Peter Brunt is Senior Lecturer in Art History at Victoria University of Wellington where he teaches the visual arts of the Pacific, with an emphasis on the ‘post-colonial’ era. He received his PhD from Cornell University and is a 2014 Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He is co-editor, with Nicholas Thomas, of Art in Oceania: A New History, published by Thames and Hudson and Yale University Press (2012), winner of the 2014 Art Book Prize in the UK. He has published widely on the contemporary arts of the Pacific in journals, edited volumes and exhibition catalogues and is co-curating, with Nicholas Thomas and Adrian Locke, the exhibition Oceania at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2018.

Peter’s research interests focus on art and cross-cultural interactions in the Pacific, with a focus on the emergence of indigenous modernisms and contemporary art after World War Two. For the Multiple Modernisms project he is investigating the significance of two cross-cultural friendships: one between Wallis Islander artist Aloi Pilioko and his ‘mentor’, French-Russian artist and Oceanic art collector Nicolai Michoutouchkine; the other between Samoan tattooist Sulu’ape Paulo II and two ‘Pakeha’ artists, photographer Mark Adams and painter Tony Fomison. Both studies investigate how intimate friendships have been conduits for larger historical forces such as the desire for decolonisation and modern artistic identity.