Pacific Art Niu Sila

Since the 1950s, a new wave of immigrants from all over the Pacific has come to New Zealand’s shores, bringing their cultures, customs and values with them. Some of these have been maintained or transformed to suit the conditions and circumstances of a new country and community, while others have been discarded. Today many Pacific people maintain strong social, spiritual and family ties to their homeland and seek to establish and understand their new connections to this land – New Zealand. The ways in which these connections are expressed are very diverse, and nowhere can this diversity can be seen more clearly than in the arts.

Pacific Art Niu Sila highlights some of the ways that Pacific peoples have contributed to New Zealand arts from the 1950s to the present day. The contributing authors engage their areas of interest in different ways; some are from academic and teaching backgrounds, others are curators, artists or practitioners; some are a combination of these. They offer varying scales of distance and participation in their documentation and commentary. This book provides a snapshot of contemporary practice across the arts, highlighting what is and has been important and relevant in different genres. It covers a range of artforms including tivaevae, tatau, tapa, weaving, film and photography, painting and sculpture, architecture, theatre, literature, costume, jewelry, music and dance.

Pacific Art Niu Sila shows how these art forms have maintained long-established ideas and have incorporated and been transformed by new ones. It is essential reading for all those interested in the contemporary arts of both New Zealand and the Pacific.