BACKThe Visual Arts Department is excited to celebrate the creativity and success of our Year 11 students at our second annual Year 11 Art Exhibition – He Kākano Ahau: I Am a Seed, currently on display at the Massey University Albany Library until late January 2026, for everyone to see.
Earlier this year we were approached by Mark Kaneko, Auckland-based Art Curator for Massey University, as they were interested in engaging with other local educational institutions on creative projects. After visiting our kura and seeing the work of our Year 11 students, particularly their colourful kōwhaiwhai panels on display around the college, Mark was excited to collaborate with us on an exhibition to display our students’ work alongside artwork by established artists in their collection.
The result of this partnership is an exhibition across two levels of the Massey University Library which opened at an event on Wednesday evening in Term 4 Week 7, when we also took the opportunity to celebrate the success of our top students, including Grace Ahn who was awarded the Supreme Award for Year 11 Art and will also receive the Jacqueline Fahey Cup for Excellence in Art & Design for 2025 in the Year 11 Prizegiving early next year. Congratulations Grace!
As Mark commented at the opening, “Students and staff at the university visiting the exhibition have already commented on the quality of the work on display and can’t believe it has been made by artists who are so young.”
The exhibition includes work from our Year 11 Visual Art and Digital Art programmes, with media including drawing, painting, printmaking, digital collage, and design. It is a celebration of the dedicated exploration of cultural ideas, art approaches and creative techniques across eight Year 11 classes this year at Rangitoto College.
In Year 11 Visual Art the brief was to learn about and connect with cultural symbolism, ideas, and styles connected to traditional and contemporary Māori art, and combine this knowledge with their own ideas, and cultural background to create original artworks, in a range of media. For their kōwhaiwhai panels, on display on the ground floor of the library (Level 2), they collaborated to connect with their own cultures as a group, interpreted through Toi Māori.
In Year 11 Digital Art students have been engaging with global and local issues connected to our warming climate and the crises which lead from the exploitation of the natural world, and their role as kaitiaki to help protect our planet. Students developed layered digital artworks as dense representations of the complex ecological and extractive systems underpinning our world and developed bold climate posters and zines based on their study of the history of Protest Art.
We are proud of students’ efforts to connect with and promote Māori and indigenous concepts and values through their art, including whanaungatanga, kaitiakitanga, and tūrangawaewae.
The exhibition title He Kākano Ahāu translates to ‘I am a Seed’ and we believe this communicates the continued growth of our students as both thoughtful, connected citizens of Aotearoa, and as emerging creative artists.
Last year our Year 11 exhibition was held at the Mairangi Arts Centre and we now intend to continue our partnership with Massey University to build on this opportunity.
We are incredibly proud of the creativity of our students and look forward to seeing what they go on to next in their art journey in Year 12 at the college.
A huge thank you to Mark for his support of this project, and to Lewis Bourne, our painting teacher and Exhibitions Coordinator, for his tireless efforts to bring this exhibition to fruition.
