A Certain Style ... Glimpses of Fashion in New Zealand
2 October 2003 - 31 January 2004
While fashion designers look towards next season's collections, this exhibition provided glimpses of fashions past and sketched a genealogy for today's thriving local fashion culture. It displayed the styles New Zealanders have worn and aspired to in the past and up to the present day, whether they have been the very latest or behind the times, and whether they have been created in London Paris New York, or New Zealand. A Certain Style exhibition was a visual history which revealed, in a series of thematic snapshots, the changing 'looks' of New Zealanders as featured in photographs and documents from our heritage collections.
The exhibition’s content was, in part, determined by Auckland City Libraries’ extensive photograph collections, especially those of two important Auckland photographers, Hermann Schmidt and celebrated fashion photographer Clifton Firth. Alongside the studio images taken by these two photographers, other images and documents were displayed which provided visitors with a varied and rich historical record of how men, women and children dressed (or were encouraged to dress) in city streets and whilst enjoying leisure activities, 'out on the town' or at the beach, in the bush and at the races.
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Telling My Story: Beyond the Official Record
29 May - 28 September 2003
The exhibition looked at various ways in which individual and family histories have been recorded over the years. It drew on books, maps, letters, diaries, photographs and ephemera from the Central City Library's special collections, plus some items borrowed from private collections and Auckland City Archives.
The material shown ranged from the logbooks and superb maps by a 19th-century Pacific sailor William Henry Webster, through to a painting of the arrival in 1842 of the ships Jane Gifford and Duchess of Argyle, which brought the first Scottish immigrants to Auckland. There were also Victorian portrait photographs of unnamed Maori and Pakeha, which the library hoped members of the public might have been able to identify. Find out more about how to research your own family history, visit the family history section of the Heritage Floor (level 2) of the Central City Library.
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Persephone in Winter: Robin Hyde
31 March - 27 May 2003
Robin Hyde is being increasingly acknowledged as one of New Zealand's finest writers. She wrote poetry, short stories, novels, historical fiction, autobiographical pieces, and worked as a journalist. She once wrote: 'I get my politics direct from Shelley and Shakespeare, with an occasional hint from the Holy Ghost'. This exhibition presented a life of Robin Hyde through images, manuscripts and published works. It was on loan from the National Library Gallery.
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Recent additions to Special Collections
13 Feburary - 23 March 2003
Auckland City Libraries has a rich collection of research materials, accumulated over the 120 years of the Library's existence. Sir George Grey's founding collection of rare books and manuscripts has inspired other valuable donations over the years. At the same time the Library has made judicious purchases to supplement and enhance those donations. It has also benefited from the breadth of its general collections by the transfer of items to Special Collections as they increase in rarity and value.
This exhibition featured recent additions to the collections and highlighted the different specialities: rare books, manuscripts, ephemera, photographs and maps. Some of the items shown were purchased and some were donated. The Library wishes to thank the donors who have been so generous with their gifts.
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Compliments of the Season - traditions of Christmas
29 October 2002 - 31 January 2003
Over the years the Christmas festival has changed by gathering a variety of traditions and customs to itself. In the early medieval period the Christian religious festival of Christmas (Christ's Mass) absorbed the midwinter pagan festivals of Europe, although many of those pagan rituals continued to survive.
However many of the traditions that we associate with Christmas, such as Christmas cards, the Christmas tree, Santa Claus, present giving, and the focus on children, date from the 19th century.
This exhibition featured the development of those customs, both religious, and secular. It also looked at the growth of the New Zealand traditions of a midsummer Christmas.
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Celebrating Dumas: His life & legacy
8 July - 12 October 2002
24 July 2002 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great French writer Alexandre Dumas, author of
The Three Musketeers and
The Count of Monte Cristo.
The exhibition “Celebrating Dumas: His life & legacy” showcased items from the Reed Dumas collection, the largest collection of books by and about Dumas outside France. Among the items on view were manuscripts in Dumas' writing, an extended letter by Dumas' daughter exhibited for the first time, the first edition of
The Three Musketeers, and posters of films made from Dumas' works.
The Art of Advertising
9 May - 28 June 2002
This exhibition had a particular appeal to those interested in graphic design and the visual style of 20th century advertising and showcased a range of advertisements and advertising art dating from around 1900 to the mid-1970s. Ads for food, fashion, cars, entertainment, appliances, and more from widely-circulated New Zealand periodicals such as the
Mirror and the
New Zealand Woman's Weekly were displayed.
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Auckland: the beginnings of a city
26 January - 27 April 2002
Auckland's early years were shown through contemporary documents, letters, diaries, early printed accounts, maps, drawings and photographs.
The exhibition covered the period from occupation by Ngāti Whātua and sale to Governor Hobson as the site for the new capital in 1840, to 1865, when the capital shifted to Wellington. It also showed the physical changes to central Auckland that have occurred since its beginnings. Items featured included:
- an 1840 letter from Governor Hobson describing his reasons for choosing Auckland as the site for his capital
- a field book of the surveys of Auckland carried out by the first Surveyor General Felton Mathew
- early photographs of Queen Street and the Auckland waterfront
- watercolours by Edward Ashworth, Charles Heaphy and John Kinder (loaned by the Auckland Art Gallery)
- eyewitness descriptions of the town by early immigrants Peter McDonald and James George.
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exhibition list.
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