Culture 101

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 t...

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 en...

Arts news for 16 June 2024

The Dead C guitarist Bruce Russell along with graphic designer and pedal steel guitar player, Luke Wood, has released a rich book of essays called A Record Could Be Your Whole World: Vinyl Records as the Total Artwork of the Late Twentieth Century.

Melanesia is a rich cultural region. It holds the largest Indigenous population in the Pacific, and has more languages than all of Europe. Vanuatu has 110 dialects and languages alone. 

For Daimon Schwalger aka artist and celebrated electronic artist The Nomad, moving to Kawatiri Westport on Te Wai Pounamu South Island’s West Coast was a deliberate ploy to enjoy more isolation. Yet the event organiser hasn’t been able to help himself, organising a few major community events as well as heading a video and photography production company there.  

The Doc Edge Festival is kicking off in Aotearoa from 19 June starting in Ōtautahi Christchurch. It’ll make its way to Auckland and Wellington before going online nationwide. With 66 local and international films and 28 digital immersive events and installations, there’s a plethora of projects for audiences to soak up. 

A small farming town in South Australia has been on a mission to show art can improve health and well-being.

Back in the early 1930s, the pianette was briefly an Art Deco home sensation. Now a band of enthusiasts have revived the instrument by converting it into a Pianette Automatique.

Courtney Dawson (Ngāti Kurī/ Ngāti Amaru) broke into the comedy world just five years ago but has steadily been working her way to the top. 

Arts news for Sunday 9 June.

The late art historian Jonathan Mane Wheoki has referred to Te Tai Tokerau in the North as the crucible of Māori art. Such were the number of groundbreaking modern Māori artists to come from this region in the 1950s and 1960s. Also among them is Elizabeth Mountain Ellis, who features with many in Te Ao Hurihuri, an exhibition of work by this generation at the Wairau Māori Art gallery in Whangarei.

If you were to speak into an old telephone - what would you say? London-based artist, Joe Bloom has been finding out. A View From A Bridge offers strangers passing by the opportunity to look out onto the water and speak into an old-fashioned chunky red telephone - sharing their inner thoughts, feelings and observations. 

Each week, Culture 101 puts the spotlight on a different region in Aotearoa for the weekly Regional Wrap. This week we’re in Russell - Kororāreka.

As painter Claude Monet's garden and house in Giverny is to France, beloved artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman's garden and house is, in a more contemporary fashion, becoming to England. It's set on the dramatic shingle beach headland of Dungeness in the South East of England, in the shadow of a giant twin nuclear power station.

An Australian sculptor is reclaiming the female form through her woodwork. 

Kaikōura is celebrating 60 years of surfing in a new long-term exhibition at their museum Wharenga - First Wave. Known for whale watching, wildlife and its beautiful coastline, the surfing history of the small town on Te Wai Pounamu’s East Coast hasn’t been as well known or well-documented until now. 

In Kathryn Burnett’s new solo comedy play, Nicola Cheeseman is Back, Nicola is sick of trying to do it all. In an all too familiar situation for those in middle age: she has lost her mojo.   With the guitar, kids and job is the play’s solo star, acclaimed actor Jodie Rimmer. Recently turned 50, with two boys heading into teenagehood, Jodie relates.

It’s not all online: live events are often where we come together as communities, sharing passions and considering the issues concerning us. It’s important they’re accessible to all.  Except they’re not. Many people have impairments that can make it more difficult or impossible to attend live events. Deaf and disability advocates argue in fact it is the society that is creating the disability, not...

A new generation and those who never made it as far as Bluff can now discover this country’s iconic Pāua Shell House in an online virtual tour. 

The Tūrangi Tongariro region, at the spectacular southern end of Lake Tāupo bordering the Volcanic Plateau, is midway between Wellington and Auckland, Napier and New Plymouth and Hamilton and Palmerston North. A popular topping off point, you couldn’t get more central.