Welcome to the 2026 Monica Brewster Evening Speaker Series — a year shaped by visionaries who remind us that dreaming is both a personal act and a collective experience.
Launched in 1999, Monica Brewster Evenings have been a fixture of Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre ever since. The monthly talk format has brought a visionary array of leading local, national, and international artists and cultural thinkers to Ngāmotu.
This year, we’re thinking about visionary dreams not as distant ideals, but as layered conversations: shaped by place, ancestry, lived experience, and the work of imagining otherwise.
Each speaker brings a distinct perspective on what emerges when communities, artists, thinkers, and leaders choose to dream with clarity, courage, and care. Maria Lind invites us to consider what it means to ‘dig where we stand’ and to understand creative practice through the ground it grows from; Tusiata Avia shows us how truth-telling, poetry, and performance can unsettle power and carve space for vulnerability; Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa opens a window onto the Moana as a site of deep history and visionary future-making; Vince Ropitini demonstrates how design guided by mātauranga Māori can carry ancestral narratives into global contexts and Leki Jackson-Bourke with the Lalaga Youth Ambassadors reveal how rangatahi dreams can reshape regional, cultural, and artistic imaginaries.
Across the series, audiences are invited to consider how dreaming can be relational, grounded, and deeply local — as well as expansive enough to hold global entanglements.
As we gather for conversations that illuminate what becomes possible when we listen to where we stand, and to one another - Join us!
Maria Lind
Tuesday 10 March
What does it mean to ‘dig where you stand’?
Join us for the first 2026 Monica Brewster evening as we welcome internationally acclaimed curator, writer and educator Maria Lind, visiting from the Swedish Arctic. As Director of the Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna, Lind works with indigenous Sámi territories and is celebrated for her experimental, place-based approaches to art and education. Her practice invites us to consider how creativity is shaped by the places we call home. For Aotearoa audiences, and for Taranaki in particular, this is a rare opportunity to engage with lobal perspectives on grounded, responsive, and locally rooted work.
Together, we are invited to consider what it might mean, in our region, to 'dig where we stand.
Tusiata Avia
Tuesday 14 April
How can public discourse, poetry, and performance unsettle power and reshape what we think we know?
Join award-winning poet, performer, and author Tusiata Avia for an intimate conversation about art, identity and the power of words to unsettle and transform. Renowned for her fearless dismantling of colonial narratives and electrifying stage presence, Avia is one of Aotearoa's most influential literary voices. She will introduce her latest poetry collection Giving Birth to My Father (2005), her most vulnerable yet - while reflecting on grief, belonging, and writing through turbulence.
From the global success of Wild Dogs Under My Skirt to the controversy sparked by The Savage Coloniser Book (2020), Avia's practice asks why truth-telling matters now more than ever. Don't miss this rare chance to hear from an artist who continues to challenge, provoke and inspire.
Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa
Tuesday 12 May
“When we reflect on New Zealand and the sea, we might then remember that this ‘sea’ is part of the Moana: a cultured ocean of stories and history,” from An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays, 2024 Damon Salesa.
Spend an evening with award-winning author and AUT Vice Chancellor Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa, exploring Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa- the Pacific Ocean, as a space of deep history and visionary possibility. Drawing from his recent writing, Salesa reflects on how relationships between Aotearoa and its Pacific neighbours have been made, unmade and imagined anew and how these currents shape identity, belonging, and community today.
For Taranaki audiences, this offers a chance to consider what it means to live on the edge of the Moana, and how Pacific perspectives can illuminate our responsibilities and opportunities in a rapidly changing region.
Vince Ropitini
Tuesday 9 June
What happens when design is led by a Te Ao Māori worldview?
