Robyn Kahukiwa

Artist, author

• Born: 1940
• Birthplace: Sydney, Australia

Significance: New Zealand artist Robyn Kahukiwa's work deals with the cultural displacement experienced by indigenous Maori. Since the 1970s, she has worked to express her objection to the diminishment of Maori traditions in her artwork. She has also become one of New Zealand's most prominent illustrators.

Background

Robyn Kahukiwa was born in 1940 in Sydney, Australia. Her family was of Maori ancestry, the indigenous people of New Zealand. She was cut off from her Maori background for most of her childhood but reconnected with her roots after moving to New Zealand in 1959. She did not begin painting until the 1960s, when she began spending her free time experimenting with painting techniques. When her family later moved to Wellington, she began to paint works that depicted the sense of destitution she experienced and witnessed among the Maori living in the ghetto. Her creations often portrayed Maori people of various social backgrounds, such as factory workers, gang members, and young mothers. In 1972, she took a job as an art teacher at Mana College, where she emphasized the importance of sustaining the Maori identity.

Kahukiwa's works were greatly inspired by Maori folk art. She also borrowed from styles such as pop art and modernism. Post-impressionist artists such as Paul Gaughin, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse and surrealist artist Frida Kahlo influenced Kahukiwa's style. New Zealand artists such as Colin McCahon and Ralph Hotere also shaped her work. As Kahukiwa came to know more about her heritage, her artwork began to focus on social problems, such as Maori poverty and prejudice against Maori people in urban communities. Such discrimination discouraged and diminished the Maori lifestyle. As Kahukiwa matured as a painter, her works began to exhibit symbolic imagery related to this sense of loss of Maori identity. Her productions often blended past and present, suggesting Kahukiwa longed for a Maori revitalization. Her works celebrated the strength of Maori culture despite the many obstacles it faced. Kahukiwa dedicated several paintings to reinterpreting the female role in Maori mythology, applying a feminist spin to traditional Maori views of women.

Life's Work

Kahukiwa regularly exhibited her work between the 1970s and 1980s. Many of her 1970s productions featured symbolic affronts to emblems of Maori cultural identity. Maori men sporting popular hairstyles, broken hei-tiki neck ornaments, and a silhouette of a Maori laborer in the middle of a dartboard are a few examples of how Kahukiwa conveyed her message to viewers. By the 1980s, she began to approach her art with a more therapeutic tone. Rather than depicting the Maori as the estranged "other," she decided to invoke Maori cosmological traditions to highlight the vitality of the Maori and reclaim her people's customs. Her art began to bring Maori animistic beliefs to the forefront and embraced the Maori's matauranga, or knowledge. Her new approach was deemed ethnocentric in its assertion of Maori power and her defiance of European influence dating back to the era of colonization.

Kahukiwa's work first gained fame in the early 1980s following her Wahine Toa exhibition, which toured throughout New Zealand between 1981 and 1984. Her "strong women" series of paintings was particularly praised for its mixture of Western art styles with Maori myth and symbolism. The painting titled Hinetitama received special attention for its reinterpretation of the traditional woman in Maori mythology and its bicultural approach. Maori writer Patricia Grace later reproduced these artworks in a book, which outlined Kahukiwa's development as a painter and her arrival as a new voice in the contemporary art world. By the 1990s, Kahukiwa's work had undergone another transformation as she began painting imagery resembling ancient Maori woodcarvings. These images took on the symbolic nature of traditional carvings, with figures painted in varying sizes to represent their significance. Kahukiwa consistently exhibited her work throughout the remainder of the decade, taking her art to galleries and museums all over the world. She forayed into book writing in the late 1990s, authoring and illustrating several children's books over the next two decades. She began branching out into other kinds of art such as poster art, billboard art, illustrations for books and magazines, and mural making.

Kahukiwa's works continued to express her discontent with the historic treatment of Maoris. On the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi—an 1840 treaty between the British Crown and Maori leaders recognizing Maori land ownership as British subjects—Kahukiwa painted a number of works representative of the broken promises and damaged language and culture resulting from the Maori's loss of sovereignty. These political messages carried over into the 2000s with her 2001 touring show Mauri Ora (Maori for "the life force is alive"), which featured a series of paintings and sculptures examining Maori history from the colonial era to the present. Kahukiwa included a number of self-portraits in the series depicting her struggle to come to terms with her mixed-race heritage. The series included several paintings encouraging Maori descendants to gain strength from a renewal of indigenous values. Kahukiwa's later artwork was primarily shown in New Zealand throughout the 2000s and into the 2010s.

Kahukiwa has been a strong advocate of Maori women's art and has promoted female empowerment. She helped establish the Haeta Maori Women's Art Collective in the 1990s. Her works regularly depicted the struggles of Maori women, such as young mothers grappling with social stigmas. Childbirth and the females of Maori mythology were other common themes. She was known to subvert patriarchal social constructs with her images of strong, muscular yet beautiful women tackling traditionally female responsibilities.

Impact

Kahukiwa has been a prominent Maori artist throughout her life, creating works that feature a strong relationship between art and politics. As part of the Maori cultural revitalization that began in the 1970s, Kahukiwa encouraged a rediscovery of Maori traditions through art and activism. She has worked to build connections with the Maori community and has promoted artistic activities as a way of protesting and coping with Maori cultural dejection. Kahukiwa urged Maori descendants to learn about and reclaim their heritage through art.

Personal Life

In addition to being an artist, Kahukiwa is also a mother.

Principle Works: Books

• Koroua & the Mauri Stone,1994
• Paikea, 1994
• Oriori: A Maori Child Is Born, from Conception to Birth, 1999
• Supa Heroes: Te Wero, 2000

Principle Works: Paintings

• Hinetitama, 1980
• We will never be lost, we are from a great canoe, 1994
• Aue Aue Aue Ra, 1995
• Emblems of Identity, 1995
• Kaitiaki Hina, 2007
• Tino Rangatiratanga Tiki, 2009
• Power to Define, 2009
• Kahukura, 2010
• 2 Hina Supa Heroes, 2014

Bibliography

Dunn, Michael. New Zealand Painting: A Concise History. Auckland UP, 2003.

Eggleton, David. "Earth and Spirit: Robyn Kahukiwa's Mauri Ora! Exhibition." Art New Zealand, Summer 2002–03, www.art-newzealand.com/Issue105/robyn.htm. Accessed 14 Mar. 2017.

"Hinetitama by Robyn Kahukiwa." New Zealand History, www.nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/hinetitama-robyn-kahukiwa. Accessed 14 Mar. 2017.

"Robyn Kahukiwa." Toi O Tahuna Gallery, www.toi.co.nz/ArtistDetails.aspx?ArtistId=57. Accessed 14 Mar. 2017.

"Robyn Kahukiwa." Warwick Henderson Gallery, www.warwickhenderson.co.nz/artist/robyn-kahukiwa. Accessed 14 Mar. 2017.

"Robyn Kahukiwa Author Page." Amazon, www.amazon.com/Robyn-Kahukiwa/e/B001K89PF2. Accessed 14 Mar. 2017.

"Work by Robyn Kahukiwa." Toi O Tahuna Gallery, www.toi.co.nz/ArtGallery.aspx?ArtistId=57&ArtistName=Robyn%20Kahukiwa. Accessed 14 Mar. 2017.