OTN STUFF

Art Gallery news

2012-01-27T19:22:00.002+13:00

MEDIA RELEASE 27 January 2012

Christchurch Art Gallery to re-open mid-2013

Christchurch Art Gallery expects to re-open in mid-2013 – but in the meantime it will continue to offer art and art-related programmes beyond its walls.

Engineers are still investigating a number of options for repairs and working through these with Christchurch City Council’s insurers. Recommendations are expected to go to the Council for consideration and approval in June.

Gallery Director Jenny Harper says engineering reports indicate that the Gallery’s primary structure performed exceptionally well during the earthquakes and aftershocks since September 2010. It is also clear that the December aftershocks have caused only a small amount of cosmetic damage.

However, secondary structural elements such as the glass façade, the wall cladding and parapets above the Worcester Boulevard-facing side of the Gallery, and the ceilings and fittings in the foyer and in some galleries have sustained damage. The way the building and its car park has settled is also the subject of further engineering analysis.

“Due to the extent and the complexity of the likely repair work, it has become clear that the Gallery will not be able to re-open as early as we had hoped. Even after Council approval for the work is gained, it is likely to take nine months for repairs to be completed and three to relocate the collections and install new exhibitions both upstairs and down. We need to accept this situation and plan accordingly,” Ms Harper says.

She says that the Gallery’s exhibition programme and its reputation as a lively and successful art gallery is dependent on being able to borrow national and international works of art. “It is a key priority for us to be in mint condition when we re-open and to be able to reassure lenders that their works will be safe in Canterbury. While the Gallery’s own collection has come through the earthquakes with almost no damage, its ongoing safety is also of vital importance,” she says.

“Christchurch citizens have really embraced their Gallery over past years, with local residents coming in large numbers and returning often. We appreciate that the
expected opening is later than they would like and Gallery staff share this disappointment with our many supporters.

“However, since our closure in February last year, staff have actively embraced becoming a ‘Gallery without walls’. The Gallery’s Outer Spaces initiative, which brings art and art-related programmes to the people of Christchurch and further afield, has been a great success and more projects will unfold over the next few months. Since the Gallery’s closure, its education programmes have been delivered directly to schools and this will continue.

“The Gallery has also been working hard to increase its online presence and it will continue to do this. The new functions in our collection online and My Gallery function are the sorts of things that many galleries in the world are dreaming of.”

The latest Outer Spaces project is an exhibition by Christchurch artist Julia Morison, which will open above NG and The National in Madras Street, a space overlooking the inner-city red zone on 10 February.

Ms Harper says the Gallery has been looking for an alternative exhibition space and has so far considered several options.

“At present the Centre for Contemporary Art (CoCA), next door to the Gallery, is equally constrained by the demolition of the nearby Gallery Apartments. However, their repairs are not expected to take as long as the Gallery’s and this is being discussed as a potential space. The Gallery is keen to investigate other interesting possibilities as well,” she says.

______________________________________________________________
For further information or images please contact:
Rachel Solotti on 027 236 9054
Or Media Adviser Jocelyn Ritchie on 027 241 0244

Hirst card

2011-12-22T17:53:00.003+13:00

Left the original card and right Hirst's painting using the same image

First Christmas card

2011-12-21T14:04:00.000+13:00

The corrections

2011-12-18T22:33:00.000+13:00

Hi there,

Based on the figures in most recent Annual Report, 1,334,712 visitors came through the door in the 2010-2011 year. We divided that by your government contribution of $23,574,000 and came up with the figure of $17.66 per visit. Is this right? It is at odds with the figure of $11.40 per visit stated on page 8.

Can you tell us:

1. how the $11.40 figure was constructed.

2. why the cost per visit doesn’t use the formula of total operating costs divided by number of visits to the building.

3. the percentage of visitors to Te Papa who come for reasons other than to specifically look at the collections or exhibitions, ie Film Festivals, weddings, conferences etc.

Cheers,

Jim and Mary

Kia ora Jim and Mary

Thanks for your email and for your interest in the annual report.

The $11.40 figure is an average over the period shown in the chart and relates to visitors to Cable St and to touring exhibitions, as this reflects Te Papa’s broader reach. We are focussed on increasing our national reach – which as the national museum we are funded by central government to do – so in this case, the logic of using total visitation works. What we were trying to show with those figures was the cost to the taxpayer of running Te Papa. As you’ll be aware, we do generate a significant amount of revenue ourselves.

You can see that more people have visited our touring exhibitions over the period, which we’re very pleased about. Unfortunately, we don’t have data on visitors to conferences, film festivals etc, but this is something we are looking at improving our data on. However, I understand that our approach is consistent with other museums and galleries.

All people who enter Te Papa during the hours it is open to the public are electronically counted. Data about where people go or what they visit is based on exit interviews, from a sample. These interviews seek insight into how engaged visitors are with the collection, their views on particular exhibitions, and possible improvements that could be made. Our visitor researchers ask about motivation, prior knowledge and also time spent in parts of the building.

Trick or treat?

