Avis Higgs

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Avis Winifred Higgs (21 September 1918 – 14 October 2016) was a New Zealand textile designer and painter. She was born in Wellington into a family of artists; her father, Sydney Higgs, was a well-known Wellington watercolourist. She went to Wellington East Girls' College and studied at the Art School of Wellington Technical College. In 1937 she won second place in a League of Nations poster design competition and earned a Special Art Scholarship.

She worked at National Distributors Ltd, doing lettering and poster design and learning screenprinting. When World War II began, she trained as a nurse but contracted diphtheria. In 1941, after recovering, a holiday in Sydney led her to stay; she became Head of Design at Silk & Textile Printers, where she worked from 1941 to 1946. Her designs drew on the Sydney scene, including Bondi Beach, and featured motifs like sailing boots, water skiers, surfers, seashells and sun umbrellas.

Higgs returned to New Zealand in 1948 and worked as a commercial artist at Screens Advertising, creating cinema advertisements. She continued to design textiles inspired by native plants, flowers and Māori taonga held at the Dominion Museum, and she produced modernist textiles using koru and other Māori carvings.

In 1951 she travelled to England, worked as an agent for a Parisian textile designer, and freelanced. A car accident in Italy left her badly injured, and she returned to New Zealand in 1952 after months in hospital in Rome. In 1954 she entered some of her earlier textile designs into a New Zealand Academy of Arts craft exhibition, which attracted press attention. The accident effectively ended her textile design career, and she focused on painting.

From the 1950s to the 1960s Higgs was active in Wellington’s art scene, exhibiting across New Zealand and winning several awards, including the National Bank award for watercolour in 1964 and a Special Merit prize in 1968. She later won the IBM New Zealand Fine Arts Award in 1985 and, in 2006, the Governor-General’s Art Award for her contribution to New Zealand art, with a retrospective at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts. In 2010 she was inducted into Massey University’s College of Creative Arts Hall of Fame.

Higgs’s work was showcased in major exhibitions, including The Eighties Show at The Dowse Art Museum in 1999. A survey of her life and work, Avis Higgs: joie de vivre, was published in 2001, and she also had a retrospective at the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery (now MTG Hawke’s Bay). She has been recognized as one of the most important designers in the 20th century by the Australian Ministry of Culture.