Culture 101

Spooky, beautiful, yet funny, Greta Anderson’s photography transforms day into night, while invasive flora and domestic objects glow with spiritual electricity.   

Each week Culture 101 puts the spotlight on a different region around the motu - for our regional wrap.  This week we're in culture-rich Ōtepoti, Dunedin with Pip Laufiso.

“Sharpen your pencils and limp your wrists, Queer Academy is upon us.”

Records are made to be broken right? 

Born and raised in Rēkohu, the largest of the Chatham Islands, musician and storyteller Ajay Peni is a young ambassador for the revitalisation of Moriori culture and its rongo, or music. While now based in Perth, Peni’s blues-rock group Black Robin provides a contemporary musical window into the experiences and stories of this remote and wild South-Eastern part of Aotearoa New Zealand. 

Every week on Culture 101 we invite a guest to share their love of culture and shout out to other artists. This week it's actor, director and producer Te Kohe Tuhaka (Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Porou). 

A pioneer artist across the ‘60s and ‘70s and one of the most influential arts educators of his generation,  Jim Allen passed away just shy of turning 101 in June.  Known for inspiring what has been termed ‘post-object art’ in New Zealand, Allen was still working as a performance artist in his 90s. And he had a formative influence on another legend of experimentalism and education, artist Phil Dad...

Three theatre institutions are celebrating 50th anniversaries this year.   

An ambitious new book - Pacific Arts Aotearoa - has been released, spanning six decades of multi-disciplinary contributions from Pacific artists to New Zealand, Oceania and the world.

Karin Bettley tells Culture 101 about how her love of creative life in the coastal town of Raglan. 

An annual Spooky Disco means Halloween proves the busiest day of the year for a community and arts centre established on the green and surrounding buildings of a former bowling club in the Eastern Hills of Wellington. 

In the handsome just released book Don Binney Flight Path Gregory O’Brien tracks the avian-like swoops in the career of the late Tāmaki Makaurau painter, teacher and ornithologist (1940–2012).    

He’s best known for fronting rock band Shihad, but musician Jon Toogood says playing acoustic solo shows is now where he feels most “human”.

American slime mould tours Aotearoa creating giant kinetic sculpture of rubbish

The name of the northern Hawkes Bay river town of Wairoa has been translated as "the long water which bubbles, swirls and is uneven". That certainly became true earlier this year when Cyclone Gabrielle swallowed the town, leaving a flooded trail of destruction in its path. But what of life beyond that catastrophic event? What makes Wairoa special? Wairoa's Deputy Mayor Denise Eaglesome-Karekare fi...

While other kids went to kindergarten, when he was a small child Tongan New Zealand artist John Vea was on the factory floor where his father worked. The experience has led Vea to make the relationship between factory and manual labour work and the Pacific Island community central to his performances, sculpture and installations. Exhibition Outcast at Tamaki Makaurau’s Gus Fisher Gallery brings Ve...

Toi Mahara gallery director Janet Bayly offers the whakatauki: ‘ahakoa he iti he pounamu’, when she speaks of the Kāpiti Coast’s regional Gallery in Waikanae. “The gift of something small but precious.” Small, precious and also shiny new, the opening of an Athfield Architects designed purpose-built building for Toi Mahara has been 20 years in the making. A picturesque one hour train ride north of...

This week saw the passing of a legend in the arts in Aotearoa. Sir Jon Trimmer, arguably New Zealand’s most beloved dancer has died aged 84. With him to the end in Paekākāriki alongside his wife Lady Jacqui was Sir Jon’s older sister Coral Trimmer. Now aged 93, Coral is of similar enduring stock. An acclaimed jazz and classical musician, she started playing the harmonica 88 years ago, and continue...

Freshwater ecologist, environmental science researcher and activist Dr Mike Joy is a well known outspoken voice in the need for our society to make radical changes to deal with our major environmental crises.  He is one of Aotearoa’s foremost public scientists, but also a supporter of artists and art projects as a way of raising awareness to enable change. 

Lucy Godoroja unfastens the miniature world of wonder and the surprising history of the button. In her book, All Buttons Great and Small. 

Culture lover and curator Rosie Dawson-Hewes is passionate about accessibility in the arts. It led her to collaborate with a new Bay of Plenty art patron Fiona Menzies to create A Seat at the Table at this month’s Tauranga Arts Festival (19-28 October). 

Henderson artists Bernie Harfleet and Turtle Sarten make visible the things we often find uncomfortable to talk about. Urgent social issues all around us: like family harm, mental health and poverty. These self-described creators of 'Community Activated Art Action' do remarkable things. Since 2002 Bernie and Turtle have been staging installations that involve public participation to raise awarenes...

Cat Lovett is a New Zealand textile designer with a passion for the sustainable. Her interest in design has led her to live in Mexico's textile capital, Oaxaca. There she has been closely studying the region's ancient textile traditions.

Self declared pirate queen Mandy Mayhem gives Maggie Tweedie a slice of life in Waitati. The celebrant, MC and Dunedin City Councillor gives the regional wrap into the cultural happenings of the bustling seaside village. 

It took until the 1970s for Toi Māori (Māori  art) to develop a tradition in clay (uku). One that in part looks back to an ancestral Lapita pottery tradition across the Pacific.  Today, the collective artist-led rise of this unique ceramics movement stands as a striking development in contemporary Māori art: Ngā Kaihanga Uku, the makers with clay.