2011-12-16T12:49:00.000+13:00

Love love, by Julien Berthier

Te Papa art purchases 2010-2011

2011-12-06T14:21:00.001+13:00

ART Paintings – New Zealand
Maoris on a Riverbank by Frank Wright, oil painting, 305 x 495 mm (h x w, sight), not dated, gift of Marlene and Renée Colclough in memory of Irene Colclough
Ngā Toenga (daughter of Barrier Island Chief) by George F. Angas, watercolour on paper, 840 x 615 mm (h x w), 1844, purchase
Souvenir of the Boer War by M. Airey, oil on canvas, 820 x 1090 mm (h x w), c1902, purchase
Te Pehi Kupe, Warrior of the Ngati Toa Tribe by Sam Stuart, oil on canvas, 370 x 290 mm (h x w), 1906, purchase
Edith by Toss Woollaston, oil on cardboard, 480 x 430 mm (h x w, support), 1948, purchase
Les deux amies (The two friends) by Louise Henderson, oil on canvas, 740 x 560 mm (h x w), 1953, purchase
Untitled (kowhaiwhai painting) by Theo Schoon, tempera on cardboard, 1155 x 850 mm (h x l), c1957, purchase
Painting red by Milan Mrkusich, oil on canvas, 762 x 762 mm (h x w),1968, purchase
Pocket full of rainbows by Seraphine Pick, oil on canvas, 2000 x 1650 mm (h x w, support), 2010, purchase
Paintings – International
Poedua (Poetua), daughter of Oreo, chief of Ulaietea, one of the Society Isles by John Webber, oil on canvas, 1445 x 925 mm (support h x w), 1785, purchase
A moko takahe by J.G. Keulemans, oil on canvas, 863 x 1118 mm (h x w), 1902, purchase
Works on Paper – New Zealand
Works on paper (5) by Toss Woollaston, various measurements, 1938–85, purchase
Sublunary wardrobe (3 works from), by Joanna Paul, chalk pastel on paper, 370 mm (support diameter), 2002, gift of the Friends of Te Papa
Aquarium (with sunglasses) and Aquarium (with bottles) by Nick Austin, acrylic paint on newspaper, 575 x 785 mm (h x w, each), 2009 and 2011, purchase
Works on Paper – International
An allegory of visual perception by Jan Saenredam, engraving, 241 x 181 mm (h x w), 1616, purchase
Banks Florilegium Parts XX to Part XXVII (complete set of New Zealand plants, 184 engraved plates) by Sydney Parkinson/Alecto Historical Editions Limited, measurements not available, 1769- 70/1980-89, purchased with the assistance of the Friends of Te Papa
Fête à Ferrières no.2 by Anthony Gross, etching, 198 x 298 mm (image h x w), 1954, purchase
Sculptures and Decorative Forms
Necklace by Colin McCahon, woven threads and cut tin painted in enamel colours, measurements not available, 1949-53, purchase
Untitled by Gordon McAuslan, wood sculpture, 345 mm (height), c1950, purchase
Ceramic works (8) by Len Castle, various measurements and dates, purchase
Tribute to Hone Tuwhare by Jim Allen, installation, 2000 x 2000 x 2000 mm (h x w x d, overall), 1969/2010, purchase
Small Worlds by Jim Allen, installation, 2000 x 2000 x 4000 mm (h x w x d, overall), 1969/2010, purchase
Modern arrangements by L Budd (et al.), installation, various measurements, 1990, purchased from the Molly Morpeth Canaday Fund
Rings (5) by Karl Fritsch, gold, silver, granite, iron, diamond and brass, various measurements and dates, purchase
Steinhaufenring by Karl Fritsch, silver and coloured glass ring, 80 x 55 x 55 mm (h x w x d), 2006, purchase
My name in lights by Daniel Malone, neon light installation, 1140 x 2950 x 50 mm, 2006, purchase
Six silver bullets (one missing) II by Peter McKay, sterling silver brooch, 2007, purchase
New Twists (5 works from) by Pauline Rhodes, aluminium, wool and silk sculpture (1) and photographs (4), various measurements, 2008, purchase
Pendant, by Lisa Walker, measurements not available, 2009, purchase
Necklace and What Karl didn't take with him by Lisa Walker, mixed media necklaces, measurement not available and 400 mm (l), 2009-10, purchase
Handy Andy with red by Bill Culbert, light sculpture/assemblage, 310 x 600 x 90 mm (h x w x d), 2010, purchase
Photographs – New Zealand
Whole-plate negatives (11) depicting prominent nineteenth century chiefs, by various photographer, black and white gelatin negatives and gelatin glass negatives, various measurements and dates, gift of Roger Andrews
Bowen Fall - Milford Sound by Burton Brothers, albumen print, 213 x 287 mm (h x w), 1889; purchase
Māori-themed postcards (6) by various photographers and printers, gelatin silver photographs/postcards, various measurements, c1900, purchase
Black and white stereoscopic photographs and two leather bound photograph albums, various measurements and various dates, purchase
Lake Mapourika and Buddha image, National Museum Bangkok, Thailand by Brian Brake, gelatin silver print and type C print, 350 x 455 mm and 455 x 350 mm (h x w), 1951 and 1970, purchase
Black & white photographs (25) by Terry O’Connor, gelatin silver prints, various measurements and dates, purchase
Brian Brake film items and prints, various materials, measurements and dates, gift of Wai Man Raymond Lau
Cosmo flying disc I-IV by Darren Glass, toned gelatin silver print on printing-out paper, 252 x 203 mm (h x w, each), 1999-2009, purchase
Hangi rock, no 1-3 by Ross T. Smith, pinhole gelatin silver photographs, 122 x 97 mm (h x w, each), 2005, purchase
Ruby's room, portfolio of 30 inkjet colour photographs by Anne Noble, various measurements, 2010, purchase
Contemporary Māori
Digital Marae by Lisa Reihana, type C prints (6), 2000 mm x 1200 m (h x w, approximate, each), 2007, purchaseDigital Marae by Lisa Reihana, digital videos (2), 2001 and 2008, gift of the artist
Groundswell by Lisa Reihana, eight monitor video installation, 2005, purchase
Te Pūtahitanga ō Rehua by Reuben Paterson, animated video, 2005, gift of the artist
Shark, Angel, Bird, Ladder, by John Pule, oil paint, enamel, ink & polyurethane on canvas, 2000 x 4000 mm (h x w), 2008, purchase
Five works from the Waka Huia exhibition by Areta Wilkinson, jewellery made with sterling sliver, gold, wood and muka (flax fibre), various measurements, 2008, purchase
Ruatepupuke and Hei Tiki Tipuna Wahine, by Stacy Gordine, hei tiki, measurements not available, 2009, purchase
Whakapapa Get Down on Your Knees (2), by Reuben Paterson, glitter and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 4000 x 4000 mm (h x w), 2009, purchase
Back Bone by Shane Cotton, oil on canvas, 1400 x 1400 mm (h x w), 2010, purchase
Contemporary Art – International
Nauru, Notes from a Cretaceous World by Nicholas Mangan, mixed media installation including digital video, coral coffee table, collage and a modified cartoon, various measurements, 2009-10
Pacific Sediment part of Nauru, Notes from a Cretaceous World by Nicholas Mangan, found material in custom-built vitrine, 900 x 1380 x 740 mm (h x w x d), 2009-10, gift of the artist
Other
The Field (Part II) by Gavin Hipkins, digital video, 2003-04, gift of the artist

The Depot responds

2011-12-01T00:07:00.000+13:00

Thank you for taking up discussion on Over the Net regarding our recent newsletter (no press release was issued) outlining the lack of CNZ support for the Cultural Icons project. There are some good points raised in your blog post, please accept this (rather lengthy) response to it:

We are aware of the lack of diversity in the project – both in discipline and culture - this has arisen for a number of reasons: We have not selected or prioritised but have undertaken the interviews according to recommendation and subject/interviewer availability. Because we envisaged the series as ongoing (we were inspired by Radio Pacifica which began in 1946 and has something like 50,000 interviews in its archives) we intended to include everyone who should be included.

