Various Artists with Nicholas & Beth

A boosted campaign has recently been launched for FETU Creative Talks. 

The talks aim to provide a variety of workshops and creative talks for Māori and Pasifika rangatahi, working with a variety of artists and creatives from around Aotearoa.

The programme is the first of many from Launchpad, a creative organisation aiming to create a community of rangatahi artmakers across the motu. 

Liam had a chat with Lance Fepuleai, AKA Lucky Lance, about the talks and the campaign to fund them.

Don Binney: Flight Path is a richly illustrated account of the life and work of one of New Zealand’s most iconic artists.

Painter, printmaker, teacher, writer and ornithologist, Don Binney was a mercurial presence on the New Zealand cultural scene from the time of his rise to fame in the early 1960s. His unmistakable, stylised depictions of birds have come to define an era in the development of the nation’s art. 

Drawing extensively on Binney’s letters, journals and other writings, award-winning author and curator Gregory O’Brien takes us into the world of this gifted but paradoxical artist. Richly illustrated with Binney’s paintings, drawings and prints – alongside photographs and documentary materials – this is the first full-length monograph on one of New Zealand’s most important twentieth-century artists.

To hear about the book, Frances caught up with Greg for Various Artists this week. 

Opening next Friday at Michael Lett Gallery is Nirvana Park by Dan Arps. 

The exhibition is inspired by the various industrial reserves found around Tāmaki Makaurau, particularly the titular Nirvana Park found in Lynfield. 

The sculptures in the exhibition aim to combine the desolate atmosphere of these reserves and ask about what else these spaces could be used for.

After first occupying vacant spaces in a post-stock-market-crash Auckland in the mid-1990s, public art curators ‘Letting Space’ re-emerged in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. Confronted by the thin net of social welfare, the waste of the capitalist system and the climate emergency, it brokered spaces for artists to think and act radically, outside gallery walls.

A big and bright new book out of Massey University Press, ‘Urgent Moments’ chronicles these projects the artists that drove them. 

To hear about the projects, Frances caught up with editors Mark Amery and Sophie Jerram.