Art in Action

This week Mr Clark's Year 10 Art Class were treated to a tour of two of our city's cultural taonga - the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (DPAG) and the Hocken Collections.

On the back of recent lessons in Surrealist art, the boys were excited to discover that our own city galleries house works by artists with links to the European traditions they've been studying.

At the DPAG the boys were encouraged to find an artwork that spoke to them and really engage with it. It was incredible to see the diversity of the artworks that resonated and sparked their curiosity.

At the Hocken we were given rare and privileged access to the stacks in the Pictorial Collection, which house many thousands of artworks stored in regulated and temperature-controlled conditions. The visit was rounded off with a guided tour of last year's Frances Hodgkins Fellow Reece King's epic exhibition of modernist paintings.

For some of the boys in the group, this was the first time they'd visited an art gallery. Seeing art in the flesh, not just online or in a book, was more than just inspirational. In getting a behind-the-scenes look at how artworks are cared for, stored and deeply valued demonstrated to the boys just how vital visual art is to our cultural conversation, and how it connects us to our shared history.