When Jenna Ingram started exploring street art at university, her painting tutor told her emphatically that “graffiti is dead”.

He may have been right. It was 2006. Graffiti crews were tagging suburban fences in the dark, and they were painted over by volunteer groups in the morning. But just five years later, Jenna was part of the explosion of urban artists that took to the broken city centre post-quake, creating hope-filled murals, stencils and paste-ups. Jenna and her husband and Fiksate co-owner Nathan pasted cartoon Band-Aids to soothe cracks in buildings, their contribution to the rebirth of urban art in Ōtautahi.

That thriving community of local artists needed a home, so in 2015, Jenna and Nathan created Fiksate, a studio space where urban artists could congregate, develop their craft and hold exhibitions. It’s now a vibrant gallery space in Gloucester Street, representing urban artists from all over Aotearoa. Fiksate is New Zealand’s only dedicated street art and urban contemporary gallery, hosting and selling work from locally- and internationally-renowned street artists. Considering Christchurch’s place on the international street art scene, it’s no wonder the country’s foremost gallery is here.

The Christchurch street art landscape sprung up almost overnight in the wake of the 2011 quake. It mirrored what had happened in tragedy-struck regions overseas: “Artists are often the first to take action after disaster,” Jenna says. The opinions of the public changed too. “People became more accepting of us trying to beautify what was an apocalyptic cityscape. It was a fresh canvas.”

Christchurch has since leaned into its identity as an urban art hub. In 2013 for its 10th birthday, the damaged Christchurch Art Gallery had no choice but to take its displays outside, with artists like Yvonne Todd and Dick Frizzell painting works around the city. Organised public art installations aren’t without their detractors – within weeks, one of the large-scale works had been tagged “Keep your shit 4 the gallerys”.

But the rebirth continued, and in 2014, George Shaw and Shannon Webster from Oi You! facilitated the Rise exhibition, which gave us now-iconic murals like Owen Dippie’s Ballerina on the back of the Isaac Theatre Royal and Roa’s Moa skeleton on the side of Canterbury Museum. Lonely Planet named Christchurch one of the street art capitals of the world in a 2017 book, alongside the likes of Barcelona, New York and Berlin.

As part of the Oi You! follow-up festival Spectrum, in 2015, Clint Park (Porta) and Reuben Woods (Bols) joined Jenna and Nathan to install the ‘Stick ‘em Up’ paste-up and sticker room, with contributions from artists all over the world, including an 8-year-old paste-up artist from New York. After that, they started Fiksate. “It grew organically,” Jenna says. “Most people didn’t know that these artists had a studio practice - there was a real lack of opportunities for urban artists to showcase their work, and we wanted to change that,” Jenna says. “Our aim was to build a close connection between these artists and the public by providing a space to showcase those works, and by making them available for the public to bring into their homes.”

So who should we look out for on a visit to Fiksate? “Meep is a Christchurch-based artist whose work spreads across a diverse range of fields, including graphic design, illustration, painting, graffiti, and clothing design. Her output is heavily influenced by hip hop culture, low-brow art, and sustainability issues.” Gallery co-owner Nathan Ingram, who goes by Dr Suits, has recently been picked up by two other galleries, and he’s producing abstract art using unique media, like spray paint on glass or risograph prints. Jenna herself paints as Jen Head; vibrant faces filled with objects that represent the multi-faceted nature of human emotion – sadness, joy and stress, among others.

Fiksate is open from Wednesday to Saturday and has a huge range of prints, sculptures and original work for sale, as well as a custom framing service. You can stretch your creative muscles at Fiksate every second Wednesday, when the artists run sticker-making and badge-making workshops.

fiksate.com