MEDIA RELEASE: The Chartwell Trust celebrates 50 years of dedicated support for creative thinking and the visual arts in Aotearoa.

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Being

Creative visual thinking is fundamental to us all as human beings as we strive to understand our sense of self and the world. Chartwell seeks to deepen understanding about the importance of art and creative thinking for our future and our wellbeing.

In 2024-2025 Chartwell celebrates its 50th Anniversary, marked in part by the publication of our Chartwell Project book. Purchase your copy here.

Seeing

Chartwell is an explorer of the visual world. We want to know more about how and what we see. When both the eye and the mind are active, the creative process opens to the artist and viewer. The Chartwell Collection provides the viewer many examples of creative visual thought in action.

Making

Chartwell supports artists as they make and think. Making is an active and connected process, involving the interaction of intention, intuition and intellect with the mediums of the world. Chartwell is making too - making a difference through philanthropy and enabling access to creative activities and research.

Thinking

Chartwell encourages everyone to think about art and the creative process with a commitment to drive an understanding about the significance of the visual arts to general creative thinking. We share a curiosity to know and learn more: an imaginative, ongoing investigation.

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1 March 2024

Between March 2024 and March 2025, the Chartwell Trust is celebrating 50 years of dedicated support for creative thinking and the visual arts in Aotearoa. The Chartwell Collection of contemporary art from New Zealand, Australia and around the Pacific was established in 1974 and is held on long term loan at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, its home base in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland.

With a focus on artists, the Anniversary events around the country present a range of dedicated projects and exhibitions for 2024 - 2025. Chartwell is celebrating the significant milestone by co-publishing a book with Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. The book will tell the story of the Chartwell Project, and illustrate 150 works from the Chartwell Collection. It is intended to appeal to a wide readership and convey the four pillars of the Chartwell mission: Being, Seeing, Making, Thinking.

Chartwell’s long established commitment to better understanding the creative process of seeing, making and thinking, as an inherent part of us all as human beings, has led to the establishment of key projects in the last 50 years:

The Chartwell Collection - From day one, Chartwell has been dedicated to valuing the contribution that public art galleries make. With the first acquisition in March 1974, the Collection was established to support the public art gallery through the development of a collection of contemporary art and as gymnasiums for the creative mind. Since then, the collection of artworks by artists who are valued creative visual thinkers, both in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Australia as well as further afield, has grown significantly.

The Chartwell Charitable Trust - a philanthropic trust that has supported artists, public art galleries, exhibitions, projects and publications for 50 years. CAST- The Centre for Arts and Social Transformation at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland is an academic research hub focused on the role of the arts in solving big social issues. Chartwell is a founding donor of CAST, sharing a vision to understand the role and potential of the arts in everyday life.

Squiggla - Chartwell’s outreach project that delivers the belief that we can all access and exercise the creative spark through participation in hands-on, non judgmental mark making. Our goal is that we come to understand our own creative potential more deeply.