We agree with your observation that the Cultural Icons so far included in the programme show a noticeable lack of Maori/Pacific Island cultural contributors represented. Our funding application highlighted this in the project aims we hoped to achieve with support from CNZ:

“These outcomes will assist us in our overall project aims to:

Develop the diversity of Cultural Icons interviews and programmes available online by including high quality arts practitioners from throughout New Zealand’s cultural and ethnic communities. This will help to raise awareness of culturally diverse art in an easily accessible, enriching and unique platform www.culturalicons.co.nz. This new series of interviews/programmes will specifically highlight New Zealand’s visual artists.”

Initial funding for the project was from the Auckland Regional Services Trust (ARST), hence the Auckland focus. It was used to establish the website, format, initial interviews (predominantly of writers in residence at the Michael King Writers Centre). Now, with a multi-media platform worthy of such a project, industry support and a growing and appreciative audience we require further support to develop it further, to including cultural contributors from outside of Auckland, from many disciplines and from diverse cultures.

The other consideration we needed to make in the application was the structure of applying for support through Creative New Zealand. There is no category for ‘multidisciplinary’ projects and no avenue for applying for support for the project as a whole entity (other than Investment Funding in which an organisation is required to have a history with CNZ – The Depot has been unsuccessful gaining CNZ support for any project for 15 years!) We were recommended by CNZ to apply for 20 x Visual Arts interviews only. Then, in the next round, we could have applied for 20 x Literature interviews and so on.

As you identify, the project and its development have been affected/directed by available sources of funding. We are continually looking for funding and will apply to any source where the project fits the criteria. For example, we recently received some funding from Auckland Council’s Arts North team to interview 5 ‘icons’ in the north of Auckland and have asked locals to nominate ‘icons’ in their community. www.culturaliconsnorth.co.nz Another application seeks support for Maori Cultural Icons from the same districts – here we work with marae and local communities calling for their nominations of Cultural Icons. And yet another for a Cultural Icons Sculpture Series.

We also have a number of women on whom we are waiting to commit themselves to an interview. We have found that women are often more reluctant than men to be interviewed and are also, for some reason, less available; for example, Maureen Lander has been on our list for some months, as has Alison East. Jo Drayton is booked to talk about Frances Hodgkins in February. (A new segment of the series involves significant artists who have died and we have a panel to be organised for Colin Mccahon, and Janet Frame’s niece to be interviewed when she is next in Auckland)

Our goal is to secure funding that enables us to carry out as many interviews as our community recording studio will accommodate and as our time to edit and download will allow. We feel perhaps that seeking sponsorship could be the best avenue for this and for ensuring that the great and rich diversity of cultures and disciplines, and gender balance, are represented.

The Depot has for fifteen years has honoured and sought to actively represent its philosophy, an aspect of which is inclusiveness, from which the Cultural Icons series originated.

Collectors

2011-10-15T21:32:00.002+13:00

Comments on Art Gallery directors having a fixed term

2011-09-26T07:21:00.001+13:00

HARRY CUNDY 26-9-11: I can imagine there might be genuine and reasonable grounds for fixing a maximum term for directors. So, no, they could do it if they wanted.

OTN 25-9-11 right: ... but what does that all mean to the Govett-Brewster? Does this legislation prevent them having a five year maximum term for their directors?

COMMENT HARRY CUNDY 25-9-11: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2000/0024/latest/DLM59161.html?search=ts_act_employment+relations+act_resel&p=1#DLM59161

OTN 25-9-11: "An employer may not employ someone on a fixed-term agreement where the job is really a permanent one and the employer really wants to avoid having to go through a fair disciplinary or dismissal procedure if there are problems." - Biz.govt.nz

COMMENT FROM ANDREW CLIFFORD 24-09-11: That's an interesting clarification about the Employment Relations Act and fixed term positions. So how does that work for Artspace's 3-year directorship and Te Tuhi's 3-year term curatorship?

COMMENT FROM THE GOVETT-BREWSTER ART GALLERY 23-09-11: There is no mention in the Monica Brewster Trust Deed, which established the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, of the Gallery Director having a five-year tenure. An Advisory Committee (made up of Directors of other art galleries) was established in the 1970s and was responsible for selecting a Director for the Gallery. This Committee did have a practice of employing a Director for a term of five years. The New Plymouth District Council(NPDC), which is now responsible for employing the Gallery's Director, initially continued the practice of a five-year term. However, under the Employment Relations Act, a fixed term is not possible for a permanent position, and so it is not possible for NPDC to have in place a practice where the Gallery Director has a fixed tenure of five years. Former Director Greg Burke was employed for seven years.

focus

2011-09-10T16:53:00.000+12:00

Te Papa Visitor & Market Research Unit
Focus Group Information Sheet

You have been invited to participate in a focus group discussion at Te Papa because of your professional knowledge and interest in New Zealand art. There will be eight participants present as well as Te Papa staff who will observe the discussions. Notes will be taken, and our conversations will be recorded for analysis.

While more information will be provided at the beginning of the evening, the aim of the discussion is for you and the others to explore & discuss some ideas and concepts Te Papa has about the possible re-development of the museum’s art exhibition spaces on level five. It could be a very interesting evening.

It will be held at Te Papa on Tuesday, 16 August 2011. Please be at the ‘black revolving ball’ inside Te Papa’s main entrance no later than 4.40 p.m. One of our staff will be waiting for you.

The discussion will run from 4:45 to 6.45 p.m.. If you arrive by car, please park in the Te Papa car park – we will provide a parking voucher to ensure you are not charged when leaving. Food and refreshments will also be provided, and a $50 Te Papa Store gift voucher will be provided as koha for your participation.

All research undertaken with people at Te Papa meets the requirements of the New Zealand Privacy Act 1993 and the ethical requirements contained in the New Zealand Market Research Society Guidelines.

If you agree to participate, your participation is entirely voluntary. You can withdraw your agreement at any time for whatever reason.

The information you provide will not be published in any form that willidentify you personally. If you agree to participate, you also agree to not disclose what other people said or did during the sessions. This protects everyone’s right to privacy. Te Papa staff are also required to abide by this privacy rule.

The focus group discussions will be recorded (by hand and audio and/or video). They will be held in secure storage and will be destroyed upon completion of the final report. There will be observers present; these would be people who are responsible for exhibition development and delivery.

If you have any questions, or require additional information,
please contact the focus group facilitator.
Stephen Owen, Te Papa Visitor & Market Research Manager.
Tel: 04 381 7133. E-mail: stepheno@tepapa.govt.nz

Green thing, you make my heart sing

2011-08-22T16:50:00.000+12:00

Jeff Koons Bowl of eggs (green)

Len Lye Centre plans: click on image to enlarge

2011-07-31T16:00:00.000+12:00

LA Icon

2011-07-15T17:08:00.000+12:00

Hidden gems

2011-06-06T03:12:00.000+12:00

On first looking into Chapman's Homer

2011-06-01T05:00:00.000+12:00

Dominion Post survey

2011-05-23T03:10:00.000+12:00

Now you know

2011-05-07T05:44:00.001+12:00

Artist Peter Adsett's house and studio on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia with Buren additions.

