Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū is a public art gallery holding a significant permanent collection alongside a changing programme of exhibitions. The gallery publishes Bulletin, described as New Zealand's leading gallery magazine, featuring commentary, artist profiles, interviews and articles alongside each exhibition.
The gallery's collection includes works such as Louise Henderson's Addington Workshops (c.1940), an oil-on-board painting depicting workers assembling locomotives at the Addington Railway Workshops, presented to the gallery by the McKegg Family in 1999. The gallery also runs an on-site shop, Toa, offers education programmes, and makes its spaces available for venue hire.
Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū holds a significant permanent collection alongside a rotating programme of exhibitions, supported by Bulletin, described as New Zealand's leading gallery magazine.
Among the works in the gallery's collection is Louise Henderson's Addington Workshops, painted around 1940 in oil on board. Henderson, a Paris-born interior and embroidery designer who moved to Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1925, was repeatedly drawn to urban and industrial subject matter throughout the 1930s and 1940s, including city streets, brickworks and rock quarries. She became a key figure in local art circles, including as part of The Group, and was influential in the development of a Canterbury landscape painting style.
The painting depicts workers assembling locally produced locomotives at the Addington Railway Workshops, which opened in Christchurch in 1879 and closed in 1990, employing over a thousand people at its height. The work reflects something of Henderson's left-leaning political interests through the period, and has been described in gallery exhibition texts as one of very few New Zealand modernist paintings dealing with urban industry, with a clean, bright factory floor and immaculately depicted overalls that speak to the dignity of work during the Great Depression.
Addington Workshops has featured in several gallery exhibitions over the years, including From Here on the Ground (2024), Louise Henderson: From Life (2020), Above Ground (2015-2017), and I See Red (2007-2008) — each exhibition text offering a different lens on the painting and Henderson's career, from her training in Paris under cubist artist Jean Metzinger to her later teaching roles at Elam School of Art in Auckland.
Beyond exhibitions and the permanent collection, Christchurch Art Gallery runs an on-site shop, Toa, offers education programmes, and makes its spaces available for venue hire. Visitors can also use the gallery's My Gallery feature to save works of interest to a personal collection for future reference.
The gallery's Bulletin magazine and blog provide ongoing commentary, notes and artist profiles connected to works like Addington Workshops, including behind-the-scenes writing on tracking down the original site of the painting and audio recordings connected to the history of the Addington Railway Workshops Band.
Between its rich permanent collection, changing exhibitions, its own magazine, shop, education programmes and venue hire, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū offers a deep, ongoing engagement with New Zealand art and its local histories.