Biography

Mexican born Xavier Meade has been a Wintec (Waikato Institute of Technology) academic and researcher since 1982 in the fields of eco-design and visual arts. He has exhibited widely in Mexico, Cuba, Aotearoa (NZ), Holland and Spain since 1978 and completed collaborative projects bridging the politics and cultures of Latin America and Aotearoa.

Illustrated Talk

Whakawhiti/Exchange
“Whakawhiti” or “exchange” is the basis of all communication. This is doubly important as New Zealand, a post-colonial and substantially immigrant nation, establishes and solidifies its identity as a South Pacific nation.

New Zealand, Aotearoa, is officially a bi-cultural and bi-lingual nation. The full recognition of Maori culture and how and what it contributes to the identity of our society and the nation, is a subject of on going debate and one that interests Meade and Reed.  The projects, Purakau/Myths and Legends and Ko Taku Kupu, Ko Tau/My Word is Yours, demonstrate this on going exchange between artists, writers and cultures.

Purakau/Myths and Legends
In 2009 Xavier Meade (NZ) and Prof Flor de Lis López Hernández (Cuba) invited twelve artists from Aotearoa, Cuba and Mexico to produce posters in response to the theme of ‘Purakau’ (a Maori term referring to myths, legends and “lessons for life”).
The artists activated a diverse range of indigenous myths and legends. The stories are deeply embedded in their cultures or origin, but the underlying themes resonate across cultures. The craftsmanship of the posters is exquisite. The Cuban contributors come from a long-standing tradition of handcrafted screen-printing, which has been maintained since the Cuban Revolution. All posters are made in their country of origin, through screen-print and lithographic processes.
This project follows in the footsteps of Xavier’s highly successful “Aotearoa Liberators” project, an exhibition of posters designed by NZ artists and screen-printed at the ICAIC in Havana, that found an audience in New Zealand, Mexico and Cuba.

Ko Taku Kupu, Ko Tau/My Word is Yours was the combined efforts of twelve Te Reo (Maori language) and thirty design students at the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, producing a sequence of bi-lingual typographic posters, for a local literary festival, The Press Christchurch Writers’ Festival 2012.

Exhibition 1

Purakau = a Maori term referring to myths, legends and “lessons for life”
In 2009 Xavier Meade (NZ) and Prof Flor de Lis López Hernández (Cuba) invited twelve artists from Aotearoa, Cuba and Mexico to produce posters in response to the theme of ‘Purakau’.
The artists activated a diverse range of indigenous myths and legends: “The Tangler”, “the Disappearance of Matias Perez”, “Origin of the Poisonous Guao Plant”, and others. The stories are deeply embedded in their cultures or origin, but the underlying themes resonate across cultures.
All posters are made in their country of origin, through screen-print and lithographic.

Exhibition 2

Aotearoa Liberators
Libertadores de Aotearoa
Posters designed in Aotearoa printed in Cuba
http://www.xaviermeade.net/aotearoa-liberators-libertadores-de-aotearoa/
This poster collection is the creative response by artist amig@s from Aotearoa to the invitation to design a poster and write a text about a liberator/activist from these islands whose work resonates personally with them.
The designs were printed in the legendary screenprint shop of the ICAIC in Havana, Cuba. The ICAIC printers who have produced seminal posters vital to the Cuban Revolution, and cinema and education since 1959. They use only manual techniques.
The result is a series of 12 posters and texts by:
Jon Bywater, Simon Cuming, Nicola Farquhar, Dion Hitchens, Tessa Laird, Katerina Mataira, Xavier Meade, Te Rita Papesch, Warren Olds, James Ormsby, Jenny Rhodes, Josh Watene & Leafa Wilson.