Robyn Kahukiwa, a Māori painter who became one of the most famous artists in Aotearoa New Zealand, died of an illness at 86 in a Wellington hospital on Friday. Her death was announced on Facebook by her family.
Her family wrote that she died with “her kaitiaki near, wrapped in the korowai of aroha and pouritanga of our whānau.”
Kahukiwa’s paintings gave a visual language to the daily realities of modern Māori life. Frequently focusing specifically on women, she powerfully upheld the rights of Indigenous people, whose perspectives have often been downplayed or outright denied in Aotearoa New Zealand.
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“The reality of Māori life has got to be put by me on canvas, because I have to think about it myself—that’s how I can deal with it,” she told the Auckland Art Gallery in 2014.
She frequently took up colonialism, rebutting myths about the history of Aotearoa New Zealand in the process. In her 2019 watercolor Monument, for example, she depicted a group of people staring at a statue of James Cook, the British explorer who is commonly credited with having “discovered” New Zealand. But whereas most statues of him are celebratory, the one painted by Kahukiwa is not: Cook is shown here raising a rifle to a pile of Māori people, some of whom are already dead.
“In Kahukiwa’s Monument, the fictions that shroud colonial histories are removed,” wrote curator Cameron Ah Loo-Matamua in Aotearoa Art News. “She presents Cook’s arrival as it really was, unequivocal in her depiction of him as a murderously violent colonialist.”
Kahukiwa achieved acclaim in Aotearoa New Zealand, but international recognition has followed only recently. In 2023, she was included by curator Hoor Al-Qasimi in the Sharjah Biennial, whose concept that year was conceived by Okwui Enwezor prior to his passing. On Instagram this week, Al-Qasimi called Kahukiwa “one of the most brilliant painters of our time.”
Robyn Fletcher Crenshaw was born in 1938 in Sydney. Her mother was Māori, of Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Ngāti Hau, Ngāti Konohi and Te Whānau a Ruataupare descent. In 1965, she married Dooley Pera Kahukiwa, of Ngāti Whakaue and Te Arawa.
Robyn Kahukiwa.
Courtesy family of Robyn Kahukiwa.
When she was 5, her family moved to Adelaide. Though her parents were “not well off,” as she would later say, they managed to buy her art supplies on special occasions. She recalled making her first oil painting at age 13 in her bedroom.
She moved to New Zealand in 1959, at age 19, and would remain there for much of her career. After she married Dooley Pera Kahukiwa, she and her husband raised a family in state housing in Wellington, an experience which raised within her a social consciousness. “The Maori she focused on—factory workers, gang members, young mothers with young children—wrestle with their marginal status and perhaps with their ontological status too,” wrote David Eggleton in Art New Zealand, of her early paintings. “Gauguin’s guiding hand is evident, but so is that of Nga Tamatoa, local Black Power.”
Her most famous series, “Wāhine Toa,” was produced in the early ’80s. Its eight paintings feature radiant images of women that she placed at the center of Māori life. Muriranga-Whenua (1983), for example, depicts a goddess holding out a glowing hand with a jawbone in its palm. She emerges from the darkness, shining a light on the Māori hero Māui, who can be seen crouching beneath.
The “Wāhine Toa” works gained national fame in Aotearoa New Zealand after they were printed in a 1984 book by Patricia Grace and toured by museums such as the Christchurch Art Gallery. These paintings are perceived as being so important that in 2024, when the New Zealand Portrait Gallery organized a Kahukiwa survey, the museum called for a national search for works in the series that its curators could not find. Some pieces from the series also figured in the 2023 Sharjah Biennial.
Robyn Kahukiwa, Hinetītama, 1980.
Collection of Te Manawa Art Society, Palmerston North, New Zealand
Recent works by Kahukiwa took the form of sprawling allegories that took up an array of historical events and art-historical references. Her 2012 painting War borrowed figures from Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), redirecting the Spanish artist’s painting so that it now spoke to the present situation of the Māori people. Prominently featured in one portion of Kahukiwa’s painting is a quotation from a speech by the Māori activist and politician Hone Harawira: “We are in a war for the future of our children.”
She considered her art a form of survival. “We have never been assimilated despite many attempts by successive governments to make Māori and Pākehā one people,” she once said. “Today’s Māori are living proof of the continuum of whakapapa, the power of our achievements and the survival of an intact, dynamic culture.”
