Five New Zealand Artists Recognised in 2025 Laureate Awards
Established in 2000, the awards celebrate creative excellence within Aotearoa New Zealand’s arts scene across the visual arts, film, literature, and music. Save to My Ocula
Artists Séraphine Pick, Kate Newby, Cheryl Lucas, Reuben Paterson, and Shona Rapira-Davies have been honoured by the Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate Awards, alongside filmmaker Roseanne Liang, writer and musician Bill Direen, and composer Hall Cannon. Each 2025 Laureate will receive 50,000 NZD with no strings attached.
Established in 2000, the awards celebrate creative excellence within Aotearoa New Zealand’s arts scene, recognising cultural figures for exceptional achievement in their field, a world-class body of work, and a lasting contribution to Aotearoa’s culture and communities. Previous recipients of the award include leading actor Cliff Curtis, visual artists Yuki Kihara and Lisa Reihana, and directors Jane Campion and Taika Waititi.
Séraphine Pick: My ART Visual Arts Award
Painter Séraphine Pick is known for canvases that traverse memory, psychology, and abstraction. In her works, figures seem to drift through dreamlike environments. While her early practice emerged alongside the ‘Pencilcase painters’ (the Canterbury Ilam cohort of the 1980s and 1990s including Bill Hammond, Shane Cotton, and Peter Robinson) Pick’s work has followed its own trajectory, marked by psychological nuance and introspection. In Paintings, her recent exhibition at Michael Lett, Pick’s oil-on-linen works addressed anxieties shaped by the digital age. Frenetic brushwork and layered surfaces enveloped spectral, shifting silhouettes, conjuring atmospheres charged with psychological intensity.
Kate Newby: Gow Family Foundation Sculpture Award
Based between Floresville, Texas, and New Zealand, Kate Newby is celebrated for subtle, site-responsive installations that elevate everyday spaces. Her growing international profile includes a residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa in 2017, recent presentations at the Sharjah Biennale and Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and a 76-foot ceramic and glass mural commissioned for Portland International Airport. Newby’s practice gently disrupts viewers’ expectations, using everyday materials—ceramics, textiles, metal, glass—to generate often fleeting experiences that encourage fresh engagement with site and place. Her work is currently on view at Art Basel Paris with Galerie Art Concept.
Cheryl Lucas: Female Arts Practitioner Award
The hand-built, architectonic ceramics of Cheryl Lucas are marked by experimental glazing and rugged, totemic form. Recent series such as ‘Skin Fence’, presented at Christchurch Art Gallery in the artist major 2022 solo exhibition, Shaped by Schist, reference post-disaster landscapes and domestic resilience in the face of destruction. Following her home city of Christchurch’s 2011 earthquakes, Lucas paused her studio work to fabricate large ceramic chimney pots for the city’s heritage rebuilds—a contribution that underscores her materially engaged and community-embedded approach.
Reuben Paterson: Toi Kō Iriiri Queer Arts Award
Reuben Paterson is known for his exuberant use of glitter and colour in works that draw on subjects ranging from pop culture and flora to queer identity and Māori stories. Among his notable commissions is Guide Kaiārahi (2021), a ten-metre crystal waka commissioned by the Edmiston Trust, which now resides at the entrance to Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Paterson’s practice spans painting, public sculpture, and video, marked by an emphasis on light, spirituality, and communal memory. In 2023, he was the subject of The Only Dream Left, a major retrospective at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, and most recently, his work was featured at High Noon Gallery, New York, in the exhibition INCARNA (2 July–9 August 2025).
Shona Rapira-Davies: Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa Award
Shona Rapira-Davies has been recognised for her sustained exploration of Māori womanhood, postcolonial identity, and social justice. Her large-scale public work, Ngā Kākahu (1992), is located in Wellington’s Te Aro Park and foregrounds the history of the land upon which the work resides, reflective of its maker’s long arc of community advocacy through materials and form. Rapira-Davies’ practice has influenced the shape of Māori art discourse in New Zealand for more than three decades. —[O]
Main image: The 2025 Laureate artists. Left to right: Shona Rapira-Davies, Cheryl Lucas, Bill Direen, Séraphine Pick, Reuben Paterson, Roseanne Liang. Courtesy the Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi.
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