Christchurch Quake

2011-02-28T13:17:00.018+13:00

People from the Art Community that have been sighted and are ok, in so far as you can be in Christchurch at the moment.

If you have additions to this list you can email us at: jim@barrs.co.nz or mary@barrs.co.nz

Matt Akehurst
Glen Busch
Roger Boyce
Helen Calder
Tyler Cann
Stephen Cleland
Vanessa Coxhead
Bing Dawe
Margaret Dawson
Neil Dawson
Andrew Drummond
Warren Feeney
Judith Gifford
Jason Greig
Jessica Halliday
Bill Hammond
Georgigie Hill
Paul Johns
Joanna Langford (in ChCh day of quake, but ok)
Tony de Lautour
Kim Lowe
Marie le Lievre
Quentin Macfarlane
Marian Maguire
Ross Marwick
Felicity Milburn
Christopher Moore
Julia Morison
Robin Neate
Miranda Parkes
Justin Paton
Pauline Rhodes
Jonathan Smart
Heather Straka
Lara Strongman
Grant Takle
Martin Trusttum
Philip Trusttum
Lee Trusttum
Kate Ungar
Creon Upton
Evan Webb
Andrew Wood
David Woodings
Wayne Youle
Jane Zusters

The staff of the Christchurch Art Gallery
The team working on SCAPE

Te Papa Vision

2011-02-20T14:46:00.001+13:00

Te Papa’s vision is to be:

■ relevant to all New Zealanders through stories of our collections and scholarship, and through these engage with communities throughout New Zealand

■ a source of experiences for audiences to grow their understanding and respect for mātauranga Māori, and the different cultures of New Zealand

■ a means of access to the best collections from around the world

■ creative, collaborative, and outward looking

■ fun, challenging, and always enriching.

Give me your tired, your poor...

2011-02-05T17:57:00.000+13:00

From: "Kim Knight (SUN)"
Date: 4 February 2011 3:09:37 PM NZDT
To: "Kim Knight (SUN)"
Subject: sunday star-times arts coverage

Dear All,

An email flung far and wide to those who work in, or support, the arts in NZ, and who want to see more column centimetres devoted to the cause.
We're proposing a new piece of arts "furniture" in the Sunday Star-Times - basically an occasional column of bite size, quirky, newsy pieces from the worlds of visual and performing arts.
Finally, a place to put 100 words about something that doesn't quite make it across the line as a stand alone news story.
The emphasis would be on the odd (and the funny and the gossipy and the behind the scenes), but it could also be a place to feature a really great quote from an online review (attributed of course!), to alert people to a new project, maybe to list dates for funding applications, to feature new appointments in the sector, etc.
It will not be a place to repeat press releases or run general listings, although I always welcome knowing what's going on out there.
I'm after some ideas, and some support - it will only work if people from around the country send me material.
Ideas? Thoughts? Idle arts goss?
I'm on leave for a week but look forward to a full in-box on my return.

Kind regards,

Kim Knight

365 days

2011-01-29T17:13:00.000+13:00

Giovanni Intra 365 Days 1991, collection Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington

Heat reference

2011-01-04T05:33:00.000+13:00

Impala Land

2010-12-18T08:55:00.002+13:00

Arts Access Aotearoa $278,000
Choirs Aotearoa New Zealand $290,000
Christchurch Symphony Orchestra $750,000
Circa Theatre $273,000
Downstage Theatre (Not included in the 2011 funding list)
Footnote Dance $370,000
Fortune Theatre $480,000
Southern Sinfonia $315,000
Vector Wellington Orchestra $365,000

Limping impala

2010-12-15T23:36:00.000+13:00

A rough guide...

2010-12-05T15:18:00.000+13:00

...to Government spending on museum building projects over the last 10 years.

2000
Christchurch Art Gallery (2000) 6,474,000
2001
Aratoi - Wairarapa 320,000
Eastern Southland Gallery - Gore 30,000
Puke Ariki 4,200,000
2002
Canterbury Museum 15,750,000
2005Auckland Museum redevelopment 26,500,000
Dowse extension 1,969,000
2007
Tauranga Art Gallery 750,000
2008
Auckland Art Gallery redevelopment 30,000,000
Otago Settlers Museum 6,000,000
Rotorua Museum extension 7,500,000
2010
Hawke's Bay Museum and Gallery extension 6,000,000

Thanks B

Koru #2

2010-10-20T11:58:00.003+13:00

Comment on roundabout exhibition

2010-09-27T22:19:00.007+13:00

Mike Weston has asked for his comments on collectors and the roundabout exhibition to be removed. 3 October 2010

Walters: Stevenson

2010-09-19T21:59:00.000+12:00

Nominees for the Walters Prize contemporary art award have been announced.

In their initial deliberations, the Walters Prize 2010 jury nominated the project Persepolis 2530, by Michael Stevenson, for inclusion in the Prize.* Although the nomination itself stands, the Auckland Art Gallery regrets that due to accommodation and budgetary constraints it was not possible to realise Persepolis 2530 as part of the Walters Prize 2010

Koru

2010-09-13T20:10:00.001+12:00

Walters press release

2010-04-23T17:54:00.001+12:00

Auckland Art Gallery MEDIA RELEASE

Friday 23 April 2010

The nominees for New Zealand’s most important award for contemporary art have been decided.

The $50,000 Walters Prize is awarded for an outstanding work of contemporary New Zealand art produced and exhibited during the past two years. Previous winners were Yvonne Todd for Asthma and Eczema (2002), et al. for restricted access (2004), Francis Upritchard for Doomed, Doomed, All Doomed (2006) and Peter Robinson for ACK (2008).

Named in honour of the late New Zealand artist Gordon Walters, the prize was established in 2002 by founding benefactors and principal donors Erika and Robin Congreve and Dame Jenny Gibbs, working together with the Auckland Art Gallery. The Prize set out to make contemporary art a more widely recognised and debated feature of our cultural life.

