Bob Jahnke
New Zealand artist, writer, curator and professor (born 1951)
Robert Hans George Jahnke (born 1951) is a New Zealand artist and educator, well-known for his graphic and sculptural artwork. He is a professor at Massey University, founding Toioho ki Āpiti in 1991, the Māori visual arts degree programme in New Zealand.
Biography and education
Jahnke was born in 1951 in the Gisborne region and grew up in Waipiro Bay. His heritage is Māori, Samoan and Pākehā and he affiliates with the iwi Ngāti Porou through three hapū: Ngāi Taharora, Te Whānau a Iritekura, and Te Whānau a Rakairoa. He has German and Irish ancestry on his Pākehā side. He was educated at Hato Pāora College.
At Ardmore Teachers' College in Papakura in 1970, Jahnke was formally taught painting, ceramics and art history and realised he wanted a career in the arts. However, he did not complete his teachers' college study. After that he worked in a furniture factory and in the evenings went to AIT to study life-drawing and design.
Jahnke studied industrial design at Elam in Auckland starting in 1972, and went on to complete two master's degrees: a Master of Fine Arts in graphic design from Elam; and a Master of Fine Arts in experimental animation from the California Institute of the Arts.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Bob Jahnke” is new Zealand artist, writer, curator and professor (born 1951). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Jahnke, Zealand and artist, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q56612918. VIAF identifies the subject as 26221648. The Library of Congress control number is n90636009. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1951, 1991, 1970 and 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bob Jahnke” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.