Te Maori (sometimes Te Māori in modern sources) was a watershed exhibition of Māori art in 1984 (later continued to 1985, 1986 and 1987). It is notable as the first occasion on which Māori art had been exhibited by Māori, and also the first occasion on which Māori art was shown internationally as art. In retrospect it is seen as a milestone in the Māori Renaissance.
In the colonial period, many Māori objects, including art, domestic objects and human remains (particularly Mokomokai) were widely collected by explorers, missionaries and scientists and were lost to the communities which had created them; largely they were lost to large European collection institutions such as the London Science Museum[1] the Victoria and Albert Museum[2] and the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford.[citation needed] This alienation meant that Māori regarded many Pākeha (Western) cultural institutions with considerable skepticism and overcoming this skepticism to allow objects to be borrowed for exhibition made Te Maori a milestone.
The exhibition started at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) in New York on 10 September 1984. Part of the exhibition was carefully held practices and values guided by Māori tikanga. This included a dawn ceremony, traditional karakia, speeches in the Māori language, waiata and kapa haka. Mead described the effect at the prestigious institution of the Met, "It did much to make tikanga Māori more acceptable not only to the population at large of Aotearoa but, more importantly, among our own people."[4]
The exhibition was very well received, both at home and abroad.[8][9] The impact of the exhibition is described by the late museum ethnologist Robert Neich:
The effect of Te Māori has been so pervasive that its influence cannot be avoided. (Robert Neich 1985)[10]
^"Te Maori in New York". art-newzealand.com. 2011. Retrieved 3 October 2011. Douglas Newton, chairman of the Department of Primitive Art at the Met, had no doubt that the exhibition would be a great success. He assured me of this months before the opening. But even he was delighted with the response of the media, of the people of New York and of the art world in the United States. When the Te Maori cultural group performed at the American Museum of Natural History there was no doubt something had happened. The audience was already won over even before the performance began. What they wanted was to touch Maori culture and Maori people to learn more and more and more. They were reaching out to us in a way that is difficult to describe.
^Neich, Roger (2013). Tradition and change in Māori and Pacific art : essays. Clarke, Chanel,, Pereira, Pandora Fulimalo,, Prickett, Nigel,, Auckland War Memorial Museum. Auckland. p. 167. ISBN978-0-473-25872-6. OCLC870529690.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Further reading
Gathercole, Peter (2002). "'Te Maori' in the Longer View". In Herle, Anita; Stanley, Nick; Stevenson, Karen; Welsch, Robert L. (eds.). Pacific Art: Persistence, Change, and Meaning. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. pp. 271–279. ISBN0-8248-2556-X.
Mead, Sidney Moko, ed. (1984). Te Maori: Maori Art from New Zealand Collections. New York: Abrams. ISBN0-8109-1344-5.
