Toi Te Mana wins Book of the Year Apollo Award 2025
A landmark work of Māori art history has been honoured at the 2025 Apollo Awards, with Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art named Book of the Year.
Written by Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis, with the late Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, and published by Auckland University Press/University of Chicago Press, Toi Te Mana has been hailed as a transformative contribution to global art scholarship.
The judges praised the book for its scale, depth and originality — a work “grounded in and animated by Māori concepts of time, place, people and valuables,” while also drawing on rigorous art-historical research, feminist critique and postcolonial perspectives. Its title, which translates roughly as “arts of power”, reflects the book’s central aim: to reposition Māori art within its own intellectual, cultural and historical frameworks.
Spanning sculpture, architecture, textiles, body art and rock art, the book offers an expansive narrative from ancestral practices through colonial disruption to modern and contemporary innovation. Its chapters on early Māori engagement with figurative painting, paper-based work and iron bring fresh insight to a tradition that is too often understood only through northern hemisphere museum displays. Later sections trace the rise of Māori modernists in the 1950s and the growing global presence of Māori artists in major museums and at the Venice Biennale.
Beyond its sweeping history, Toi Te Mana is celebrated for its attention to detail — illuminating specific objects, artworks, makers, and even famous forgeries — while maintaining a clear focus on the social and cultural forces that shaped them.
The book is dedicated to Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (1943–2014), the distinguished scholar, curator and cultural leader whose vision helped shape the project. His knowledge, generosity and imagination are evident throughout this volume.
Toi Te Mana stands as a defining achievement in Indigenous art history and a milestone for Māori scholarship on the world stage.