Overview
A major acquisition in 2006 was Bill Culbert and Ralph Hotere's collaborative, site-specific sculptural installation VOID. This was commissioned from the artists and is permanently featured in the space known as the Void between Te Papa's level 2 Wellington foyer and the gallery on level 6.
Another important acquisition was the painting VEE (2006) by Shane Cotton. It is a dark, haunting work with a 'variously enlightening and dark surface reflecting and embedding tensions and undisclosed narratives'.
A characteristic landscape by Rata Lovell-Smith, a contemporary of Rita Angus and major figure of the Canterbury School of the 1930s, was gifted by the Friends of Te Papa. Spring in the foothills joins a number of other early regionalist paintings in the collection that express the newly emergent Pākehā sense of place and belonging of the 1920s and '30s.
Other notable acquisitions include fifteen photographs by Richard Collins and Max Oettli from the late 1960s and early '70s; The Buchan family by M T Woollaston; jewellery by Octavia Cook; Portrait of Arthur Lett-Haines by Frances Hodgkins; and a group of nine paintings and prints from the first half of the 20th century by artists such as Rhona Haszard, Grace Joel and Flora Scales.