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Seven decades celebrated in new He Waka Tuia exhibition

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He Waka Tuia Senior Curator: Exhibitions Gemma McDonald (left) and Manager Sarah Brown with some of the works in the Spring: What We’ve Kept exhibition.

The newest exhibition on display at He Waka Tuia will take visitors on a journey through the evolution of the visual arts, with works spanning seven decades.

Spring: What We Kept brought together 100 artworks first seen at the annual Spring exhibition held by the Invercargill Public Art Gallery (IPAG): tracing a remarkable story of artistry and community in Murihiku Southland.

He Waka Tuia manager Sarah Brown said the exhibition celebrated a tradition that began in 1951 at Anderson House, and had become a cornerstone of the IPAG calendar. Spring: What We Kept had been curated to represent the evolution of the works acquired by IPAG during the decades since the annual exhibition began.

“For more than 60 years, our annual Spring exhibition drew hundreds of entries from artists across the motu. The exhibition here at He Waka Tuia today reflects the stories of our artists, our community, and our country across more than half a century,” she said.

“Spring carries so many connotations. To all of us, it means renewal and growth, and it also means change. Art has the innate ability to reflect our society – the styles, the culture, and the deeply-rooted issues lurking beneath everything else – at any given point in time. It holds up the mirror, and shows us who we are.”

Since 1951, acquisitions from the annual exhibition had made up more than 10 percent of the gallery’s collection. The 100 works featured in Spring: What We Kept included award-winning works, invited artists, and selected entries whose artistic and cultural significance had cemented their place in the region’s public visual arts collection.

The exhibition’s history had continued through periods of change, too. Following the closure of Anderson House, the exhibition moved to City Gallery briefly, before a pause as IPAG focused on collection care and relocation to its current home at transitional art gallery and museum space, He Waka Tuia.

In 2024, IPAG and the Southland Art Society brought together the annual Spring exhibition and the ILT Art Awards, and created the collaborative ILT Murihiku Art Awards – subsequently reigniting the long-standing Southland tradition, Brown said.

“We are really excited to share this exhibition with our community. To have the opportunity to create what is essentially a capsule of our collective past, and give these works a new lease on life, encourages our manuhiri to consider how we have all grown, changed, and evolved in the past seven decades. It’s a journey we hope encourages visitors to not only appreciate the incredible works that call Invercargill home, but reflect on the changes that have shaped us,” she said.

The exhibition both acknowledged the creatives whose works had shaped New Zealand’s artistic landscape over the years, as well as the funders, donors, and benefactors whose generosity had helped to shape the public collection held by IPAG, she said.

Spring: What We Kept was now open. The exhibition would run at He Waka Tuia until Sunday 27 September.

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