City Gallery City Gallery

Past event

Tuatara Open Late

Thursday 5 October, 4pm-10pm

Experience City Gallery Wellington after-hours with Open Late. Enjoy our changing programme of art, music, screenings, and talks on the first Thursday of the month. 

Start the evening with an insights tour of selected works from the new season of shows, expand your experience with Poets Respond: Beauty Incarnate' and dive into our drop-in watercolour painting session. End you night with the post-punk funk of E.U.G. 

Get your ticket to Wellington’s best Thursday here for $10 or $12 at the door. 


Drop-in and get hands- on with this activity inspired by the works in Folk Nationalism, by sketching and painting botanical studies of native rākau and ferns. Limited watercolour paint and materials are provided. Feel free to bring you own materials (dry media only please).

Join our expert tour guide for a highlights tour of our new season exhibitions; Diane Arbus: A Box of Ten Photographs, Ngahuia Harrison: Coastal Cannibals and Archive: alter / image. Spend time with selected artworks in each exhibition for insight into the artists’ work and what drives the ideas that inform their practices. 

George Watson’s Beauty Incarnate tweaks, rephrases and makes strange the material and subliminal nature of colonial inheritances to expose the persistence of Empire and unsettle its assumed position of authority. Join Wahine Māori poets Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, Kahu Kutia and Renae Williams as they offer responses to the exhibition.

End the night with the rousing post-punk of E.U.G. Usually heard in only the darkest sweatboxes of Wellington’s underground scene, E.U.G.’s frenetic, deliciously heavy sonics and potently tense lyricism will raise every hair on the back of your neck. Made up of local musicians Jordy Edwards (Mother’s Dearest) Frazer Charlton (Mother’s Dearest, Goya), Laura Robinson (Soft Plastics) and Lucas Donnell (Goya), this is one performance not to be missed.

All this along with our regular fixtures; Tuatara beers, Matahiwi estate wine, food truck and sounds from a RadioActive DJ.


Thursday 5 October, 4.00pm-10.00pm | $10 pre-sales | $12 door sales

4.00pm DJ, Exhibitions and Shop Open

5.00pm-9.30pm Bar and Shouk Israeli Food Truck open

5.00pm-9.00pm Sketch & Paint: Native Botanicals

6.00pm-6.45pm Exhibition Tour: New Season Highlights

7.00pm-8.00pm Poets Respond: Beauty Incarnate

8.45pm-9.45pm Live Music: E.U.G.

Please consider supporting Open Late and our other programmes with a donation when you arrive.