Simpson Grierson wins Creative NZ Award

25 August 2005

Simpson Grierson wins Creative New Zealand Award for Bravery 2005 at The National Business Review Awards for Sponsorship of the Arts

First time award won by same business two years in a row

Simpson Grierson has won the 2005 Creative New Zealand Award for Bravery at the National Business Review Awards for Sponsorship of the Arts for its support of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tàmaki exhibition, Mixed-Up Childhood.

The annual Creative New Zealand Award for Bravery, presented last night at the Auckland Town Hall, is about recognising and encouraging arts and business partnerships that are visionary and involve elements of risk.

Leading commercial law firm Simpson Grierson also won last year's Creative New
Zealand Award for Bravery for its sponsorship of the 2nd Auckland Triennial: Public/Private Tumatanui Tumatatiti at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tàmaki. It is the first time this award has been won by the same business two years in a row.

Peter Biggs, Chair of Creative New Zealand, says: "Winning this award two years in a row is testament to the way in which Simpson Grierson continues to be bold and visionary in its arts sponsorship. Mixed-Up Childhood and its sponsorship by Simpson Grierson capture the essence of the Creative New Zealand Award for Bravery - vision and the courage to embrace risk."

This year's judges of the National Business Review Awards for Sponsorship of the Arts were Barry Colman, Publisher of NBR, and arts patrons Jenny Gibbs, Lady Adrienne Stewart, Don Turkington and Michael Hill.

The judges described Simpson Grierson's sponsorship of Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tàmaki as "a long-term sponsorship relationship that is becoming bolder and more effective over time, differentiating the law firm Simpson Grierson from its competition".

Mixed-Up Childhood depicted childhood in a challenging and provocative way. The exhibition considered the way childhood is represented and revisited in the work of more than 20 international artists, including Sally Mann from the United States, Grayson Perry and the Chapman brothers from Britain, and Yvonne Todd, Sima Urale and Gregor Nicholas from New Zealand.

Curators Robert Leonard and Janita Craw wanted to present a collision of contrasting takes on childhood. They described Mixed-Up Childhood as "a show for grown-ups. It's about how we understand childhood retrospectively; how, as adults, we reverse engineer our childhoods from our memories and concerns, and the things that get lost and found in the process."

The Creative New Zealand Award for Bravery is one of three annual awards that Creative New Zealand supports to acknowledge the contribution that other sectors make to the arts sector. It also sponsors the Creative Places Awards to recognise local government's critical involvement in the arts and the arts journalism categories of the Qantas Media Awards.

ENDS

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