Current Exhibition
Walking through every door available: 25 years of the BFA
Curated by Bena Jackson and Max Fleury
Featuring Liz Allan, Sandy Gibbs, Mike Ting, Elisabeth Pointon, Emerita Baik, Emiko Sheehan, Steph Arrowsmith, A.J Manaaki Hope, Miles Greville, and Siobhan Wooding
This year we are celebrating 25 years since the first students ventured into Massey University’s new Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Since the first semester, with little more than chairs and a slide projector, the programme has grown to occupy its own space within the contemporary art scene in Aotearoa. The 10 artists in this show reflect some of the diverse practices that Massey has helped to form. Their works are indicative of the interdisciplinary and experimental direction that emerged in 2001 and has remained central to the programme.
Curatorial text and list of works available HERE
Opening event 5.00 pm on Friday 17th July 2026.
Gallery Hours: M-F 12-4 PM, July 20th-31st.
Recent Exhibitions
He Kanohi Kitea - Exposure Exhibition
4 MFA Exhibitions in the Engine Room
Diana Adams, Rosa Wilson, Cerys Wiles, and Fiona Campbell
Read more on their projects HERE
Open from Sat 27th June - Sun 12th July
10-4pm daily
Performing Punctuation
Julieanna Preston and Anna Brown
Book Launch event Wednesday 17th of June 2026 at 5 PM, in association with Intellect Books (UK/US)
Exhibition on view Thurs-Fri 18th-19th June 10-3 PM
This book invites readers and performers to reimagine and transform the rules that shape language and identity. Performing Punctuation challenges the colonial legacy embedded in the English language’s use of punctuation.
Join us to celebrate the contributors, among them artists, performers, musicians, poets, designers, dancers, educators, literary scholars, architects, film makers, sound philosophers, and computer programmers who play humorously and tenaciously with the small but powerful marks that regulate, discipline, and structure how we write and speak.
Watch a conversation with the editors HERE
Julieanna Preston is a Professor of Spatial Practice at Toi Rauwharangi/College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Wellington, Aotearoa/ New Zealand. Her practice spans across architecture, art and philosophy, interior design, building construction, landscape gardening, material processes and performance writing. Julieanna has delivered live art performances and lectured on her creative and scholarly works in Austria, Australia, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Germany, New Zealand, Scotland, Sweden, The Netherlands, and the United States. For more info, see Julieanna’s website HERE
Anna Brown is an Aotearoa New Zealand-based design researcher, educator and practitioner. Working with visual artists, curators, editors and musicians, my work investigates through iterative processes, form, materials and typography how the vehicle of the book can animate and amplify the content it contains. Anna is a Professor at Massey University’s Toi Rauwharangi/College of Creative Arts where she has taught editorial design, typography, visual communication and courses about the future of the book. She is currently the Director of Toi Āria — Design for Public Good, a research unit harnessing design for positive social change. For more info, see Anna’s website HERE
Zines NZ: Punk to present
Bryce Galloway
Book Launch event Friday 22nd of May, 2026 at 5 PM, in association with Massey University Press.
Zines NZ (punk to present) is the first extensive history of zine making in Aotearoa. The book is an oral history based on interviews with 50 zine makers operating between 1980 and the present. The book also includes hundreds of photographs of zine covers and spreads.
Speakers will include founding publisher of Massey University Press Nicola Legat and College of Creative Arts staff member, artist, designer, and zinester Kerry Ann Lee. Books will be available for purchase with the kind participation of Unity Books Wellington. An exhibition of related images with zines from Massey students will be open 23rd-29th May.
Read an excerpt from Zines NZ HERE
Listen to an interview with Bryce on RNZ HERE
Bryce Galloway is a lecturer at Whiti o Rehua School of Art, Massey University and a transdisciplinary artist with an enduring interest in zines. Galloway is the author of the long-running perzine Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People. He has co-curated zine exhibitions in Aotearoa and Germany. He’s also a committee member of both Wellington Zinefest and Kirikiriroa Hamilton Zinefest (which he instigated in 2014 alongside Kim Paton). Galloway is also one half of the band Wendyhouse and an occasional video artist. Galloway was born in Kirikiriroa in 1966 but has lived in Te Whanganui-a-Tara since 1993. He and his wife Jakki live in Miramar and have two adult daughters.