FINALISTS FOR THE WALTERS PRIZE 2010 Dan Arps: Explaining Things shown at Gambia Castle, Auckland (7-24 December 2008) Fiona Connor: Something Transparent (please go round the back) shown at Michael Lett, Auckland (15 April – 16 May 2009) Saskia Leek: Yellow is the Putty of the World shown at Ivan Anthony, Auckland (25 November – 23 December 2009) Alex Monteith: Passing Manoeuvre with two motorcycles and 584 vehicles for two-channel video shown at ST PAUL St, AUT University, Auckland (19 June – 7 July 2008)

The four finalists will each receive $5,000, thanks to major donor Dayle Mace.

* Michael Stevenson: Persepolis 2530 shown at Arnolfini, Bristol (2 February - 25 March 2008)

Auckland Art Gallery Director Chris Saines says – “The Walters Prize jury has again drawn out a strong and conceptually diverse group of works for inclusion in this year’s Prize exhibition. Seen together, the finalist projects offer a lively and engaged register of the current state of play within New Zealand contemporary art.

I want to congratulate warmly Dan Arps, Fiona Connor, Saskia Leek and Alex Monteith on achieving their thoroughly deserved place among this year’s finalists. At the same moment, I want to acknowledge as well the Gallery’s inability to stage Michael Stevenson’s ambitious Persepolis 2530, a project included in the first round of jury nominations.

In that context, it is important to recognise that the award of the Walters Prize is made by a visiting judge with the sole task of selecting one work from the four Prize exhibition finalists. As a result, while Persepolis 2530 remains a jury nominee, the judge is unable to consider the project for the 2010 award.

This year marks a decade since we inaugurated the biennial Walters Prize. The Prize continues to go from strength to strength, as the high quality of this year’s finalists proves once again. It is encouraging to see too that, taken together, they are the youngest in the Prize’s history”

JURORS Jon Bywater - Programme Leader, Critical Studies at Elam School of Fine Art, The University of Auckland. Rhana Devenport - Director, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth Leonhard Emmerling - Visual Arts Adviser, Goethe Institute, Munich, Germany, former Director, ST PAUL St, AUT University Kate Montgomery – Director, Physics Room, Christchurch

INTERNATIONAL JUDGE The international judge for the Walters Prize 2010 prize will be named later this year. They will select the winner, announced at a gala dinner in October. The winner will receive $50,000 and an all expenses paid trip to New York, including the opportunity to exhibit their work at Saatchi & Saatchi’s world headquarters. The Walters Prize 2008 international judge was Paris-based curator and writer Catherine David.

JURORS STATEMENT “The five projects or bodies of work we have selected for the Walters Prize 2010 were chosen for what they have in common. As the Prize’s criteria stipulate, they are considered to be the most outstanding contributions to contemporary New Zealand art shown in the time since the last Prize was shortlisted. At the same time, however, they are quite unalike. They offer notably different kinds of pleasures and puzzles, and have been created through contrasting artistic approaches. This highlights a key challenge of our task as jurors, which has been to remain alert to what impacts in a valuable way on the practice and reception of New Zealand art. Mediated by debate, our collective sense of what constitutes artistic excellence agreed on the diverse successes of each project.”

Dan Arps

Born 1976 Lives in Auckland MFA (Hons), The University of Auckland 2006 BFA Sculpture, University of Canterbury 2000 Nominated for Explaining Things (2008) Jurors comment: “Where the art stops and the ordinary world starts is a point Dan Arps often blurs with his work. He has made careful formal gestures with materials as banal as breakfast cereal and sheets of newspaper - things a long way from the everyday idea of art. At the same time, he has made gestural paintings and elaborate objects on plinths - almost parodies of a clichéd idea of art. In Explaining Things, the expressive and the deadpan are jammed together in this way. Chunks of mass cultural detritus - You Tube clips, furniture, ornaments and posters - are reworked into what sometimes appear to be illegibly personal artifacts. As the title hints, all manner of cultural stuff sampled in this precise jumble of images and objects might relate to our desires for things to be explained, including art.”

Fiona Connor

Born 1981 Lives in Los Angeles BA, BFA Elam School of Fine Art, University of Auckland, 2003 Nominated for Something Transparent (please go round the back) (2009) Jurors comment: “Echoing, and initially installed within, the high-profile window space of Michael Lett’s dealer gallery on Karangahape Road, Fiona Connor’s intriguing sculptural proposition Something Transparent (please go round the back) makes the most of the unsettling potential of the double-take. Positioning multiple reproductions of the glass façade and public entrance to the gallery in situ one behind the next, Connor’s work is both visually captivating and compelling conceptually. Literally sidelining its audience and fragmenting the commercial space of the work’s initial host with layer upon layer of plate glass, Something Transparent (please go round the back) proves itself as disarming as it is illusory and alluring. With an ongoing interest in how spaces and objects operate within specific communities, this playfully sophisticated work continues Connor’s investigations into the multivalent site of the art gallery by again harnessing the potency and enigmatic duplicity of the replica.”

Saskia Leek

Born 1970 Lives in Auckland BFA University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts, 1992 Nominated for Yellow is the Putty of the World (2009) Jurors comment: “Whitish yellows and whitish blues contribute to the distinctive colouring of Saskia Leek’s recent work. This palette has evolved from paintings that respond directly to the look and the mood of sun-faded prints and Paint By Numbers pastels, and is treated in the exhibition Yellow is the Putty of the World more clearly as a subject in itself. Leek’s painting has long honoured the appeals of popular images. Here she acknowledges a pathos in the generic nature of any picture of a sailing ship, say, or bowl of fruit, and aligns it with the now equally familiar idea of abstraction. She does not strain to make a point about supposedly ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, about modernism or mass culture. Instead, these works demonstrate the fascination that remains in such over-determined starting points for the act of painting, refreshing and personalising them. Combining subtlety and accessibility, they are paintings about painting, but also just as much paintings about the world, that painting, after all, is a part of.”

Alex Monteith

Born 1977 Lives in Auckland Completed BFA in Photography in 2001, MFA in Intermedia and the time-based arts and DocFA at the Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland. Nominated for Passing Manoeuvre with two motorcycles and 584 vehicles for two- channel video (2008) Jurors comment: “What we are seeing is illegal according to the New Zealand Road Code, but a familiar sight for commuters on Auckland roads nonetheless: motorbikes threading their way between lanes of slow-moving traffic. The action is defamiliarised by being presented to us from two perspectives at once, as one camera looks forward and another looks back, from one bike to another. As in many of her works, Alex Monteith has taken advantage of contemporary technology to update the kinds of image-making experiments undertaken by structuralist filmmakers in the 1960s, deriving a formal composition from the action of vehicles. Here, the apparently simple double view of the relative motion of the motorbikes and the other traffic comes to life as an experience as it confounds our sense of time. Where is the present moment in the image we are offered? Our grasp of movement and space is challenged by Monteith’s elegant abstraction.”

