Culture 101

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.

Jo Ann Firestone is a  teller of tales, a producer, host, and co-founder of Couch Stories. A sold out storytelling series that has taken the Nelson Arts fest by storm. 

Rather than Boys II Men, it’s Boys II Middle Age: playwright and actor Michael Galvin has written a play about boy bands, with a difference.

Museums are really theatres of political power, says Maia Nuku, curator of Oceania at one of the biggest: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  Nuku (Ngāi Tai) is interested in the way museums can provide greater access and in the Big Apple that has meant creating a home for Māori and Pacific Island peoples and artists. 

Wellington artist Bailee Lobb has had a "combative" relationship with sleep her whole life. In the upcoming performance-installation How do you sleep at night? she'll use a range of "non-pharmaceutical sleep aids" to try and nod off at a Nelson gallery.

In 2016 Aotearoa lost architect and teacher Rewi Thompson too young. But as an innovative new book reveals -  Rewi: Āta haere, kia tere - Thompson’s legacy lives on not only in buildings and public projects but also his imaginative drawings and teaching. 

Award winning drag queen Spankie Jackzon joins Maggie Tweedie for Culture 101’s regional wrap to spill the tea on what makes Palmy so bloody balmy.

Peter Porteous is a musician based in Dunedin who organises an experimental music festival called Lines of Flight. The idea was bred from a friendship he shared with mate and late collaborator Peter Stapleton for years. Maggie Tweedie asks Peter Porteous about some of the lesser known and more mesmerizing music coming from The South. While he selects the sounds that showcase the analgoue and abstr...

Samoan New Zealand dancer John Vaifale (Lalovaea and Solosolo) is packing his bags to head to Germany and represent Aotearoa at the Red Bull Dance Your Style World Finals on November 4. 

From the opening scenes of the second series of Raised by Refugees - the comedy sitcom created by award winning comedian Pax Assadi - monocultural views of New Zealand society are challenged with humour. 

An award-winning playwright, actor, musician and founder of the Maori Sidesteps, Jamie McCaskill’s latest play Two Guitars is a musical journey examining those of a  generation of Māori find themselves lost who have grown up without te reo and tikanga and find themselves lost. 

In a 2023 election countdown special ‘Carcass’ brings you lively banter on where culture and politics is and isn’t meeting on the hustings.

Madison Emond from Rhode Island has been building pinhole cameras from clay in Wellington’s Kaiwharawhara stream. Her photographic work is a vessel for the natural environment, capturing life by and under water by wrapping film around glow worms and river stones.

Artist Taloi Havini began life in Bougainville but fled with her family to Australia aged 9 due to a civil war which claimed 15,000 lives. 

Every week on Culture 101 we check the pulse of a different area of Aotearoa. This week, we’re off to Hastings, ahead of the Hawkes Bay Arts Festival 13-29 October.

In Still Here director Litia Tuiburelevu takes us inside the homes, centres and churches that carry forward  the different island community's stories and cultural traditions.  

 George Nelson is a New Zealander living in Japan with a passion for haiku, techno and fashion. The pages of, The Techno Kiwi reveal a delightful fusion of both Japanese and New Zealand cultures, using native New Zealand birds, techno and hip hop, Japanese and English.