Culture 101

It's Pride Month in Tamaki Makaurau where the LGBTQIA+ community comes together to celebrate diversity and resilience throughout February. The month-long festival features more than 200 events this year with open-access arts, cultural and community events. Along with Big Gay Out and Pride Fest Out West, there's also an exhibition at Season Gallery Aotearoa and Pride Elevates at Q Theatre Loft. Auc...

Young Maori artists are currently being called to enter portraits of their tupuna, their ancestors in any media for the Kiingi Tuheitia Portraiture Award. The Award is hosted by Te Pukenga Whakaata the New Zealand Portrait Gallery in honour of the late Maori King. Artists have until March 20 to enter. One of the judges of the award is a young artist himself: a lead carver who holds responsibility...

Each week, Culture 101 puts the spotlight on a different part of Aotearoa for our regional wrap. This week, it's one of the food and wine capitals of the world - Napier. It's gearing up for the annual Art Deco Festival in which tens of thousands flock to celebrate all things 1920s. For four days, from the 13-16 February, the centre of the coastal city will be transformed by vintage car parades, fa...

First released in 1991 and sparking a whole new genre of empire-building games, computer game Civilization has tens of millions of players, among them tech world builders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. . In the game you choose a leader from across ancient to modern history, and set about building a civilization. You develop agriculture, technology, a culture, economy, and religion. And, natur...

Husband and wife duo Damon and Lu Holter from Wisconsin are champion grillers in the world of American BBQ and competitive 'foodsport'. They've competed at the world's largest culinary festival, the World Food Championships for a decade. Founders of Croix Valley Foods, a family based business in Wisconsin making BBQ sauces, rubs and marinades, they're in New Zealand February 14 and 15 for Meatstoc...

Over the summer, thousands have been flocking to the Auckland Botanic Gardens in south Tamaki Makaurau for Sculpture in the Gardens. Back after a 3-year hiatus, the exhibtion showcases 15 artworks from artists across the motu and features steel and glass work, soaring sculptures and sound and light works. The bienniel exhibition started in 2007 - and now attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors...

Courtney Johnston has been the chief executive of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa now for five years, joining Maori co-leader Arapata Hakiwai at the helm. Johnston's career as a director, curator and writer has been dedicated to our culture, and how we represent and access it. Prior to Te Papa she was the director of the Dowse Art Museum for eight years, worked at the National Library...

Industries around the world are grappling with what AI means and how it could be empowering, challenging and potentially threatening.

Culture and heritage aren't just the preserve of cities and towns.

New Zealand dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Loughlan Prior has been named one of '25 to Watch' in 2025 in the prestigious US publication Dance Magazine.

President Donald Trump is back and so is Hollywood. He's appointed three ambassadors; Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone to revive the industry

Kiwi actor Luciane Buchanan has become a familiar face to millions as one of the stars in the Netflix series The Night Agent. 

The latest arts news from around the motu.

83-year-old poet and songwriter Tucker Zimmerman has had something of a cultural Forrest Gump of a career, and 2024 has found him gaining new-found fame. Acclaimed album Dance of Love, out on 4AD records, is the result of a collaboration with fans who tracked him down in Belgium to record: folk-rockers of the moment Big Thief.  It’s Tucker Zimmerman’s 15th album, in a recording career that stretch...

Culture 101 speaks to the artist from Berlin about his first solo show in New Zealand and is innovative approach to art.

Our Regional Wrap takes us to somewhere named after the Christmas city itself.

Since winning the coveted Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Anora has spent the past six months taking the movie world by storm. It finally arrives in New Zealand cinemas on Boxing Day.   Anora stars Mikey Madison (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Scream) as the titular character, a sex worker from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. 

It’s a 2024 thriller concerned with race, podcast-making and the criminal justice system high on a fair few 2024 best-of lists. 17 Years Later is Melbourne-based bestselling New Zealand writer JP Pomare’s seventh novel in as many years.  In the book, it’s been 17 years since the violent stabbings of the British immigrant Primrose family while they slept, in Cambridge in the Waikato. And 17 years s...

She joins Culture 101 to talk about her time in the South of France for the 2024 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, her new novel and her highlights of 2024.

The Pōhutukawa - our Christmas tree - once bountifully fringed the West Coast north of Taranaki, and the East Coast north of Tairāwhiti Gisborne. While now found even further south, these trees with their stunning gold tipped crimson blooms remain synonymous with summer on the Northern East Coast.  They are there, at the end of the garden, before the vivid blues of sea and sky in East Coast, a new...

Renowned Māori actor and filmmaker Cliff Curtis has been honoured with the prestigious International Federation of Film Producers Associations Award at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. The event, held on Australia's Gold Coast, celebrated Curtis's outstanding contributions to the film industry. A decades-long career has included iconic roles in Once Were Warriors, Training Day, Whale Rider, and mor...

Dean Roberts, aka The Moth, was an experimental composer and multi-instrumentalist who lived in Auckland, New York, Bologna and Berlin. A student of the sound artist Phil Dadson, he went on to lecture at Elam School of Fine Arts and Berlin’s dbs music school. He was also a total crack-up and spinner of excellent yarns. In August, he died in his sleep in Lisbon, Portugal at the age of 49.  

A survey of recent film work by Jon Rafman Oh, the humanity! opens at Whangārei Art  Museum on December 20. It is, the gallery say “a harrowing meditation on the digital era’s fraught promises, and how they may have ultimately been broken.” Rafman’s career has seen him dubbed an internet artist. His work has obsessively followed and meditated on the development of cultures and their aesthetics onl...

For the regional wrap we head to Raglan Wharf to speak with Tony Sly of Tony Sly Pottery where the scenic views inspire his work.  Among his Raglan cultural highlights Tony Sly mentions artists Chris Meek and Jean Carbon, the Raglan arts weekend (held every Labour Weekend) and, naturally, his wharf studio.

Tāmaki Makaurau's eclectic Karangahape Road is known as a creative hub for alternative arts and events, unique hospitality and independent retailers. Now it can add a new fine arts gallery to its attractions. The gallery is the brainchild of former head of art at Webb's, Charles Ninow.