Award-winning emerging fashion design Vince Ropitini (Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāruahinerangi me Whakatōhea) explores how Te Ao Māori worldview shapes contemporary fashion both locally and globally. Born and raised in Taranaki, and now based in Naarm (Melbourne), Ropitini is redefining what it means for Māori design to stand proudly on international stages. His debut collection, The Art of Passive Resistance (2023), boldly centred Parihaka's lived histories and strength in garments that fuse traditional dye techniques with innovative silhouettes. As he develops his next collection, Ropitini continues to push boundaries, imagining fashion as a vessel for cultural narratives and intergenerational resilience.
From a Taranaki perspective, Ropitini's journey offers a powerful example of how local histories can generate world-relevant creative futures.
Leki Jackson-Bourke
Tuesday 14 July
What makes Taranaki rangatahi so special?
Working alongside Pasifika Programmer Theresa Tongi, Pacific Curator-at-Large Ruha Fifita, and the brilliant young leaders of the Lalaga Youth Ambassadors, award-winning playwright and actor Leki Jackson-Bourke has helped shape a powerful new performance that asks what it means to grow up Pasifika in regional Aotearoa. In March 2026, the Ambassadors travel to Tāmaki Makaurau to reconnect with wider Pasifika arts communities, visit museums and creative network and take the stage at the ASB Polyfest - the largest Polynesian dance festival in the world.
Join us for an intimate kōrero with Jackson-Bourke and two Youth Ambassadors as they reflect on this milestone journey: how a dream became reality, what it meant to represent Taranaki on a world stage, and what possibilities lie ahead for both the Ambassadors and their evolving creative practice.
Katie Wolfe
August
Postponed
How might we foster empathy when stories confront painful histories and uncomfortable truths?
Come hear acclaimed storyteller Katie Wolfe (Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Tama, Ngāti Toa Rangatira) for an evening exploring the responsibilities and risks of telling difficult stories. Working across film, theatre and television, Wolfe creates bold, character-driven works that invite audiences to sit with lived experiences, emotion, and truth. In this kōrero, she reflects on how art can hold space for listening, healing and change, and why meeting complexity with compassion matters.
Her acclaimed work The Haka Party Incident revisits a pivotal 1979 clash between Pākehā engineering students and Māori activists, sparking national conversations about colonisation, racism and cultural identity. Adapted into a feature documentary, the work earned the 2025 Human Rights Awards. As Aotearoa continues to reckon with its histories, this is an opportunity to come together, reflect, and imagine more empathetic futures - guided by storytelling that refuses to look away.
Kimberley Moulton
Tuesday 8 September
Tickets
What might it mean to restore the spirit?
We are honoured to welcome Kimberley Moulton, a Yorta Yorta curator and writer whose work is transforming how museums and cultural institutions honour First Peoples' knowledge and relationships. Moulton brings a practice grounded in kindship, care and responsibility. Anchored in regeneration, disruption and restoration, her curatorial approach spans community-led rematriation, on-country activation, interventions into colonial presences and collaborative approaches to collection care and exhibition-making. Her practice sits as the intersection of cultural knowledge, collections and contemporary art, shaped by long-term relationships, her cultural connections, and a commitment to honouring the living presence of Ancestors, objects and stories.
For Aotearoa and Taranaki in particular, her visit invites reflection on how we collectively care for the cultural, spiritual and material worlds within our institutions and communities. Together, we are invited to consider what it means, here and now, to 'restore the spirit'.
Nathan Taare
Tuesday 13 October
Tickets
How might scent be a carrier of stories, memory and of lived experiences?
We close the 2026 Monica Brewster Evening series with an immersive conversation led by multidisciplinary scent artist Nathan Taare (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Tama). His practice spans multimedia art - exploring scent as a public expressive medium deeply tied to whakapapa. For Taare, scent is more than fragrance; it is a carrier for story, belonging and lived experience.
You're invited for an evening that asks audiences to tune into how olfactory cues consciously connect us with memory and illuminate our emotional landscapes. In a world saturated with visual culture, Taare's work asks what it might mean to slow down and return to the quiet intimacy of smell. His practice reminds us that the scent can both hold and transmit histories, offering space for connection, reflection and care in the present.
