Darcy Nicholas is a leading Maori painter and sculptor. He has been a key member of the Contemporary Maori Art movement since the 1960s and has exhibited widely throughout the world.

"My art is about identity… the ancestral lines that connect me with the multiversal nature of our people. We have to survive both as a tribal and a global people in this new age of technology and rapid change."

Raised in Taranaki, New Zealand, Darcy is the eleventh child in a family of twelve siblings. Growing up on the site where the New Zealand Land Wars began in the mid 19th century, he learned his culture by living it, surrounded by his parents and elders, many of whom had been born in the 1800s.

Darcy has travelled widely and works with internationally recognised indigenous artists such as Dempsey Bob with whom he has exhibited at the Spirit Wrestler Gallery, Vancouver. As Creative Director of Porirua's Pataka Museum of Arts and Cultures October 2009 saw Darcy oversee the continuation of bi-annual Maori Art Market first launched as 'Maori Art Meets America in San Francisco 2005'. Darcy Nicholas works tirelessly to mentor young artists whilst building a richly deserved international profile for Maori art.