Books
Undreamed Of . . . 50 Years of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship
by Priscilla Pitts and Andrea Hotere
Otago University Press, Dunedin 2017
In some ways Undreamed Of was one of the easiest books on art to write. The thorny curation questions―who do we include; who do we leave out; have we attained a balance of gender, ethnicity and media―had been answered for the authors by the selectors of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in each of the 50 years since its establishment. The book’s structure could hardly have been the result of a committee meeting: ‘Oh, chronological looks good to me.’ ‘Me, too.’ ‘Me, too.’ The decision to allocate each Fellow with the same number of pages―four―was surely not a contentious one. And, with the roll call of artists who have been awarded a Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, anything other than a sumptuous volume that gave equal priority to words and images would have been a publishing faux pas.
The easy solutions came to a halt with
