Raising Boys at Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery brings together three of New Zealand's leading contemporary potters with their close mentors and teachers into a colourful family portrait. Andy Kingston, Paul Maseyk and Martin Poppelwell are three artists who challenge the perception of clay within New Zealand art. Their predecessors, Ross Mitchell-Anyon and Richard Parker, are key artists in the progression of New Zealand ceramics and important artists in their own right. Raising Boys at Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery brings together three of New Zealand's leading contemporary potters with their close mentors and teachers into a colourful family portrait. Andy Kingston, Paul Maseyk and Martin Poppelwell are three artists who challenge the perception of clay within New Zealand art. Their predecessors, Ross Mitchell-Anyon and Richard Parker, are key artists in the progression of New Zealand ceramics and important artists in their own right.Raising Boys will be accompanied by a publication examining the connections between these five artists, their critical context and the historic precedents of ceramics in New Zealand education.

The exhibition draws all five artists into a colourful family portrait - a picture of a tenacious, irreverent and dynamic group who are together changing the face of contemporary New Zealand ceramics.

Hawke's Bay has had a long and rich association with innovative New Zealand craft and design and been home to pioneering craft artists and innovators of contemporary object making. So it is with much pleasure that Hawke's Bay Museum and Art Gallery is able to feature a new exhibition which brings together some of the most challenging and cutting-edge contemporary ceramics being made in New Zealand - some never before exhibited in this region.

The exhibition will also be supported by a Symposium held at HBMAG between the 17th and 19th October 2008, which will challenge its audience to think about the position of the contemporary craft/object artist in New Zealand. Full details about this event will be available from HBMAG.

Raising Boys
Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery
Andy Kingston, Paul Maseyk, Ross Mitchell-Anyon, Richard Parker and Martin Poppelwell
1st August - 16th November 2008

The Raising Boys publication and Symposium are made possible through the generous support of Creative New Zealand.

03/08/08