Hawke’s Bay Art Review Exhibition and Gala Opening

Join us on Friday 3 September for the Gala Opening of this year's Hawke's Bay Art Review. It will be a fabulous night with light, where our Guest Selector and Curator Tyson Campbell will award the Gordon Harris Premier Award of $1000 plus six Highly Commended Awards.

The Hawke’s Bay Art Review is a selected exhibition showcasing art excellence in Hawke’s Bay, revived as a biennial competition by Creative Arts Napier in 2017.

This year local emerging and established artists display their work - in painting and drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography, multi-media, design, textiles and ceramics from artists throughout New Zealand, who have close connections to Hawke’s Bay.

CAN is delighted that Tyson Campbell has kindly agreed to be the selector for the 2021 Hawke’s Bay Art Review. For the past three years Tyson has worked as an artist, writer, community facilitator and independent curator based in Naarm Melbourne and Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Over the last two years, through his involvement with Blak Dot gallery, TCB art inc, and Artspace Aotearoa, Tyson developed an emerging curatorial practice that centres on contemporary Indigenous artistic practices.

‘I have taken the initiative to elevate world-Indigenous kinship ties from the position of being Māori: Critical Indigenous studies is at the core of what I do. As an active and engaged member of cross- cultural discourse that emerges between the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand contexts, I believe my perspective, and lived-experience have a relationship to all disciplines of knowledge that enact themselves on colonised territories.’

Tyson’s current work focuses on Indigenous strategies toward shifting institutional structures and how culturally grounded and communitarian ways of knowing – conversational, celebratory, and respectful kanohi-kitea – can initiate change within such settings.

Tyson is currently working at Artspace Aotearoa in Auckland;

'We are incredibly excited to have Tyson on board and to be able to open a two way street of institutional and personal experiences, dialogues and exchanges departing from viewpoints of indigeneity, internationality and a straightforward human approach that Tyson advocates for. Obviously in these times it is crucial for these opportunities to exist and the whole team is looking very much forward to work with Tyson this year' – Remco de Blaaij, Artspace Aotearoa Director.