Marilyn Kohlhase

In the 2023 New Year Honours, Kohlhase was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to Pacific arts and education.

As an arts administrator, Kohlhase has been on Auckland War Memorial Museum’s Pacific advisory group and the Museums Aotearoa board, leaving in 2018. While Kohlhase was chair of the Pacific Advisory Group, she expressed in a 2014 interview:

In 2007, Kohlhase co-founded with Bridget Marsh a pan-Pacific art gallery, Okaioceanikart, on Karangahape Road, Auckland, after an invitation from artist Fatu Feu'u. The gallery, which represented exclusively contemporary artists of the Pacific and Oceania, is believed to be the first gallery in the world to have this focus. Okaioceanikart gallery closed in 2013. Kohlhase also opened Okai@Reef Gallery with a similar purpose. Kohlhase is known by some as the "art lady".

She was involved with the Socialist Unity Party, and worked for the Centre of Continuing Education at Auckland University in the 1980s and the Council of Organisations for Relief Service Overseas (CORSO).

As a curator, Kohlhase is linked with decolonising art histories alongside others such as Caroline Vercoe, Lisa Taouma, Fulimalo Pereira, Sean Mallon, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Deidre Brown and Teresia Teaiwa (1968–2017).

Marilyn Rhonda Kohlhase MNZM (born 1953) is a New Zealand arts curator and administrator, specialising in Pacific Islands art. She has worked with Auckland War Memorial Museum and Creative New Zealand. Kohlhase set up the first uniquely pan-Pacific art gallery and is known as the "art lady" in some circles.