Meet Johnson Witehira
Johnson Witehira is an Aotearoa New Zealand artist, designer, and academic, who is on a mission to bring Māori culture into all aspects of New Zealand life, focussing on decolonised approaches to teaching art and design. Witehira himself says he “spends most of my time thinking about how we, Māori, did things in the past, and how we might apply our mātauranga (knowledge) to contemporary problems.”
According to “Johnson Witehira | Semi Permanent,” 2013, Witehira has presented this topic throughout New Zealand and internationally, with his design projects and writing on indigenous design significantly being published in Visible Language, The Graphic Design Reader (Bloomsbury), AIGA Eye on Design, Novum Magazine, and Monocle.