Mentor & Artist
The opening of veteran Māori artist Sandy Adsett’s retrospective, Toi Koru, on 31 July was a festive affair. The organisers apparently underestimated the volume of attendees: hundreds milled in outer rooms while the inner chamber was jam-packed for speeches, waiata, far-flung video-links and celebrations of Adsett’s lifelong commitment to promoting Māori visual arts. Many if not most of the crowd were brown, many were young, families and friends chattered and hugged, snatches of conversational te reo could be heard, children scampered and babies were snuggled. Many had come from afar. Illustrious senior figures of Māori arts and literature contributed to or attended the accompanying symposium. Compared to most art openings I have attended, this was a powerful display of indigenous pride, elegance, vivacity and cultural mana.
Dr Sandy Adsett (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Pāhauwera), born 1939, is a recipient of many awards recognising outstanding service to Māori visual arts and art education. In 1993 he joined the newly founded Toihoukura School of Māori Visual Art & Design at Tairāwhiti Gisborne and in 2002 the Toimairangi School of Māori Visual Culture in Hastings. In 2020 he became an Arts Foundation Whakamana Hirangi Icon. He is one of the last surviving More lastingly significant for Aotearoa’s art history, however, was the effect they had on each other, and the underappreciated influence of master carver Pine Taiapa (Ngāti Porou). Taiapa ran courses in Ruatōria for Department of Education art staff, not only providing technical expertise but also instilling profound respect for Māoritanga. The group’s itinerant day jobs—training primary school teachers—left little opportunity to socialise; but not only did Taiapa teach carving, he brought the group together, explains Adsett, by inviting them to his whare at Tikitiki where he would observe tikanga meticulously as he prepared to carve, and chant as he swung his adze. In a public conversation with Reuben Friend, director of Pātaka and curator of the show, held as part of a symposium on the opening weekend of , Adsett movingly described the loyalty Taiapa inspired. Moreover, these young Māori artists would ‘hang out at the marae’ over school holidays, working on their own art, exhibiting and ‘focus[ing] on being Māori’. For this ‘Taiapa Generation’, then, the period of the 1970s onwards embodies a double strand of indigenous artistic endeavour. On the one hand Māori artists continued to explore modernism in methods and materials that had arisen in the 1960s alongside rapid urbanisation and excitement about international trends in modern art; on the other, the 1970s and ’80s saw a resurgence of Māori political resistance and cultural assertion that encouraged reconnection to the marae and to customary arts and values. The former is individualistic, gallery-based and rewards innovation; the latter is collective, community-based and recognises a formal vocabulary rich in cultural meaning. Far from being incompatible, the tension between these impulses has energised contemporary Māori art ever since: Sandy Adsett’s practice sits precisely in its cross-current.
