As a prominent Māori artist, Robyn Kahukiwa (Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Ngāti Hau, Ngāti Konohi, Whanau-a-Ruataupare), has established a strong connection between art and politics. Australian born, Kahukiwa re-established her whakapapa links on her return to Aotearoa New Zealand. Events of the mid-1970s including the Hikoi (Land March on Parliament) and the passing of the Treaty of Waitangi Act encouraged her interest in issues relevant to Māori. Kahukiwa's work often deals with themes of colonialism and the dispossession of indigenous people, motherhood and blood-ties, social custom and mythology, her work is part of her process of reclaiming and affirming identity. 

Kahukiwa has a considerable interest in connecting with the Māori community and specifically with the rangitahi (young Māori people) through her work. In 1972 she was employed as an art teacher at Mana College in Porirua. Art Historian and curator Jonathan Mane-Wheoki wrote: ‘Painting from her experience, and as a largely self-taught artist, initially meant empathising with her Māori and Pacific Island students’ sense of alienation, urbanisation, detribalisation and cultural dislocation and disorientation, and delineating images of the ‘outsider’ in a painfully sincere form of realism’.