Dowse Art Museum

The Dowse Art Museum is Lower Hutt's most significant cultural institution — a modern gallery with a strong collection of New Zealand contemporary art, craft, and design. The building itself is compact and well-organised, with galleries rotating through the permanent collection and a programme of temporary exhibitions that tends to be more experimental than the city-centre galleries in Wellington.

The Dowse is particularly known for its craft and design collection: jewellery, ceramics, glass, and textile work by New Zealand makers from the 1970s to the present. Entry to the permanent collection is free. The museum has a café and a well-stocked gallery shop. It is in the civic centre of Lower Hutt, a five-minute walk from the train station.

things to do museum
A story
The Dowse opened in 1971, named after Lower Hutt's long-serving mayor Walter Mervyn Dowse. It was one of the first public galleries in New Zealand to collect contemporary New Zealand craft and design as art in its own right — not as craft or applied art, but as a serious collecting discipline. Today its collection of jewellery, ceramics, and decorative objects is among the strongest of its kind in the country.