Was $60

Years in the making, NOW SHOWING: A History of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery is a fitting testament to this country’s most loved and most talked about art museum.

NOW SHOWING tells the inspiring story of New Zealand’s contemporary art museum founded as the result of a visionary act of patronage by Monica Brewster in 1962, which opened to the people of New Zealand in 1970.

The book was edited by Christina Barton, Jonathan Bywater and Wystan Curnow (who are also contributing essayists) with additional writing by Jim Barr and Mary Barr, Rhana Devenport, and a director’s foreword by Simon Rees.

In words and pictures NOW SHOWING depicts the museum’s many years of flirting with controversy, acquiring the leading edge of works for the collection, coupled to breaking new ground for contemporary art in New Zealand. It builds a comprehensive history of the museum through the selection of a 45 artwork colour plate section of important works from the Govett-Brewster Collection (representing roughly a work a year) and the writing of ‘Forty Five Moments’ about 45 exhibitions considered crucial to the development of both the museum and contemporary art in New Zealand.

Simon Rees, director, says he’s pleased to have been part of a team of dedicated people responsible for publishing NOW SHOWING.

“In as much as the book is about art, it’s a social history of New Zealand and its culture and the way that it has developed since the 1960s in tension between the centres in Auckland-and-Wellington and the regions, read through the perspective of a single building,” says Rees.

The book was launched at a Friends of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre event in New Plymouth on Friday 9 September 2016. And there will be launches in Auckland on 21 September and Wellington early-November 2016).

300-pages, full colour

ISBN: 978-0-908848-74-4