THE ARTS OF MAORI CHILDREN

Rights Information
Year
1962
Reference
F22404
Media type
Moving image
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Rights Information
Year
1962
Reference
F22404
Media type
Moving image
Place of production
New Zealand/Aotearoa
Categories
Short
Duration
00:17:31
Production company
Ramai Hayward
Taonga Māori Collection
Yes
Credits
Director: Rudall Hayward
Photography: Rudall Hayward
Producer: Ramai Hayward
Narrator: Harry Dansey

A look at the renaissance of Māori art.

Para Matchitt teaches Māori Art practice at Kāwhia Primary School.

Whai-a-te-motu whare in Ruatāhuna.

Arnold Wilson teaches at Bay of Islands College.

Selwyn Wilson teaches at Northland College.

A visit to Whakarewarewa Primary School to look at performing arts including poi, tītōrea and haka.

This item looks at the Northland Art Project instigated by Gordon Tovey who was the first supervisor of art and craft for the Department of Education in Wellington. Tovey’s charismatic style of leadership inspired a national network of specialists who transformed drab schools into environments ablaze with life and colour. Given full support by C. E. Beeby, the director of education, Tovey revolutionised art teaching within New Zealand and the South Pacific. By the mid 1950s his northern Māori project had proved the worth of incorporating Māori legends, craft and song into the general curriculum, and in 1959 he published Art and craft for the South Pacific.

Tovey saw vitality in the art of Māori, and shared with them a reverence for the past and a belief in the importance of mythology. His deep respect and affinity with Māori, as witnessed by a landmark course on arts and craft at Ruatōria in March 1960, resulted in his publication, The arts of the Māori (1961), being issued to every school. By the mid 1960s, despite controversy, he ensured New Zealand teachers and children were aware of and were participating in their bicultural heritage for the first time. Influenced by Tovey to develop their own creativity, many of his students, such as Cliff Whiting, Para Matchitt and Ralph Hotere, became leading artists and craftspeople.