Women in the Visual Arts in Aotearoa

VOLUME Books — August 30, 2024

With the publication of the wonderful Modern Women: Flight of Time, we have gathered together this selection for you of Aotearoa art books focussed on the creative pursuits of women across visual arts, architecture and photography. All beautifully produced by outstanding publishers in Aotearoa, each covers new ground, adding to the discourse and illuminating their subject matter visually and with essays. If you are interested in the visual arts in Aoteraoa, you will want these outstanding books in your library.

Making Space: A History of New Zealand Women in Architecture (Massey University Press) is a remarkable contribution to both our architectural and our social history. This groundbreaking book tells the story of New Zealand women architects; their contribution to creativity, the built environment and community. Written by leading women architects, both in practice and in academia, the book's bold, vivid chapters surface dozens of remarkable women, including many whose careers had until now almost entirely been lost to the historical record.

The recently published Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa is an outstanding publication. Beautifully produced and thought-provoking, Sight Lines is a bold new account of art-making in Aotearoa through 35 extraordinary women artists. Gathered here are painters, photographers, performers, sculptors, weavers, textile artists, poets and activists. They have worked individually, collaboratively and in collectives. They have defied restrictive definitions of what art should be and what it can do. Their stories and their work enable us to ask new questions of art history in Aotearoa.

‘An exceptional book. Thoughtfully conceived, well written, timely and significant. It manages to be both scholarly – informed by the state of art writing in the present – and accessible to a general readership interested in art, women and feminism in Aotearoa.” — Peter Brunt, Victoria University of Wellington—Te Herenga Waka

Profiling 44 innovative artists, Modern Women: Flight of Time places women in the front and centre of New Zealand modernism and explores their varied responses to the transformational changes occurring across five decades of the 20th Century. Artists include iconic figures Rita Angus, Frances Hodgkins, and A Lois White; as well as the significant contributions by lesser-known artists June Black, Flora Scales and Pauline Yearbury. The book is published in conjunction with a major exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery curated by Julia Waite.

Through Shaded Glass: Women and Photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860 -1960 unearths a large and hitherto unknown number of women photographers, both professional and amateur, who operated in New Zealand from the 1860s to 1960, either as assistants in the early studios or later running studios in their own right. Through superb images and fascinating individual stories, it brings an important group of photographers into the light.

"Mitchell's decade of research has unearthed a wealth of wonderful images created by women in Aotearoa, and provided a powerful narrative that reveals their creators' lives and motivations. Through Shaded Glass is both a corrective and a celebration, and will no doubt create a legacy in its own right, as a point of departure for future scholarship." —Hamish Coney, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books