Exhibition Opens: 24 July 2010 Exhibition Closes: 31 October 2010 Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Taamaki New Gallery

Walters Prize rules OK

2010-04-21T01:59:00.000+12:00

Excerpts from the Walters Prize rules:

4 SCOPE
The Walters Prize seeks to determine and publicly acknowledge the most outstanding contribution made to contemporary visual art in New Zealand in the two-year period preceding its award, the prize years. For these purposes “contemporary visual art in New Zealand” is defined as being an individual work or body of work of contemporary art which has been predominantly created within New Zealand or in response to the artist’s experience of New Zealand. The work or body of work must have been publicly exhibited for the first time during the prize years, either in New Zealand or elsewhere in the world.
In this respect the prize takes no regard of the artist’s actual or perceived identification as a New Zealand artist, whether they self-identify or are recognised as such. Moreover, an artist’s potential for inclusion in the prize should be determined without reference to their ethnicity, country of origin or current nationality.

8 JURY
The selection of artists shortlisted for representation in the biennial prize exhibition will be made by a New Zealand based group of invited experts, the prize jury. Membership of the jury will be determined and appointed, from prize to prize, at the discretion of the organising gallery. The final determination of the prize award is based on the shortlisted artist’s representation in the exhibition and is made by the prize judge.
The jury will comprise no less than three (3) and no more than five (5) individuals with recognised expertise in the visual arts and/or in allied contemporary cultural arenas. Jury membership can include but is not limited to those who are senior practising artists, art critics, writers, curators, art museum directors, art historians, or those otherwise prominent in allied contemporary cultural arenas.
The organising gallery is required to keep membership of the jury confidential until the announcement on the shortlisted artists. At the same time, members of the jury are required to retain confidentiality as to their membership until that time. The purpose of maintaining confidentiality over membership of the jury is to ensure that members can more effectively undertake their role from the relative anonymity of being a regular and interested observer of visual art exhibitions, thereby more easily retaining their critical independence and freedom to act.

9 JUDGE
The prize judge is chosen and invited by the founding benefactors and principal donors in consultation, as necessary, with the organising gallery. The judge will be an eminent national or international figure in the world of the visual arts or an allied cultural arena. He or she will be of such standing as to act to focus public, critical and media attention on their role. Those invited to be prize judge may include but are not limited to being senior practising artists, art critics, writers, curators, art museum directors, art historians and the like. The decision of the judge in making the prize award will be considered final and binding.

The rest of Ernie

2010-02-26T11:40:00.001+13:00

Yes Minister

2010-02-16T10:52:00.002+13:00

Hon Christopher Finlayson

Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage

16 February 2010
Media Statement

Creative NZ governance streamlined

Creative New Zealand’s four governing bodies will be streamlined into a single board to improve its effectiveness and to free up resources that would be better directed to artists, under a proposal announced today by Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Christopher Finlayson.

A review of Creative New Zealand’s governing legislation was promised in the National Party’s arts culture and heritage policy in the 2008 election, which was informed partly by Mr Finlayson’s first hand experience as Chair of the Arts Board from 1998 to 2001.

“A streamlined unitary board requires fewer resources, and frees staff to focus on what is important – artists, arts organisations and arts development,” Mr Finlayson said.

The review of the Arts Council (also known as Creative New Zealand) has recommended the creation of a single board responsible for policy, strategy and funding allocation, replacing the current more unwieldy division of responsibilities between four separate councils and committees including the Arts Council, the Arts Board, Te Waka Toi and the Pacific Arts Committee.

The Ministry for Culture and Heritage, working with Creative New Zealand, Te Puni Kōkiri and the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs, carried out the review, as well as targeted consultation with the arts sector.

The proposed streamlined board would have up to thirteen members, including a minimum of four members with knowledge of Māori arts and at least two with knowledge of Pacific arts.

“The new arrangement guarantees that issues involving Māori and Pacific arts are represented at the top table for decision-making, which under the current cumbersome structure is not the case,” Mr Finlayson said.

“Along with the arts sector, which has voiced concerns for years about Creative New Zealand’s governance structure, I am looking forward to the improvements in service, focus and efficiency these changes will allow,” Mr Finlayson said.

It is estimated that the governance reforms will reduce the number of board and committee members from 28 to 13, and will result in direct cost savings of approximately $200,000 per annum. Mr Finlayson said the benefits of freeing staff up to concentrate on core responsibilities to the arts sector, rather than servicing bureaucracy, would be even more significant.

Mr Finlayson said he hoped legislation would be introduced this year to enact the changes.
Media contact: Ben Thomas 0274-943-579 or (04) 817-9763

In situ

2010-01-27T21:00:00.001+13:00

Pablo Helguera....

2009-12-01T17:26:00.000+13:00

.... never let's you down.

Holy

2009-11-13T06:58:00.003+13:00

Holes left in the wall of the Peter McLeavey Gallery after the dealer's attempts to find a stud under the plaster wall.
"I never found one" - Peter McLeavey

Warhol zip

2009-11-05T15:36:00.003+13:00

Images: Top, front and back of album cover with real zip on front. Bottom, zip open to reveal commercially sensitive undies and Warhol signature stamp.

An OTN alphabet

2009-10-18T16:10:00.026+13:00

If you’re going to start an art alphabet (and we are) what other word can you kick it off with? We did consider Attic. Even though we all love the idea of Damien and Jeff and Richard and Olaf being awash in cash, there's still a sneaking belief out there that a little hardship goes a long way in art production. A is for Animal art was another favourite, but after the embarrassment of the fake painting snail, no thanks. Go for A is for Assistant and you’re right back in the awash-with-cash bin. A is for The Agony and the Ecstasy was a front runner until we realised that Lust for Life is the best art movie ever made, and that starts with an L. So A is for Art.

Illustration: Pippin Barr.

If an artist were ever to wash up on a cartoon desert island complete with an iconic single palm tree, chances are his (always his) head would be shaded from the sun by an equally iconic beret. Like the easel, the palette and the smock, the beret has often stood in for the creative spirit. Originally headgear in the Basque country (although Rembrandt did paint a self portrait wearing a version of one back in 1630) the beret was cemented as an art icon in the twentieth century by Picasso, who probably popped it on his head as a symbol of rebellion. Since then the beret has been worn by countless artists, and many, many actors wanting a quick symbol to turn them into one.

