It is an unusual thing as any researcher can tell, to feel you know a place with great familiarity through in-depth reading and research but when visiting that place for real, find that no amount of reading will ever compensate for actually standing there in person. That’s the reaction IRead more

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This week’s wearable continues on last week’s theme of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and hopefully encourages you all to bee supportive! Bee Supporters is the clever handi-work of Andi Regan,who seeks to transform and find beauty in the discarded and everyday. ‘The whole No 8 wire philosophy inspires me. IRead more

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Wendy Kaplan is Department Head and Curator, Decorative Arts and Design, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Wendy is a leading expert on late 19th to mid 20th-century design, and one of the co-curators of California Design, 1930–1965: Living in a Modern Way, which was recently onRead more

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How on earth would you feed a city of over 200,000 people when the land around you was a swampy lake? Seems like an impossible task, but the Aztec managed it by creating floating gardens known as chinampas, then they farmed them intensively. These ingenious creations were built up fromRead more

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‘There is a whole world inside me. I often dream of something deep and colourful which moves and which is very mysterious. There are many corners, strange places, folds and holes. I have an enormous need to express that world.’ Marjolein Dallinga I love the above quote from Marjolein Dallinga.Read more

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Tlaloc, Aztec God of Rain

This week you may have noticed a blue goggly eyed face with vicious fangs staring back at you. This is the face of Tláloc, the Aztec god of rain. In the form of a beautiful blue vessel recently flown in from Mexico, he is the face of a new exhibitionRead more

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One of the best things about working in the cultural sector is getting to meet amazing people. Dame Suzie Moncrieff, the founder of the World of WearableArt™, is just one of those people – gutsy, visionary and determind. This week we get to share her. On Saturday 21 September fromRead more

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Chilean curator Roberta Bacic is a keynote speaker at the Third International Visual Methods conference in Wellington hosted by Victoria University and Te Papa. We are fortunate to also have her speak on the fascinating and politically-significant stories of arpilleras.     Arpilleras – tapestries or quilts sewn by womenRead more

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Do you know where any of the locations in these photographs are? If so, please leave a comment in the section at the bottom of the post along with the image number. 1) Does this mural still exist? 2) Like the one above, this mural might have been painted over or the building knocked down… 3) ARead more

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Sixty years ago, Queen Elizabeth II is crowned (2 June 1953) Only selected officials were invited into Westminster Abbey to witness the formal coronation ceremony, so thousands of people lined the route of the coronation porcession in order to see the Queen. Robert Buhler’s lithograph (above) depicts part of theRead more

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  It took many hours of sorting, registration, taxonomy review, preparation and coordination, then 12 long sessions in the imaging lab.  Te Papa Science staff have now completed the online access for 2241 black & white engravings of plants collected on Captain Cook’s first voyage. The Te Papa Collection Online narratives about the Banks andRead more

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