Tēnā Koe, I am Associate Professor of Art History in the Art History programme where I teach and research the visual arts of the Pacific. I am interested in the role of art in mediating cross-cultural encounters from the late eighteenth century to the present, with a particular focus on Indigenous modernisms and contemporary Pacific art. My work documents, analyses and publicises the work of artists – Islanders and Europeans – who have been travelers, migrants and settlers to examine questions of cultural difference, relationality, cosmopolitanism, indigeneity and decolonisation.

Most of my work has been collaborative and interdisciplinary. Since 2011, I have been part of the ‘Multiple Modernisms: Twentieth Century Art in Global Perspective’ project, which recently published the second of a four-volume series from Duke University Press. I am co-editor and a co-author of the multi-authored book Art in Oceania: A New History (Thames & Hudson, 2012), winner the 2012 Authors Club Prize, and co-curator of the exhibition Oceania at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris (2018-2019), which together attracted over 250,000 visitors. Other projects I’ve been involved with are ‘Tatau/Tattoo: Embodied Art and Cultural Exchange c. 1760-c. 2000’, and ‘Pacific Presences: Oceanic Art in European Museums’. Currently, I'm developing a book project on the friendship between New Zealand painter Tony Fomison, New Zealand photographer Mark Adams and the Sāmoan tufuga tatatau (tattooist) the late Su'a Sulu'ape Paulo II. 

These academic interests reflect something of my own history. I was born in Auckland, the son of mixed-race parents from Sāmoa; my father is the child of a nineteenth century marriage between a Sāmoan woman from Lano and a settler father from rural England; my mother is the child of a common law marriage between a Sāmoan woman from Vaiala and an itinerant European father of origins unknown.