Page 262 - Constructing Craft

Barriers

Barriers to Māori craftspeople being accepted into Pākehā-dominated art/craft

institutions could be implemented by the institutions or self-imposed. Only rarely did
public art galleries make attempts to reach out to a Māori audience or deal with

Māori issues. The director of the Manawatu Art Gallery in the 1970s, Luit Bieringa,
observed that:

People like Para Matchitt who were the path breakers between
contemporary and traditional art were not evident at all, they
weren’t visible. People are invisible if nobody writes about them
and nobody sees their work. The structures were driven by
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Pakeha, ...

Māori were aware of Māori artists and craftspeople but because gallery audiences

were largely Pākehā the New Zealand public seemed unaware of what was going

on in the world of Māori craft.

Māori craftspeople might also refuse to embrace new cultural developments if they
were not comfortable with them. For instance, some Māori women were convinced

that cultural feminism was largely a white and middle-class distraction that achieved
little for them. In the mid-1980s, just as many Pākehā women believed that the

women’s art movement had ‘begun to “arrive”’, some Māori women set out to
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discover their own identity. Similarly, some Māori men could not relate to Pākehā
ideas that they perceived to be based on colonialist concepts of art.

Commercialisation

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The increasing demand by Māori for recognition of rangatiratanga that saw the
passing of the Treaty of Waitangi Act in 1975 encouraged an economic renaissance

as Māori tried to gain greater control, not only of their cultural heritage, but also their
financial future. Moves to achieve this gained both government and private sector

support and Māori craft was a factor in this development. In 1983, Kara Puketapu,
the Secretary of the Department of Māori Affairs, commissioned a report by Richard

Hovis, an American consultant, to investigate business opportunities for Māori. The

Hovis Report, Maoritanga and the American Retail Marketplace, recommended
taking a showcase of ‘quality products’ to the United States to obtain orders from
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prestigious department stores such as Bloomingdales. A private company called

Constructing Craft