Photo: supplied
Published Aotearoa art histories have been few and far between, particularly since the 1980s.
What accounts there are, for the general reader, have been dominated by the media of painting, and they typically begin with 19th century colonial depictions of the landscape. With this focus, Toi Māori has been marginalised, as has been the work of collectives and Pacific Island artists. It’s also been noted worldwide - art histories have been dominated by men.
Public galleries have been demonstrating our view of art history has been changing radically for years. It just hasn’t been published for a wider public, until now.
Kirsty Baker Photo: Ebony Lamb Photography
Art historian and curator Kirsty Baker’s smart and insightful new book Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa, published by Auckland University Press, is then a major publishing event.
Alongside Baker’s own lively chapters are contributions from a range of leading Māori and Pacific Island female essayists. It is weaving, filmmaking and body adornment that lead the conversation - not painting and sculpture. It recognises remarkable practises that have often been missing from our books.
Baker describes her’s as an “unruly perspective” and Sight Lines is a major attempt to rebalance art history with a focus on women. In this, she says she is mindful of the book questioning binaries - stepping outside the cisgender. She includes artists Yuki Kihara and Aliyah Winter. She was careful, she says, to subtitle the bo ok ‘Women and art’ not ‘women artists’.
'Self Portrait' Ayesha Green Photo: Sam Hartnett
In a way that makes Sight Lines accessible to a wide readership, considering our art in the context of the politics of the society it was made. It considers the impact of class and views of labour with a feminist lens. The fact, for example, that the first book of art published in Aotearoa was actually Sarah Featon’s 1889 The Art Album of New Zealand Flora, or that painter Frances Hodgkins success was initially enabled by her own family privilege.
Speaking to Culture 101, Baker is open about the way her frame of reference remains problematic. While reviews for Sightlines have been positive they have also looked to what the history leaves out. Kihara is the only Asian artist, for example, and some readers may struggle with the absence of a host of well-known women artists, ranging from Fiona Pardington and Ans Westra to Gretchen Albrecht and Jacqueline Fraser.
Yet Baker isn’t attempting to be comprehensive and admits she has her own blindspots. She chooses to tell lesser-told stories by focussing on a select group of 35 artists, with the writers picking paths by looking at both the relationships between artists - and between themselves and them.
“We’re not going to be able to agree on one national art history,” Baker tells Culture 101, “that’s not going to happen. But so much useful work can be done through art history.”
'The Useful Idiot and Arnodolfi's Hat' Di Ffrench 1984 Photo: supplied
