Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art
Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis, with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki
Auckland University Press/University of Chicago Press
Oceanic art has inspired a vast literature. Since the early 20th century, hundreds of catalogues and monographs have highlighted the collections of museums, explored genres and traditions and, more recently, celebrated contemporary practice. The achievement of Toi Te Mana (which roughly translates as ‘arts of power’) is of another order altogether. Its subtitle points to its distinctiveness. This is both a work grounded in and animated by Māori concepts – of time, place, people and valuables – and the outcome of sophisticated art-historical research, which deftly mobilises the discipline’s foundational methods and the feminist and postcolonial perspectives that have challenged the field.
The book promises and delivers a survey of core practices and mediums over time: sculpture, architecture, textiles, rock art and body art. Its accounts of colonialism and innovation, via an early Māori turn towards figurative painting, work on paper and uses of iron, will surprise and intrigue those who only know this great world art tradition through displays in northern hemisphere museums. Chapters on Māori modernists from the 1950s set the scene for contemporary movements since the 1980s and the recent success of Māori artists at the Venice Biennale and across major international museums.
Toi Te Mana is remarkable not only for its lucid broader history but also for fascinating detail regarding specific works, images and histories, and even of quirks such as notable fakes. This is a social and cultural history, yet one consistently attentive to art and artists. The book is dedicated to the scholar, curator and museum leader Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (1943–2014), who contributed to the publication’s framing and to its writing up to the time of his death. Jonathan was deeply knowledgeable, imaginative and generous: these too are the qualities of this magisterial volume.
Nicholas Thomas, director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, and co-curator of ‘Oceania’ at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, 2018–19.
