50 Years of Painting in the Cook Islands” is a retrospective exhibition that focuses on early modern painting in the Cook Islands. It celebrates a specific time period in which this genre emerged and came to be locally regarded as art. It acknowledges the artists who visited these shores and the visual legacy that was left behind.
A great part of the exhibition is dedicated to the response to a new kind of artistic process and how local culture came to adopt new ways and methods in which to express and reproduce the living environment around them. Featured in this exhibition is Pomani Tangata, Charles McPhee, Nga Teariki, Tim Manavaroa Buchanan, Ian George, Rick Welland, Edwin Shorter, Joan Rolls-Gragg and Rennie Peyroux.