhibition Ka mua, ka muri at two significant art institutions in Canada: Oakville Galleries, Toronto and Remai Modern, Saskatoon.

*This programme may change due to factors out of our control. Visit this page regularly for the most up to date information.