Tōwai: Between Forest, Mountains, and Ocean
Curated by Regan Balzer and Rubén Díaz
8-19 May 2026
Opening 7th May 2026 at 5 PM, please gather in foyer of Te Ara Hihiko (Block 12), nearby the gallery.
Bringing together Māori artists and the Sapara nation (from the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon).
“Knowledge does not remain fixed in objects, it circulates through the room as vibration, as rhythm, as fiber, animating the space as a living presence. The installation breathes as territory, where voices, memories and relations unfold and remain active.“ — Rubén Díaz
Read the curatorial text by Regan Balzer and Rubén Darío Díaz Chávez HERE
And catalogue of works and further writing HERE
Artists exhibiting:
Rubén Díaz, Kura Puke, Kurt Smith-Komene, Stuart Foster, Horomona Horo, Israel Randell, Regan Balzer, Matt Tini, Darío Santi, Ripanu, Jessica Santi, Sapara people, Doménica Landin, José Saca, Layqa Nuna Yawar, Polett Zapata, and Mikaela Montenegro
Camille Bleu-Valentin
Polynésiaphonia
14-24 April
Closing 23rd April 2026 at 5 PM
Writing by the artist HERE
Based in Nantes, Camille Bleu-Valentin (b. 1995, Paris) is a French interdisciplinary artist whose practice weaves together colonial histories, material memory, and geopolitical urgency. Descended from both colonisers and colonised (a freed enslaved woman and a French soldier in Algeria), her work navigates these inherited contradictions through sculpture, performance, installation, and printmaking. Ephemeral materials such as cast sugar, milk biotextile, and pyrotechnics become sites for reckoning with the Atlantic slave trade, migration, and ongoing conflict.
She is currently in residence at Te Whare Hēra / Massey University, Wellington, where she presents Polynésiaphonia, a solo exhibition rooted in her childhood years spent in New Caledonia, with the support of the French Embassy in Aotearoa New Zealand.
A graduate of the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nantes (DNSEP, 2018), she has exhibited and held residencies across Europe, West Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia. Her recent projects include Chini Ya Ardhi (Vichwa Gallery, Goma, 2025), Paré! (Université d'Angers, 2025), and Sous la Surface (Galerie Hors Champ, 2024). She was awarded a public art commission for Lycée Colette Bret, Aizenay (2025), and was a finalist for the Prix de la Monnaie de Paris and Prix ICART Artistik Rezo (2025).
For more on Camille’s practice see her website
Scorched Earth
Opening 12th March 2026 at 5.30 PM
13-27 March
Essay by artist Holly Walker here
Based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Will Bennett (b. 1994, Ngāmotu New Plymouth) is a Pākehā artist whose vivid, dreamlike paintings merge histories, mythologies, and personal memory. Drawing on figures from Anglo-Saxon legend and the tuna of Aotearoa’s waterways, his work folds ancestry and place into layered imagery that hovers between the familiar and the otherworldly. Will is a BFA Honours alum of Whiti o Rehua School of Art. His recent exhibitions include Community (Envy, 2023), Fauxktales(Twentysix, 2023), The Bush Points Back(Kingsroy, 2022), and Formations (Webbs, 2024). He was a finalist in the Adam Portrait Award (New Zealand Portrait Gallery, 2014)
Will Bennett
Peter Simpson
Te mātauranga o te Pākehā
Opening 26th Feb 2026 at 5 PM'
Peter Simpson (Ngāti Maniapoto, Waikato-Tainui, Ngāti Pāoa, Ngāti Tamaterā, Pākehā) is a Māori artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. His recent exhibitions include Three Approaches, Three Rooms, Gus Fisher Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau (2024); from elsewhere, with Newell Harry, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau, (2024); He Rāwaho, with George Watson, Coastal Signs, Tāmaki Makaurau (2023); Literature’s Arrival to the Pacific, Blue Oyster Project Space, Ōtepoti (2021).
Still image; Painting’s History, Painting’s Future (2024)
Essay by the artist here