Californian artist brings the moa back from extinction

An Emmy award-winning Los Angeles artist has opened a quirky multi-media exhibition in New Zealand as a unique tribute to his late cousin.
Gary Baseman is a prolific artist who has produced a massive body of work over the past 45 years, including designing the artwork for the board game Cranium, and creating the animated TV series Teacher’s Pet that received several Emmy awards and a Bafta.
The inspiration for his latest exhibition Memento Moa in Taupō came from his cousin Beverly, who he grew up with as a child in LA.
Playing off the phrase ‘memento mori’ which expresses the inevitability of death, the Californian artist reimagines Aotearoa as a land of rebirth and harmony, bringing back the giant moa from extinction to symbolise those loved and now lost.
Beverly was five years older than Baseman but they lived less than a block away from each other and were very close.
“Most beautiful smile, funny, fun and it was easy for her to become my favourite cousin as a little boy.”
“She became an ER nurse in LA – it’s much different than New Zealand – lot of gunshots and knife wounds so she needed to take a lot of vacations.”
She also “dabbled” in photography and on a trip to NZ she met acclaimed Kiwi landscape photographer Craig Potton in Nelson.
“From there, they fell in love, got married, had a kid and I became a well-known artist and illustrator. I was doing work for the New Yorker, the New York Times, TIME magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly. I was doing 12 to 20 assignments every month.”
They stayed in touch, but Baseman’s “crazy workaholic” lifestyle and the demand for his work in LA and New York meant he never found the time to come over to New Zealand.
Then Beverly was diagnosed with cancer and died in 2005 at the age of 51.
“That was a really busy, odd, interesting time for me and I was dealing with a lot of change and the idea of losing Beverly who was way too young to die kind of broke my heart.”
About 12 years after her death, he finally made it over to New Zealand.
“I saw how beautiful her adopted homeland was and was very inspired by it.
“Craig Potton happens to be the premiere landscape photographer of New Zealand. You can’t go to a bookstore without finding a Craig Potton book. He knows how to capture the beauty of New Zealand, so being able to see it through his eyes.”
He also had a fascination with prehistoric creatures, having grown up near the La Brea Tar Pits in LA which have produced the biggest collection of Ice Age fossils, like Colombian mammoths, saber tooth cats and other creatures of a bygone era.
The story of the moa intrigued him and a body of work was created, resulting in an exhibition called Memento Moa, which has so far been shown at The Suter Art Gallery in Nelson and now at Taupō Museum and Art Gallery.
The Taupō exhibition opened on Friday, September 27, on Baseman’s 64th birthday.
“The moa kind of touched me in a way that this creature didn’t exist any more, like my cousin Beverly, that finding a way for me to understand a bit of New Zealand, mix it with my love for her and find a way to create a body of work … She was way too young. She wasn’t a kid but she still had a full life ahead of her and if you ever met her she was full of life.”
He has created artwork mainly in the form of paintings which draw inspiration from a wide range of influences, including a strong Alice in Wonderland influence, incorporating Beverly as the main character, plus a bit of Andy Warhol, Alfred Hitchcock, Frida Kahlo, Lucille Ball, John Lennon, David Bowie, Louis Armstrong and his own cat Blackie, “who was a giant inspiration to my work and my life”. Blackie died during the Covid-19 pandemic.
His first exhibition in Nelson was delayed three times by the pandemic, which allowed the body of work to mature. He has more than 150 sketch books full of drawings leading up to the final works that appear in the exhibition.
The exhibition also includes an array of stuffed moa, that people can buy. They have Victorian mourning lockets around their necks so people can add a photo of a person or pet they have loved and lost.
“Not only was I going into the bush, seeing the prehistoric plantings and trees and how insanely beautiful everything was, I would go into the museums and learning about the flightless birds of course and then also the moa as an extinct creature that existed here forever, until man showed up and within 200 years, because it was such an easy bird to kill or eat or use all the elements of it, within 200 years it was gone.”
His art also plays off his love of cats and New Zealanders’ love for the environment and the need to protect the flightless birds.
“For me, it’s the irony of it because I am such a very pro cat person but I understand [it] being a predator and so for me that is kind of a play off it.”
The exhibition runs from September 28 to December 9 at the Taupō Museum and Art Gallery.