Ten Question Q&A with Jessica Palalagi

Q1: The 25-year anniversary of the inception of the Foundation’s laureates programme can be celebrated in many ways. What drove the decision to also publish a book?

Honestly, a night is a night — even a really good one. You get a room full of people, a lot of aroha, a lot of wine, and then it’s gone by morning. Twenty-five years of backing New Zealand’s most extraordinary artists deserved something that outlasts the evening. A book sits on a shelf, gets picked up years later, gets handed to someone who wasn’t even born when the Foundation started. It becomes the record. We also wanted something that could hold 145 people properly — not a paragraph each on a website, but real, considered writing about who they are and what they’ve made. That’s not a gala speech, that’s a book. And there’s a selfish reason too: we don’t often get to stop and look backwards. We’re always chasing the next Laureate, the next campaign, the next Tuesday. Putting this together forced us to sit with 25 years of work and go — actually, look at what this has built. Look who’s in this room with us because of it. That was worth doing properly, in something permanent, not just a hashtag for a week.

Q2: One hundred and twenty-seven writers were commissioned to write about 145 laureates — what a beast to manage all those many contact points!

It was! I won’t pretend otherwise. Matching the right writer to the right artist, chasing drafts, coordinating with a publisher, keeping 145 people across the country (and a few overseas) informed and comfortable with how their story was being told — that’s a genuine logistical mountain, and I want to be honest that it wasn’t me alone climbing it. Our team held that project with an enormous amount of care, week after week, for a long time. What made it work was that we didn’t treat it as an admin exercise — we treated it as 145 individual relationships. Some Laureates wanted to be closely involved in their profile, others just wanted to trust the writer and see it when it was done. Both are fine, but you need to know which is which for every single person, which is where the real work sits. I think the reason it came together is that everyone involved — writers, editors, our team, the publisher — actually cared about getting it right, not just getting it done. You can feel that in the pages. It doesn’t read like a database exercise. It reads like 145 people were genuinely seen. That’s the only outcome that would have made the beast worth wrangling.

Q3: As the pages were delivered to you by the publisher and you read the profiles, what struck you about these remarkable people?

How much doubt sits underneath the achievement. You’d think reading about 145 people who’ve reached the top of their fields would be a parade of confidence, but it’s the opposite. Over and over, in different words, in different art forms, the same thread: ‘I nearly stopped’, ‘I didn’t think anyone was watching’, ‘I wasn’t sure this was allowed to be my life’. That struck me hard, and it’s exactly why the Foundation exists. Recognition doesn’t just celebrate people at the end of a journey — for a lot of these artists, it’s the thing that kept them on the journey at all. The other thing that struck me is the sheer range sitting inside one book. A weaver in Northland and a composer scoring international film and a poet writing in te reo and a sculptor working in glass — completely different practices, completely different lives — and yet reading them back to back, you start to see the throughline. It’s not really a book about art. It’s a book about persistence, and about a country that is, when it chooses to be, genuinely serious about backing its creative people. Reading it made me proud of what this Foundation has helped make possible.

Q4: Were there any stories that surprised you?

A few, and they weren’t the ones I expected. I thought I knew most of these Laureates’ stories fairly well — you’d assume that, given how closely we work with our artist whānau. But there’s a difference between knowing someone’s CV and reading a writer spend 3000 words getting underneath it. What surprised me most were the near-misses. More than one profile mentions a moment where the artist was genuinely about to walk away — from the discipline, sometimes from the country — before something small and specific turned it around. Not always a big dramatic moment. Sometimes it’s as ordinary as someone believing in them at the right time, which, again, is uncomfortably close to our own job description .I was also surprised by the humour. A few of our most serious, mythologised artists turn out to be very funny people on the page, in a way their public work doesn’t always let you see. There’s a real warmth and self-deprecation running through some of these profiles that I wasn’t expecting, and it’s some of my favourite reading in the whole book — the moments where the legend gets to just be a person telling you the truth about how hard, and how ridiculous, this path has been.

Q5: The book is not just a celebration of 145 practitioners across many art forms, it’s also a profound and deep thank you to the Arts Foundation’s multitude of givers, big and small, who make it all possible. Why is that so important?

Because none of the first 145 pages exist without the people who fund them, and that side of the story so rarely gets told properly. Donors are usually thanked in a line at the bottom of a programme, or a name on a wall. That’s not enough for what they actually make possible. I genuinely believe creativity and philanthropy are partners in the same act, not a transaction where one side makes art and the other side writes a cheque. Every laureate in this book received something at a moment they needed it — money, yes, but also the message that says someone believes this work matters enough to back it. That belief comes from a person. Often someone the artist will never meet. So this book puts givers into the same continuum as the artists, not underneath them. Whether it’s someone who’s given $25 through Boosted or a family who’s made a transformational bequest, they’re part of the same act of imagination as the artist standing on stage. If we’ve done our job with this book, a reader finishes it understanding that generosity is itself a creative act — it’s what lets someone else’s creativity exist in the world at all.

