The following is a contestation of inaccurate information made in this particular review and in the recently published book on Māori art by Ngarino Ellis, Diedre Brown and posthumously Jonathan Mane Wheoki being reviewed by Corlett. I test a couple of key assertions the surviving authors of Toi Te Mana...’ (AUP 2024) make along with a genealogy of toi tāhuhu ‘Māori art history’ they authoritatively attempt to present.

Before a more detailed response to the Guardian review and to the book itself it’s important to clarify my intention here. My issue is not per se with Māori art, Māori artists, the communities to which they belong and the visual images reproduced in the book. I am solely concerned in talking to toi tāhuhu ‘Maori Art history’ the discipline I trained in, helped pioneer and in which I continue to be a stakeholder. This work continues with a followup book ‘Reading Maori Art’ which I am currently contracted to publish with Bateman Books.

Any book that promotes images of Māori art globally is a worthwhile contributor to the wider legacy of publications on Māori art. There are many images in this publication of work by Māori artists: both past and present. It’s always good when an audience receives an opportunity to familiarise itself with taonga and a range of work by contemporary Māori artists. Some reproductions already feature in the book Māori Art: History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory (Bateman 2015) and many have already been published in a range of exhibition catalogues and prior publications. The whole effort of collecting and coverage feels a little like Encyclopedia Brittanica – a discursive attempt to travel wide territories sometimes quite cursorily. The book’s designer photographer Neil Pardington appears key to this achievement skilfully organising an eclectic range of imagery and somehow maintaining a well designed, presentable whole and this appears to have found acknowledgement in a recent local award ‘Illustrated Non-Fiction’. The broad ranging scope of the 603 pages is perhaps to be expected given the vast investment of public funds ($552,174 in 2012) fairly required tangible demonstration of the Marsden grant Mane-Wheoki helped secure.

However, the book is not the first ‘comprehensive indigenous art history created by and with indigenous peoples’ nor is it the first singularly significant contribution toi tāhuhu ‘Māori art history.’ This was pointed out directly to the surviving authors at the recent previously mentioned Ockham NZ Book Awards in Tāmaki where Auckland Museum Māori curator Nigel Borrell clarified Māori Art (2015) as precedent for the current publication. All global art histories involve their own particular take on that history – books that attempt to tell the art history of Māori are no exception. That diversity is to be expected and is a healthy phenomenon that should find wide approval.

What is troubling with this particular publication is it is making claims that simply aren’t true. In Māori Art (2015) I tried to acknowledge the tendency in our art and in our tribal histories to edit out and remove previous competing layers. This was the very reason I talked, in this earlier publication, to Orwell’s palimpsest metaphor concerning authoritarianism. In order to avoid the ongoing problem of opacity and erasure demanded by the latter position I suggested a more inclusive translucency of historical layers (2015: 24-61). Perhaps ironically the 2024 book quotes the same kōrero I use in Māori Art (2015). Here Pineāmine Taiapa is forced to conclude, in response to the determination of his whānaunga he tohunga mahi toi ko Paratene Matchitt to pursue his own individually charted direction in art, ‘…there is room in the world of art for everyone (2015: 138)’. However, despite this reference to inclusiveness in Brown and Ellis’s book it would appear there is only room for particular roles and particular advocates that fit in and align themselves with the specific genealogy they want to tell.

The problem with this bias is one long familiar to the very Northern Hemisphere art histories the 2024 publication claims to avoid: that is the endless cycle of contestation and replacement. Its’ authors profess new layers of art history which renders other positions opaque or perhaps even obsolete. It’s an approach I discuss in relation to the effect of Sir Āpirana Ngata’s (2015: 138-173) well intended parliamentary laws to preserve a particular type of Māori art that excluded more culturally assimilated forms: a position I was well aware of in working (full-time and later tenured lectureship in Māori and Polynesian art history University of Auckland 1996-2008) alongside Ellis who occupied an accompanying .5 position. Those connections and earlier claims made by all three contributors to the 2024 publication can be followed on a link provided here to my personal website. So…

As follows my response to a Guardian review by Eva Corlett ‘Our People were so innovative…’ (22 February 2025) regarding the recently published book Māori art Toi Te Mana: an indigenous history of Māori art:

‘Toi Te Mana…(2024) concludes, “We would not be so whakahīhī (arrogant) as to say that this is ‘the’ art history made by Māori” (2024: 533). There is much (in both the book and Corlett’s earlier review 22 February 2025) that precludes this statement of intent. Both authors and your reviewer have made a number of assertions concerning the provenance of Māori art history which are untrue: I raise two for your readers’ consideration.

