Big picture

The Big Picture, Hamish Keith’s 6 part series on New Zealand art and culture, starts 10.25pm this Sunday. You can read more about individual episodes here and listen to Hamish being interviewed about the series here.

Episode 1: The World Intrudes
The encounter between Able Tasman and Ngati Tumatakokiri in Golden Bay in 1642: the beginning of our history and the beginning of our art history.
Episode 2: Engaging with Difference
How Maori art responded positively to European impact and flourished with new technologies and new challenges.
Episode 3: Civilising
Maori art vanishes into museums and disappears behind a sea of red paint. Three European imports - none of them English - transform New Zealand art.
Episode 4: Reinventing Distance
After a promising start New Zealand culture takes a wrong turn. Pakeha New Zealand seizes on Maori imagery to define its identity and at the same time Maori are persuaded to give up their identity and become brown Pakeha.
Episode 5: In Search of the New
Colin McCahon's trip to the USA in 1958 produces a major work of art, The Northland Panels, which would change New Zealand art forever.
Episode 6: The Braided River
Art begins to break free from the empty stereotypes of "National Identity", "Bi-culturalism" and "Telling Our Stories".

Image: Murderer's Bay in 1642, from Abel Tasman's journal