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Rosanna Raymond as Back Hand Maiden in the Greek and Roman galleries, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: Richard Wade
Museums are really theatres of political power, says Maia Nuku, curator of Oceania at one of the biggest: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Nuku (Ngāi Tai) is interested in the way museums can provide greater access and in the Big Apple that has meant creating a home for Māori and Pacific Island peoples and artists.
She does so following big footprints: the Met famously hosted the Māori-led Te Māori exhibition in 1984, changing the way we view museum practice.
Taonga from Oceania at The Metropolitan Museum Photo: supplied
At The Met, Maia looks after a collection of more than 2000 works of Pacific art; taonga from some 20,000 Islands and close to 1800 different cultures and language groups.
"Those galleries become like an island in New York for Pacific people when they come through," Maia says.
"It started me thinking about the agency of the artworks and the taonga and how they really were developed to be agents for relationships.
"If artworks have agency then they are subjects, they do have histories, they have biographies and they make their way into museums in all sorts of fascinating, complicated, contentious ways.
"We're living in a world which does want to reduce these discussions to quite binary, good and bad narratives and I think we really lose out on a lot of the richness of those histories.
"We need to do justice to the complexity and the nuance so that we can really understand ourselves, how we were centuries ago. And the collection is an archive of indigenous knowledge in that sense."
The first indigenous Pacific person to hold a curatorial position at The Met, her new book Oceania: The Shape of Time accompanies a world touring exhibition of work from the collection, while its wing in the building is being redeveloped.
Maia Nuku as a child in London. Photo: supplied
Hosting at The Met has also been inspired by Maia’s unusual upbringing: she was born in London to English and Māori parents, founding members of Ngāti Rānana, the vital London Māori Club.
"I do feel like I was really exposed to Maori culture over there, you know 1200 miles from here," she says.
"Being involved in those powhiri, it was a great way to immerse myself in the culture and understand that side of myself.
"And I guess I found my way into museum work because I became comfortable on that kind of threshold between two worlds in way, which some of us are born with.
Kea World Class Winner, Maia Nuku with Vice-Chancellor Professor Dawn Freshwater, Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland. Photo: supplied
Maia Nuku returns to Aotearoa regularly and was recently here to receive the 2023 Kea World Class New Zealand Supreme Award.