The first is the claim by co-author Diedre Brown that, ‘Prior to this book there had been no Māori led approach to writing an art history.’ Elsewhere the architectural historian has maintained theirs is, ‘the first indigenous art history created by and with indigenous people.’ In April 2025 senior historian Paul Diamond, Ministry for Culture and Heritage New Zealand Journal PH, 11 2025, described a broader provenance in his review referencing other key stakeholders and noting Maori Art: History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory (Bateman 2015) was,

‘…the first specific and sustained attempt at a Māori art history’ (White 2015) presenting an ‘unapologetic kaupapa Māori point of view’ (Chitham 2022). At the New Zealand Writers Festival session for Toi te Mana on 16 May 2025 the respondant Nigel Borell (Curator Taonga Maori, Auckland War Memorial Museum) introduced his session by contextualising their book in relation to MAORI ART (2015) and putting Brown and Ellis’s effort in its proper context.

As author of MAORI ART: History… (2015) I would like to clarify my toi tāhuhu ‘Māori art history’ (the term I use throughout this earlier book, my upcoming publication and subsequently this letter) has been nearly 40 years of research in the making and contrary to these current claims is no new thing. This mahi rangahau ‘research’ included the first Masters thesis by a Māori in Art History ‘The Development of Maori Art in a Contemporary Form and Context: Paratene Te Mokopuorongo Matchitt’ MA (Hons) 1988 (1-328) and thirteen years later the first PhD ‘Maori Art in Continuum’ 2001 (1-604) in the discipline of Art History, Auckland University. I feel compelled to raise te kaupapa nei ‘this foundation’ to toi tāhuhu, already well covered by myself and a number of other writers, curators and art historians, because with readers unfamiliar with this history taua whakapehapeha ‘this boastfulness’ begs to be called out. Ko te mea nui nei ko ngā hapori maha me āku tūpuna hoki e tū ana kei muri i taku mahi rangahau ka whakarārangitia mai nei ‘the important thing to say is many indigenous communities stand behind the research I have listed here’.

[Ngarino Ellis understood very well the international significance already being accorded Māori Art (2015) as Māori art history in the Australia and NZ Art Historical Association award it received at ANU Canberra for the best Māori Pacific Book Award 2016. She witnessed me receiving the award. Her mother and sister also sat at the same table at the presentation of the Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards, Auckland Museum in 2016 the night Māori Art was winner of the art category. Both Ellis and Brown were also aware of the Maori and Polynesian Art History lectureship I successfully received in 1996 because they both also applied for it. So regarding Brown’s claim in relation to being theirs being the first Māori led approach to art history – kāore, he moehewa i reira.]

The second claim is co-author Ellis’s belief their book has upturned the discipline of art history. [Not really – if that art history has already been challenged it was partly already in both my theses, my many published articles, my pionieering curating and in the 2015 publication]. Perhaps connected with this claim is the perception that tēnei huringa ‘this transformation’ has taken place within an art historical framework as claimed recently by the Professional Historians’ Association of New Zealand/Aotearoa – (23 April 2025). This post notes these authors are, “three Māori scholars trained in Western art history.” One reason this seems unlikely is the academic background primary contributors, Ellis and Brown, bring neither being wholly [or extensively] trained in the discipline of art history. Ellis switched from law beginning as a tutor under Ngahuia Te Awekotuku (a sociologist with a background in museum ethnology who wrote a PhD thesis on the sociocultural impact of tourism on Te Arawa in Rotorua) in the Department of Art History in the 1990s. All Brown’s thesis background is architectural research.

Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (1943-2014) is the only real contender for extensive training in this discipline completing a dissertation for the Courtauld (MA 1973). However, on closer examination his thesis topic, ‘Polychromatic Elements in High Victorian Church Architecture’ is weak in authenticating the kind of whakapapa ‘genealogy’ the authors seem [so] intent on promoting and may explain its’ absence in the books’ list of theses. Mane-Wheoki’s actual involvement in writing toi tāhuhu only came later in the early 1990s. [On my website ‘Maori Art Curator’ I make clear this history in Mane-Wheoki’s personal correspondence with me involving requests for access to curatorial publications and resources, my MA thesis (1988), attempted supervision of my PhD (late 1990s) and in a small exhibition leaflet (early 1990s) sent me which he described as his first effort at writing on toi tāhuhu].

The problem I have with Ellis’s contention is that to upturn Northern Hemisphere art history would surely demand a far deeper dialogue with that art history and also with the enormous influence European and American art, artists and theory has played in the pioneering work of most post-World War II Māori artists. Of the six hundred pages in the book barely twelve pages of text minimally allotted to Mane-Wheoki directly covers this ground and very generally. There is lots of kōrero ‘talk’ about shared global indigenous connections. But here’s the problem. Control over one’s indigenous art history silo does not mean you then have authority to claim ownership over territory outside ones’ sub-cultural construct and outside ones’ actual training.

The third area of concern is the basis of authority underpinning these two prior statements and on which this particular toi tāhuhu is said to rest. The position of the book has not changed much from a public pronouncement, made by all three authors, in 2014 that toi tāhuhu began with anthropologist Sidney Mead’s essay for the Te Māori exhibition catalogue in 1984. I devote a whole chapter of my Auckland University PhD thesis ‘Continuum in Māori Art’ to that unlikely observation and Mead’s problematic chronology of Māori art.