Q6: I am sure you don’t want to be political but given the current funding cutbacks and constraints in the arts, is the Foundation’s work now absolutely pivotal to the survival of the sector?

I’ll leave the politics to the politicians, but I can talk honestly about what we’re seeing on the ground. Public funding for the arts has never covered everything the sector needs, and right now that gap is wider than it’s been in a long time. That’s simply the environment we’re operating in. What I’d say is that philanthropy was never meant to replace public investment — it does something different. Government funding tends to fund activity; philanthropy can fund a person, at exactly the moment in their career when a vote of confidence matters most. That’s always been our lane, and it’s arguably more important now, not less, because artists are absorbing pressure from every direction at once. I don’t think it’s pivotal to the survival of the sector on its own — no single organisation should carry that weight, and it would be a strange, fragile system if it did. But I do think a strong, growing culture of arts philanthropy in this country is now one of the most important things standing between a lot of extraordinary artists and giving up. That’s not a political statement, that’s just what 25 years of doing this work up close has taught me. It’s why growing the giving movement matters as much as growing the awards themselves.

Q7: And of course you can’t reward and award everyone — that must be a bit heartbreaking for your assessment panels each year.

It genuinely is, every single year. Our panels are made up of people who know this sector intimately, and they take the responsibility seriously — these aren’t casual decisions made over one meeting. And still, every year, they’re choosing a handful of names from a longlist full of artists who are all, in their own right, doing extraordinary work. Nobody on those panels walks away feeling like the job was easy or that the ones who missed out didn’t deserve it. I think what keeps our panellists going is knowing this isn’t the only door. An artist who isn’t selected this year might be exactly right in two years’ time, once their practice has developed further, or once the panel composition changes and sees their work through a different lens. It’s a long relationship with the sector, not a single verdict. But you’re right that it’s heartbreaking, and I don’t think we should pretend otherwise or dress it up as purely a positive story. Honestly, the ache our panels feel about who they can’t reward is one of the best arguments for why we need to keep growing the pool of resource available — so fewer extraordinary artists are left on a longlist wondering if their moment will come.

Q8: One reads the profiles of the Laureates who are no longer with us with some tristesse. Is this book a chance to pay a further tribute to them?

Yes, and I’m glad you noticed that, because it mattered to us. There’s a particular kind of grief in reading about someone who shaped so much of this country’s creative life and realising the past tense has crept into their profile. It’s not something we could avoid — 25 years is long enough that we’ve lost some remarkable people along the way — but we didn’t want their pages to feel like an obituary tucked in among the living. We asked our writers to hold the same standard for those profiles as for everyone else: write about the work, the person, the mischief and the ambition, not just the loss. I think that’s the right kind of tribute. It keeps them present in the book as artists, not as absences. There’s something quite moving about the fact that this book puts them on the same page, literally, as the Laureates who received their award last year. It doesn’t separate the past from the present — it treats 25 years as one continuous whakapapa of New Zealand creativity, still very much alive in the pages, in the work they left behind, and in the artists coming through now who were influenced by them, often without even realising it.

Q9: The book cover has two colourways: pink on yellow and yellow on pink. Which one are you choosing?

You’re asking me to pick a favourite child! Honestly, I’ve gone back and forth on this more than almost anything else in the whole project, which tells you something about how much energy we put into every detail, even the ones that seem small. I keep landing on yellow on pink, purely on gut feel — there’s something about that combination that feels warmer and a little more playful, which is very much how I want this book to feel in someone’s hands. Pink on yellow is bolder, more of a statement piece, and I could easily be talked out of my choice by the end of the week. If I’m honest, part of me loves that we even have this dilemma. Twenty-five years in, we could have played it safe with something more traditional and expected for an anniversary publication. Instead we’re debating two equally loud, equally joyful colourways, and that feels true to who we are as a Foundation — a little unafraid of colour, a little unwilling to be conventional, and not remotely interested in blending in. So: yellow on pink, today. Ask me again tomorrow.

Q10: Twenty-five years and 145 happy arts practitioners. Quite a legacy?

It is, and I want to be careful how I say this, because it’s not my legacy, or even really the Foundation’s — it belongs to everyone who’s ever backed an artist through us, and to the 145 people who trusted us enough to be part of this book. We just happened to be in a place where that trust and that generosity met. What I keep coming back to is that this isn’t a closed chapter. Twenty-five years and 145 people is extraordinary, but it’s also just the base we get to build the next 25 years on. There are artists making work right now who’ll be in the next edition of this book, and donors reading these pages today who haven’t given yet but will, because they’ve seen what their support actually becomes .So yes, quite a legacy — but I’d rather call it a beginning with really good proof of concept behind it. If this book does its job, it won’t just make people feel good about the last 25 years, it’ll make them want to be part of the next 25, whether that’s as an artist putting their hand up, or a giver deciding this is where their generosity belongs. That’s the legacy I actually care about: the one that keeps going.