Te Wānanga o Aotearoa welcomes Aisha Roberts, who is the new Poutiaki Toi/Collections Curator tasked with looking after Te Kōpuni Kura, our extensive arts collection.

Aisha holds a Bachelor in Media Arts with Honours from Wintec and spent several years at Waikato Museum in its exhibition and collections teams.

Her role is based at Te Puna Mātauranga, where she manages, develops and cares for the collection.

Aisha (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa) is also working on a new TWoA Te Kōpuni Kura art collection strategy that includes a maintenance plan for the collection, which includes hundreds of paintings, whakairo, raranga, sculptures and other artworks at dozens of sites throughout the organisation.

Aisha says along with looking after the collection around the motu, she will also be caring for the collection which is currently in storage.

"One of my main jobs at the moment is to improve our current storage facilities, and work on the strategy for the collection,” she says.

She also wants to work on building the TWaA collection database, including more information and research about the artworks.

“The actual documentation on each artwork is something I’d like to do more research on to build that mātauranga of the collection. At the moment we can view works as they hang through the site, but the  information behind the works is yet to be made accessible.”

“It’s beautiful to look at the art on our walls but the whole whakapapa behind it and its contribution to the New Zealand arts scene is the kind of information that I think would be valuable to our kaimahi and tauira, to our toi programmes and other programmes as well,” she says.

“It’s about realigning the focus of the collection to our core business, educating our whanau. It’s really part of our strategy, getting the information online and making it accessible.”