PACIFIC SUPERHEROES

Here we go PACIFIC SUPERHEROES, cause it makes us stronger we always are supporting urban pacific art up in here!!! So check, check, check it out for pplz who know their game!!! Mauri ora!!!

‘Auckland-based curator Giles Peterson has launched a new MySpace website under the title ‘Pacific Art’ - with images and slideshows of exhibitions, reviews, and magazine articles from his fifteen-year curating career. It’s another sign that social networking sites are now being used more creatively and efficiently to reach new audiences of art-goers. Giles’ site on MySpace is not his first venture to take contemporary art online. The new ‘Pacific Art’ site complements his standalone website projects, ‘Urban Pacific’ and ‘pacificart’, the latter having had over 19,000 hits since 2001.

Art exhibitions and resources are not always widely available or accessible and it can be a challenge to keep distributing information to the right people. “I believe in speaking to new generations of young artists and designers,” explains Giles. You can catch Giles on YouTube discussing the ‘Urban Pacific’ exhibition, a project he curated for the Auckland Festival AK07, which has won national and international attention.

The ‘Urban Pacific’ catalogue, which won a bronze award in the 2007 Best Awards from the Designers Institute of New Zealand, is available online (at www.urbanpacific.co.nz) or more conventionally, at Parsons Bookshop Auckland. Artwork from the catalogue can also be seen at the new Zealand designers institute website (www.dinz.org.nz) where it features as part of a best New Zealand design commemorative look book . Giles also made sure that the ‘Urban Pacific’ website had a matching high-calibre standard: its designer Jenny Fraser currently has work in the online exhibition in the Sydney Biennale.

Peterson has recently returned from Samoa where he gave a lecture on Arts Management to students at the National University of Samoa. And how do you find out about happened where and when? Well, of course, photos from his Samoa trip can be viewed on Giles’ Bebo and Facebook sites.

Website links:

MySpace: www.myspace.com/pacificart

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN7otFtjlEg

Bebo: www.bebo.com/giles36

About Giles Peterson: South Auckland curator and lecturer Giles Peterson was born in Papua New Guinea and has devoted the last decade, and over 40 exhibitions, to bringing the work of Pacific Rim artists and designers to a wider public (see www.pacificart.co.nz). He regards the exhibitions he curates as catalysts and markers of social change, providing exhibition opportunities in which the artist’s voice is given primacy. Peterson is considered a leading authority on contemporary Pacific art, and has had is curatorial work reviewed in national and international art journals and magazines.

Career highlights include: Emerging into the Light (1995); Pacific Dragons – Art of Protest & Promise (1996); Plumes of Paradise (1997); By Design (1998); Fireworks (1998), Heart of the Niu (1998); Ring of Fire (1999); Body Talk (1999); Island Crossings (2000) the first exhibition of Contemporary Maori and Pacific art to tour to Australia; a ten city New Zealand museum tour of the exhibition Mauri Ora! – New work by Robyn Kahukiwa (2001-2003); Urban Pacific (2007) for the Auckland Festival AK07 (www.urbanpacific.co.nz) ; and Longitude (2007) at the Art Studio in Rarotonga for the Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust.

Peterson lectures in Contemporary New Zealand and Pacific Art and Design, Fashion Theory and Arts Marketing at Whitecliffe College of Art and Design in Auckland and contributes to journals such as Art New Zealand, and the Art Asia Pacific Quarterly (New York) and has written for the Encyclopaedia of World Dress, for Berg Publishing Press Oxford, England, forthcoming 2010).

He has also presented papers at Cambridge University, the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, and the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris, and has judged the Style Pasifika Festival fashion event, Auckland and the current 2008 Wax – Women’s Art exhibition – National Art Awards, Gisborne, which raises money for the Eastland Breast Cancer Trust.

He has given professional practice workshops to young artists and designers for organisations like the Tautai Pacific Trust, Auckland, spoken to arts, community and industry groups throughout the Pacific, and recently gave a lecture on Arts marketing at the National University of Samoa, in Apia.

In 2009 he will co–chair and speak on a panel on Urban Pacific Art at the CAA 2009 Conference in Los Angeles for the Pacific Art Association, address students at The University of California, Santa Cruz, as well as give a public lecture on Contemporary Pacific Art going global at the De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, in San Francisco.’

Hi 5 Giles!