The City Gallery Wellington (Māori: Te Whare Toi) is an art gallery in Wellington, New Zealand. The gallery was first opened in 1980 in a different building.

Located in Civic Square, the Gallery is recognised as pivotal to Wellington’s positioning and growth as New Zealand’s arts capital, City Gallery Wellington plays a unique role in the New Zealand's cultural landscape. City Gallery mounts a changing programme of exhibitions and does not have a collection. City Gallery Wellington re-opened in September 2009 after a year's closure for renovations. Three new gallery spaces were added, including one devoted to the exhibition of Maori and Pacific art, plus a new auditorium. The additions were designed by Wellington architect Stuart Gardyne of Architecture+. The Gallery reopened with the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years which achieved almost-record attendance.

Significant group exhibitions have included Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance, The Exhibition of the Century: Modern Masters from the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Techno Maori―Maori Art in the Digital Age, and the Prospect:New Art New Zealand triennial series. An integral part of the programme are artists' projects where a new body of work is profiled, including Michael Harrison, Gavin Hipkins, Saskia Leek, Peter Madden, Seraphine Pick, and Yuk King Tan. The Michael Hirschfeld Gallery shows work by Wellington-based artists, designers and architects. The Gallery also regularly publishes catalogues to accompany its exhibition programme and runs an ambitious public programme of events, lectures and conversations. The education programmes focuses on delivery to primary and secondary schools in the Wellington region and nationally.

City Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in Leicester, England. The gallery exhibits arts and crafts including international work but also local work reflecting the city's cultural diversity making the gallery an important venue for artists to showcase their work. The gallery has links with local schools and colleges holding events and workshops for young people. Admission to the gallery is free.

Coordinates: 52°37′58″N 1°07′42″W / 52.6328°N 1.1284°W / 52.6328; -1.1284

Wellington ( /ˈwɛlɪŋtən/) is the capital city and second most populous urban area of New Zealand. It is at the southwestern tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Rimutaka Range. It is home to 393,400 residents.

The Wellington urban area is the major population centre of the southern North Island, and is the seat of the Wellington Region – which in addition to the urban area covers the Kapiti Coast and Wairarapa. The urban area includes four cities: Wellington, on the peninsula between Cook Strait and Wellington Harbour, contains the central business district and about half of Wellington's population; Porirua on Porirua Harbour to the north is notable for its large Māori and Pacific Island communities; Lower Hutt and Upper Hutt are largely suburban areas to the northeast, together known as the Hutt Valley. Wellington also holds the distinction of being the world's southernmost capital city.

In 2008, Wellington was classified as a Gamma World City in the World Cities Study Group’s inventory by Loughborough University. The 2010 Mercer Quality of Living Survey ranked Wellington 12th in the world. In 2011 Lonely Planet Best in Travel 2011 named Wellington as fourth in its Top 10 Cities to Visit in 2011, referring to the New Zealand capital as the "coolest little capital in the world".

Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生 or 草間 弥生, Kusama Yayoi^?, born March 22, 1929) is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of mediums, including painting, collage, sculpture, performance art and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde.

Born in Matsumoto, Nagano into an upper middle class family of seedling merchants, Kusama started creating art at an early age, going on to study Nihonga painting in Kyoto in 1948. Frustrated with this distinctly Japanese style, she became interested in the European and American avant-garde, staging several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo during the 1950s. In 1957 she moved to the United States, settling down in New York City where she produced a series of paintings influenced by the abstract expressionist movement. Switching to sculpture and installation as her primary mediums, Kusama became a fixture of the New York avant-garde, having her works exhibited alongside the likes of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and George Segal during the early 1960s, where she became associated with the pop art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, Kusama came to public attention after she organised a series of Body Festivals in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots.

Hone Papita Raukura "Ralph" Hotere ONZ (born 1931) is a New Zealand artist of Māori descent (Te Aupōuri iwi). He was born in Mitimiti, Northland and is widely regarded as one of New Zealand's most important living artists. In 1994 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Otago and in 2003 received an Icon Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand.

He was made a member of the Order of New Zealand on 31 December 2011.

Hotere received his secondary education at St Peter's Maori College, Auckland. After early art training in Auckland, he moved to Dunedin in 1952, where he studied at King Edward Technical College. During the later 1950s, he worked as a schools art advisor for the Education Department in the Bay of Islands.

In 1961 Hotere gained a fellowship and travelled to England where he studied at London’s Central School of Art. During 1962-4 he studied in France and travelled around Europe, during which time he saw the development of the Pop Art and Op Art movements. His travels took him, among other places, to the war cemetery in Italy where his brother was buried. This event, and the politics of Europe during the 1960s, were to have a profound effect on Hotere’s work, notably in the Sangro and Polaris series of paintings.