A long tapa cloth with patterns on most of it and a line of farm symbols, birds, anchors, and religious icons along the top.

Robin White: Artist

Dame Robin White (Ngāti Awa, Pākehā) is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most loved living contemporary artists. For over fifty years, Robin White has portrayed people and their environments in Aotearoa New Zealand, Kiribati, Fiji, Tonga, and beyond.

A painting of a wooden building with a green flat-bed truck parked outside. The truck has the word Mangaweka on the door.

Touring Exhibition – Robin White: Tuituia | Something Is Happening Here

More than 50 works from across Dame Robin White’s 50-year career will form what the artist describes as a ‘family reunion’, bringing together works from 22 galleries and living rooms across the country.

TOURING

2025–2027

Exhibition Ngā whakaaturanga

Robin White: Something Is Happening Here

Closed

4 Jun – 18 Sep 2022

Exhibition Ngā whakaaturanga

Robin White: Something is Happening Here

Major survey of the 50-year career of one of New Zealand’s best-loved artists, Robin White.

Robin White: author biographies and interview

Robin White: Something is happening Here is the first book to be devoted to Robin White’s art in 40 years. Here, the authors reflect on working with Robin for the book and accompanying exhibition.

Robin White’s New Angel series

Working in close collaboration with the women at the Te Itoiningaina Catholic Women’s Training Centre. Robin White produced this series of mats made with leaves of the pandanus, when she was living in Kiribati.

Woodcut print of a women washing her clothes

Dame Robin White in our collections

Explore artworks spanning White’s career – from early paintings to recent collaborative tapa (bark cloth) portraying people and their environments in Aotearoa New Zealand, Kiribati, Fiji, Tonga, and beyond.

A brown and white patterned masi or tapa cloth

Watch: Robin White – The making of ‘That Vase’

In 2019, Dame Robin White invited a small team from Te Papa to visit her on location in Lautoka Fiji as she completed That Vase, a masi (Fijian tapa) made with her collaborator Tamari Cabeikanacea.

Gleanings from the workshop of the unknown – timeline

In this work, hieroglyphs, wave upon wave of repeating patterns on tapa, and lines from a poem by Pablo Neruda form her response to the island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), which she visited in 2011 in support of a proposed ocean sanctuary.