Ana Iti (Te Rarawa and Pākehā) is the recipient of the Grace Butler Memorial Foundation Award at Ara in 2022, encompassing a $20,000 grant and three-month residency at Ara Art and Design.  

 Working with video, text, installations and sculpture her work explores and reconsiders Aotearoa’s histories, identities and the representation of Māori histories within the built environment, and the museum as an institution and its archives.  Plans for her residency comprise the publication of a print-run artist’s book that features hand-printed artwork, text and commissioned writing.  ‘The project will extend research I’ve been working on…. specifically a trio of videos produced over 2020-21 exploring the role of printmaking and publishing, within the circulation of Māori and women’s writing and ideas.’  The project will also reference artists’ books in the Christchurch Art Gallery by Ralph Hotere, Bill Manhire and Joanna Margaret Paul.

 Ana Iti’s work is held in a number of public institutions, including Te Papa Tongarewa and the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, and has featured in exhibitions that include Takoto at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, (2020), and Swallowing Geography at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery, (2021). 

The selection panel for the Grace Butler Award in 2022 are:  Rosie Ibbotson, senior lecturer in Art History and Theory at the University of Canterbury; Kim Lowe, artist, printmaker and senior lecturer at Ara Art and Design; and Felicity Milburn, lead curator at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.  The panel commented:   ‘Ana Iti’s work is compelling, relevant to current concerns, critical and thoughtful but also personal, poetic and highly engaging.’

The Grace Butler Memorial Foundation Award at Ara was established by artist Grace Butler’s daughter, Grace Adams (1923 – 2012) and the Grace Butler Memorial Foundation in remembrance of Grace Butler (1886 – 1962).  Over more than four decades she painted ‘plein-air’ at Arthur’s Pass and New Brighton, her painting making an important contribution to contemporary art in the 1930s.

 

 

• Ana Iti, Takoto, 2020, Toi Tū, Toi Ora, North Terrace, Auckland Art Gallery toi o Tāmaki, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, curated by Natasha Conland

For further information contact:

•  warrenfeeney@xtra.co.nz   PH: 022 176 9272