Illustration: Pippin Barr

Art’s paper trail the CV feeds off production and display. The format rarely changes: biography, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions, collections and biography (me, me, we, we, and me again). Sometimes, as careers grow, more is seen as less and embarrassing lists of small town shows are collapsed into the more opaque ‘selected exhibitions’. Conceptual artist Julian Dashper wouldn’t have a bar of it. His work CV grew like a watered weed, every detail of his career noted, one under the other, page after page. More recently the academic world has jumped the CV shark. Now art school CVs spawn their own exhibitions targeted at university cash wranglers and grading masters. Publish and be in demand.
Illustration: Pippin Barr

We probably should have given this one to the letter G now that many art dealers, finding the word ‘dealer’ kinda offensive, have moved over to the more toney ‘gallerist’. The other reason for the drift was possibly because in the über good-times cutting a great deal was not a skill that needed flourishing. The selling proposition moved from Duveen’s “You’re not ready for that yet” to “We’ll put you in the queue, but no promises.” And yet, although the auction houses are jostling hard, it is the art dealers who largely set the pace and the prices. All this in an opaque world centred on the iconic question, “What’s it worth?”
Illustration: Pippin Barr

Bernard Berenson had one. Michael Jackson didn’t. A good eye has always been connoisseurship’s black box, the cunning apparatus that could sort the visually beautiful sheep from the tawdry, badly-drawn goats. Good-eyes can spot great art works in the shabby surroundings of junk shops, household auctions and estate sales, seeming to be instantly attracted by the glint of diamond in the dirt. A good good-eye can elevate its owner to giddy levels of expertise through the ability to eye ball art and successfully separate the culturally significant wheat from the populist chaff. Its choices are always authentic and important and superior, unless heaven forbid, they are fake.

Illustration: Pippin Barr

Frames help tell us that paintings are art. As Frank Zappa put it, without one “You can’t tell where the art stops and the real world begins.” The F in frame also stands for fashion. In the seventies stripping frames off old paintings became a museum passion. Modernism’s love of simplicity and objection to decoration helped, as did formal abstraction’s appreciation of the edges of the canvas and the authenticity of paintings as objects. Frames didn’t have a chance. The best they could hope for was standing in for past glories as a thin sliver of aluminium as for a time no frame was the best frame. In New Zealand Colin McCahon caught the fever, famously declaring, “ I’m finished with frames and all they imply.” Museum storerooms took on the look of local mints with gold frames stacked in piles. Times change. Now, once again, lavish gold frames are crafted specially to highlight the works in museum and private collections. Noland, Kelly and Ryman are probably safe for the twenty-first century but in the world of framing, the gold standard never really goes away. “If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.” - Picasso

Illustration: Pippin Barr

Green walls come and go, red paint is rolled on and painted over, but in the world of art white walls rule. This powerful context was identified by Brian O’Doherty in his 1976 essay in which the white cube gives as much meaning to the art as the artworks themselves. For a while in the late 1980s there was an attempt to argue this context was in fact neutral, but it was always a lost cause. In New Zealand dealer galleries often started as reflections of the artist’s studio, the front room at home without the fireplace. Then came the two-room gallery that has evolved over the years and now can run to polished concrete floors, dockways and loft-like spaces. There’s a nice rhythm to it all. The shows go up, the shows come down and the walls are patched and rolled out white ready for the next one.

Illustration: Pippin Barr

Hang on. Most art makes physical connections and most of those are with the human body. Physically lifting a painting or moving a sculpture tells you a lot about its place in the world. As curators and artists are firmly ushered out of the exhibition design, hanging and installation process, many exhibition hangs have more to do with abstract design concepts than with the effect of one artwork physically relating to another.

Hang it all. Another effect of curators being separated from the physical side of hanging is the everything-that-will-fit-on-the-wall exhibition. Removed from the physical reality of hanging, curators end up pulling together as many works as they can find on their theme and passing them over to technicians and designers to fit them into the space allocated by management.

Hang ‘em high. See above. Welcome back Academy hang.

Hang about. And whatever happened to our ability to hang things straight? In some cities that knowledge is being lost like the language of a threatened tribe. The professional installer holds the knowledge like a witch doctor, the last person left in the village who can make the paintings in private collections hang in a straight line.

Well hung. Don’t go there.

Illustration: Pippin Barr

There’s a story in the biography of Lord Duveen – the fabled Edwardian art dealer – that has him guiding a collector down a red velvet lined hall to the furthest recesses of his gallery. As they passed a door slightly ajar they saw, bathed in light, a jewel-like painting by Fra Angelico. The collector is entranced and begs to have a closer look. Duveen laid his arm across the collector’s shoulder and cooed, “No, no. You’re not ready for that yet.”

Welcome to the world of the inner sanctum. Every dealer has one, the place where all the good stuff is stored and deals are done. Even at art fairs, where desks and databases are in full view, secret white on white doors open into tiny sanctums just big enough for a couple of collectors with room to close the door and the deal.

And then of course there is the inner-inner sanctum.

Illustration: Pippin Barr

In the analogue world artists had to schlep their slides around dealers if they wanted to pitch for a show or a place in the line-up. Was there ever anything more dispiriting than a dealer holding up a sheet of slides in one hand and turning to talk to someone more interesting at the same time? Slides sold art history and played their clickety-clack music on the carousel projector. But no longer: enter the JPEG. Blessed with an acronym that sounds like an institutional curatorial selection team (Joint Photographic Experts Group), the JPEG saves artists from full-frontal humiliation. Sure the dealer or the curator might be reading amusing extracts from Jacques Derrida at the same time as mousing through the images, but who’s to know? The dark side of JPEGs is their assault on copyright and loss of control. While this skirmish is still in its infancy, over-exposure or inappropriate use via JPEGs is still a luxury problem.

Illustration: Pippin Barr (step back to view)

No one seems to have a very clear idea about what the Karangahape in Karangahape Road means. There is some suggestion that it refers to ‘a winding ridge of human activity’ and that sounds about right, but others claim that the name refers to Hape, a Maori chief who lived in the area. To most people K Road has always been synonymous with being propositioned, revealing all, drunkenness and getting screwed. More recently it has become the contemporary art centre of Auckland so in that respect, not much has changed (just kidding).

Illustration: Pippin Barr

If French philosophers were want to scrap among themselves, you’d never have known it in mid-1980s New Zealand where they were lined up like collegial lead soldiers to marshal deconstructive arguments into order. The French connection also brought with it bemusing language that, far away from France, prompted essays headlined by pithy titles like Further toward a deconstruction of phallic univocality: deferrals, without so much as a hint of irony. So, a thought for Jean-Francois Lyotard who (ironically) had a particular aversion to generalities. And while we’re at it, a moment please for Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault who, through no fault of their own, helped make New Zealand art writing almost impenetrable for around 20 years or so.

Illustration: Pippin Barr

SOLD! (… maybe.)

