Dame Robin White
THIS EVENT IS FULLY BOOKED
Dame Robin White’s contribution to New Zealand art was recognised in 2017 when she was awarded the Arts Foundation’s Laureate Award. In 2020 Te Papa will present a significant retrospective exhibition of Dame Robin’s work and, with your help, the Te Papa Foundation aims to help Te Papa acquire three recent works for the national art collection. Te Papa Press will also publish a book of her life and work to coincide with the exhibition.
Come and hear Dame Robin talk about her work with Te Papa’s Senior Art Curator Sarah Farrar and award-winning author Jill Trevelyan. They will discuss her collaborative art practice informed by many years of living in Kiribati, as well as her latest projects.
After the talk, there will be an opportunity to visit the Tūrangawaewae: Art and New Zealand exhibition, which features three of Dame Robin’s 1970s screen prints, and hear the artist herself, Sarah and Jill in conversation on those works.
Dame Robin White DNZM (Ngāti Awa, 1946) studied at the University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts, where her tutors included Colin McCahon. After graduating in 1967 she taught herself screenprinting whilst teaching art at Mana College, Porirua . She produced prints and paintings of the Paremata area and of literary friends, including poet Sam Hunt. In 1971 she relocated to the Otago Peninsula and became a full-time painter and printmaker. She became widely recognised during the 1970s, culminated in a monograph of her work, Robin White: New Zealand painter, 1981. A shift in style occurred in 1982 when she moved with her family to Kiribati. Here she worked extensively with woodblock printing and continued to depict the world around her. White returned to New Zealand in 1999, and her exhibition Island life: Robin White in New Zealand and Kiribati toured in 2002. White remains committed to working collaboratively and her recent projects have included major tapa and ngatu (bark cloth) pieces made with Fijian and Tongan collaborators.
This event is presented in partnership with the Te Papa Foundation.
Feature image: Detail from: Living in a material world, 2017. Robin White, Tamari Cabeikanacea and Ruha Fifita. Photo: Sam Hartnett