Small towns and big visions: Robin White retrospective soon to open at Waikato Museum

Thursday, 23 July 2026

Robin White’s oil-on-canvas work titled Fish and Chips, Maketu, was painted in 1975 and is from the collection at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. It is one of the most-recognisable of her creations.

Iconic scenes of small town life in New Zealand in the 1970s - as captured by one of New Zealand’s greatest visual biographers - will soon be seen on walls in Hamilton.

Te Whare Taonga o Waikato Museum and Gallery is hosting a travelling exhibition of works by Dame Robin White, titled Tuituia: Something is Happening Here.

White (Ngāti Awa, Pākehā) is one of New Zealand’s best-known artists. Her focus on everyday life, relationships and environment informed her signature style of screen prints, which employed crisp, rhythmic outlines, strong light, and flat blocks of colours.

Robin White pictured in 2022, when the major exhibition of her works at Te Papa was about to open.

She has also frequently made use of the iconic Buzzy Bee toys in a number of her artworks.

The pieces featured in this exhibition were taken from a landmark 2022 retrospective, collated from numerous private collections by staff at Te Papa and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki - which were the first venues to show them.

They include her portraits and landscapes from the 1970s, alongside later collaborative works made with artists and communities across the Pacific and Aotearoa.

Another of Robin White’s best-known artworks is this 1978 portrait titled Sam Hunt at the Portobello Pub.

Born in Te Puke in 1946, White grew up in Epsom, Auckland and completed a Diploma of Fine Arts at the Elam School of Fine Arts, where her tutors included Colin McCahon.

During her long career she has called Paremata, the Otago Peninsula, and the island of Tarawa in Kiribati, home and these places are among those depicted in her art. She was made a dame in 2017 for her contribution to the arts.

Mangaweka is a 1973 oil-on-canvas by Robin White that is part of the collection at Te Papa.

While she may not be a household name like McCahon, Rita Angus, Ralph Hotere or Toss Woollaston - and is possibly better known in Australia than New Zealand - White has cemented her own place in the pantheon on New Zealand artists.

An artwork made by Robin White in collaboration with Ruha Fifita and Keiko Limuraat, seen here on display in Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, that reflects changes in her art-making style.

The exhibition’s title, Tuituia, refers to notions of continuity and the act of binding things together.

Throughout her career, the now-80-year-old has established a theme in her works that connected art, people, and places, and her works were shaped as much by community and collaboration as by her own individual practices.

She and her husband departed New Zealand for Kiribati in the mid-1980s, and they lived there for 17 years before eventually returning to New Zealand. She now calls Masterton home.

It was while living on the tiny Pacific Atoll that she switched her art style and medium from painting and screen-printing to large-scale woodcut prints on Japanese paper - a change that initially perplexed the art-buying public who had grown used to her paintings of mountains, buildings and Buzzy Bees.

At the time, she said she had “become attracted to the basic nature of printmaking, which is the idea of the transferred image”.

“There is a sense of distancing which I like. It is not like the personal signature that painting is … I have found that it goes well with my personality and environment.”

Tuituia opens at the museum on August 1 and will run until November 11. Entry is free.