Yes Mead’s work is important to toi tāhuhu (I discuss this contribution in another Māori Art facebook entry) but only in so much as it advances an orthodox position on taonga Māori and it is not overly tātou tātou ‘inclusive’ either. Instead the Te Maori text serves an exhibition designed for venues in the United States that did not recognise the work of Maori women artists and which excluded the work of living artists. This then is not a great model for the inclusiveness the authors seek to promote. Indeed many of Mead’s statements about Māori art are conservative, exclusive and at times feel overly authoritative. “…[I]t is necessary to define Māori art so everybody knows what it is. Before this [i.e. the emergence of Te Māori] everyone seemed to know what it was…there were no big discussions about how to define our art” (Mead, He Pukenga Kōrero 1996:3). But who is we? And why do we even all have to agree? And yes, obviously if writers need to take 600 + pages to offer their definition of Māori art in 2024 then yes those discussions would seem to continue.

If, for example, as Mead contends Māori art involves, “…art that looks Māori, feels Māori, is done by Māori following the styles, canons of taste and values of Māori culture (Toi…2024:12)” how might one interpret the role of blackness in the paintings of prominent twentieth century abstractionist Hone Papita Raukura ‘Ralph’ Hōtere (1931-2013)? Without understanding seventeenth century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn (Hotere’s life-long muse) or the art-as-art philosophy of American minimalist painter Ad Reinhardt…and without more carefully advancing other global non-indigenous influences, outside the Māori canons of taste and value, one will struggle with ‘he māramatanga e pā ana ki te pōuri kei roto i ngā peita i tēnei tohunga mahi toi no Te Aupōuri “a fuller understanding of darkness in the paintings of this Maori art expert from Muri Whenua.”

“It’s a great time to be Maori…” Ellis writes. Yes, and I would add it’s a great time to be a particular kind of Māori [i.e art historian, artist and curator] with the right alignments but sadly only the kind of Māori that fits their construct [and their very particular version of toi tāhuhu].’

While I understand the need to minimise others’ roles in Māori art history, given the singular linear genealogy they are trying to create and the authority they are contending for themselves, I would make the following observations:

Although I have spent my entire working life researching, lecturing, writing, curating and creating Māori art (I began studying fine arts and art history at tertiary in 1980) I do not consider myself an expert in this discipline. If this is the case then these two authors are certainly not experts in toi tāhuhu. I beleive one’s whole life is a fluid process of learning continuously. E rere ana taua awa. E pikopiko ana, e rere tonu te au no te matapuna ki te whanga me hoki mai i reira. Ko tēnei te huringa o te wai Māori.

Further, there are many different contributors to this field. Some are acknowledged in the book being discussed here and a number, both Māori and Pākehā, are purposefully not. Importantly, we are all contributing to an understanding of Māori art history. Is there consensus on all this research, writing, curating and professing? No. Does this lack of consensus really matter? Normally it shouldn’t but unfortunately in this little country yes it does actually matter. When there is only one full-time position devoted to Māori art history at a tertiary institution in New Zealand it is very tempting to assume control and authority over this discipline.

Over my decades of involvement with art history and toi tāhuhu ‘Māori art history’ I have watched many artists, authors, curators and educators, both Māori and Pākehā, make various claims about toi tāhuhu. This latest work is no different. However, when books make unsubstantiated claims that will have long-term negative consequences on those outside their clique then those assertions beg challenge. Koia nei te whakatara o te wā e rapua ana ki te pono ō ēnei mea hōhonu.

If there are stakeholders who feel confident in their understanding of taonga and tikanga and the assertion of indigenous parallels then maybe they need to open themselves up more to the study of western art and its history that so clearly has influenced toi Māori post-WWII. If there are those who only wish to see Māori art history through a Northern Hemisphere lens (and perhaps the South Pacific version of the same) then perhaps there is room for them to deepen their understanding of taha Māori. If there are those Māori art historians who are overly confident regarding their taha Māori they shouldn’t be! I don’t know of any Māori PhD graduates in Art History in Aotearoa who are native speakers. We all have work to do on our te reo, on strengthening ngā honohono ki tā mātou hapori e whakahōhonu ana taua matauranga, he whakapapa, he wānanga, he tikanga ā-iwi i a rohe i a rohe. E tautoko ana au e mātou. E ngā hoamahi e huihui nei, kia kaha, kia toa, kia manawanui e pā ana ki taua whakapātaritari.

Towards the end of my lecturing I remember a senior University of Auckland Māori colleague advising me I had had long enough (around a decade 1996-2006) in the job and it was time to let someone else have a go in the Māori art history position. Brutal advice but (nearly two decades on in the same Department of Art History) can my replacement take the same guidance? Perhaps it’s time to let someone else have a go and lets see if a fairer, less authoritarian assessment of toi tāhuhu can be offered.