Highly Respected Māori Artist Diane Prince Exhibiting Work At Hastings Art Gallery

An exhibition showcasing powerful and thought-provoking work by wahine Māori artist Diane Prince will open this weekend at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery.

Prince (Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Whātua and Ngāti Kahu) is a multidisciplinary artist living on the Kāpiti Coast. She is a painter, weaver, installation art practitioner, set designer and educator. The exhibition is being toured by Pātaka Art+Museum in Porirua and has previously been at The Suter Art Gallery in Nelson. The exhibition opens in Hastings this evening and is on until 14 February next year.

Curated by guest curator Gina Matchitt, Diane Prince: Activist Artist brings together a selection of works that assert the mana of Prince’s multimedia practice and foregrounds the close relationship between activism and art. The exhibition includes raranga (weaving), works on paper, and a multi-media installation with the artwork Flagging the future.

As part of Ngāti Whātua, Prince’s early involvement in Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Māori land rights activism began in the late 1970s, as a researcher at Takaparawhau/Bastion Pont. Over four decades, Prince has developed a practice that portrays the impacts of colonisation and the legacy of ongoing Māori resistance.

Prince has been part of major exhibitions of Māori art since the 1990s, but Diane Prince: Activist Artist is her first solo exhibition tour across public galleries.

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