Illustration: Pippin Barr

N is for Nationalism

The argument has died on the vine along along with a lot of other art theoretical sour grapes, but there was a time where art about New Zealand and art about the world were at loggerheads. It really should have stopped in 1968 at the moment Jasper Johns painted his global local redux American flag. As it was, our stags locked horns (it was mostly stags) in the eighties fighting it out under the harsh New Zealand light, abstract butting against pictorial, United States hard up against united regionalists. All gone now, and through it all our flag remained unchanged. Salut.

Illustration by Pippin Barr

O is for Opening

The best guess date for the invention of cheese is somewhere around 6,000 years ago in what is now Iran and wine too had its origins nearby at about the same time. That means we can probably nail the first wine and cheese event to around 3900BC, or thereabouts. Not that you see much cheese at art openings these days but the wine thing is still going strong. Back in the day the wine usually came from a cask or (at upmarket events) from a bottle via a cask but now, like the shoes curators wear, the quality has gone way up.

Apart from the quality of the wine though, you do have to ask why openings have stayed so…er… the same for so long. Since the first director had the brainwave of asking four or five notables to get up and thank everyone within reach while those invited to the opening stand around waiting to see what they actually came for (the art), things haven’t changed much. TV has conquered nightlife, the internet has changed our lives, man has landed on the moon and one of those satellite things has headed off to Mars, but we still listen to directors thank their staff for doing the jobs they were paid to do (most often by us via our rates and taxes). One day perhaps a museum will hold an opening that tells us a bit about what we are about to see and then lets us in to see it. Got to take 10 minutes max.

Illustration by Pippin Barr

Designed to raise statues up from the common people, the plinth got a bit of a battering in the twentieth century as sculptors came down to earth. The plinth did still have a life in museums where even ground-based work is raised up to stop it being kicked or scuffed. If there is one unquestionable twentieth century museum icon, it is the white plinth topped with a Perspex box. And the rest is just puns like, “someday my plinth will come”.

Illustration by Pippin Barr

Q is for qualification

The MSc asks “how?” The MPhil asks “why?”, The MFA asks “tap or bottled?” An oldie but still a goodie.
Illustration: Pippin Barr

R is for Review

They say those who can do and those who can’t teach but in fact they probably review the work of those who can. Peter McLeavey once said that it didn’t matter what anyone said about art as long as they spelt the artist’s name correctly and it is true that a good review can put a few more bums through the door. Most artists claim to not read the reviews and if they do are unaffected by them, but it is probably in the same way that everyone else says they don’t watch reality television. The trick is to remember that even when the reviewer who’s opinion is worth less than an ant at a picnic gives a good review, it is the same ant talking. But even when the review is good, as Dustin Hoffman once said, “it’s just a stay of execution.”

Illustration: Pippin Barr

S is for the Stendhal Syndrome

Visitors are often overcome in museums (ok not always by the exhibits), but pity poor Marie-Henri Beyle (better known as French writer Stendhal) who, when exposed to too much art, couldn’t pop into the gallery café for a quick macchiato or quietly browse in the bookshop. Instead, overwhelmed by the beauty of Venice, Stendhal was pole-axed by fainting spells and hallucinations.

“Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty… I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations… Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call ‘nerves.’ Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.”

Illustration: Pippin Barr

T is for Tape measure

“Gather near the fire, my children. The darkness closes in and it grows cold.”

“Tell us a story great-grandfather, a story from the way back.”

“Very well… back then, long, long ago …before the times of much money, our people would take their art and hang it on their walls by themselves.”

“Straight, great-grandfather…. They would hang it straight?”

“That is so. Every painting, every print, every bas-relief we would hang on the wall absolutely parallel to the ground. It was always so in my family and in all the families of our village. Until, one day, that knowledge was lost.”

“How great-grandfather, how did it go?”

“The Straightening Man. He came from nowhere with his measure tape and his laser beam. Before long the Straightening Man hung all our pictures and all our prints, for by that time we had stopped buying bas-reliefs. Carefree we forgot the old ways until one day no one could remember how to hang a painting.

“The knowledge had vanished from our family, our tribe and, I fear, from all the world.”

Illustration: Pippin Barr

U is for underbidder

Woulda, coulda, shoulda

Illustration: Pippin Barr

V is for visitor

As theatres opted for bums on seats, art museums have gone with feet through the door as a measure of success. (click, click) Not that turning up has anything to do with experience, but what’s a poor museum to do? (click) One NZ institution reached out to sparrows. (click, click, click) The Dowse once discovered its high number of visitors was being complemented, well almost doubled, by birds flying in and out of the main door. (click, click, click, click) Local council officials turned over the director’s office looking for kilo packs of birdseed but it turned out the birds were just in it for the art. (click) Besides, unlike the birds, not all museum visitors are voluntary. (click) Kids marshalled in by schools, old people packed into vans, back in the day they were accounted separately in annual totes, but nowadays whatever your motive or intentions, if you're through the door, you're part of the score. (click, click)
Illustration: Pippin Barr

W is for watercolour

John Singer Sargent remarked that painting in watercolour was ‘making the best of an emergency.’ That probably rings true for anyone who has given it a go. Being able to knock up a good watercolour was once an essential skill for any educated traveler but, like portrait painting, it was elbowed out of the image bank by photography. Still, as they say, even paisley ties will come back one day and watercolours seem to be having quite a resurgence after long years in the shadows. Any quick tour of dealer galleries will turn up at least one exhibition of impressionistic works on paper created with pigment and wash. As David Hockney once mysteriously said, “Watercolours are wet colours in water.” Er…right.

Illustration: Pippin Barr

X is for don't touch

Museum exhibits live in the space between protect and present. The art is almost always there to see and not touch and that's tough lines for sculpture, touch’s front line in the art category. The principle is that an object may be ok with one touch but with many it risks the death of a thousand cuts. And so the barriers, stanchions, taped lines, light beams, skied paintings and, yes, do not touch signs sprinkled round the galleries like measles. And that’s not to mention guards, staff and docents most of whom apply gentle persuasion and stop short of the direct approach taken by Kah Mun Rah in the museum flick Night at the museum: battle of the Smithsonian, “How dare you! If you touch that again I shall kill you right now.”

Illustration: Pippin Barr

Y is for Ying and Yang

In the art game, as in everything else, it is best to be kind to those you meet on the way up for you will be meeting them again on the way down.
Illustration: Pippin Barr

Z is for zombie editions

They say you can’t take it with you and so most of us have to leave our stuff behind to be sent to the Salvation Army by our kids. Artists though can live beyond their natural span thanks to zombie editions – the works of art that are made on an artist’s behalf after their demise by helpful supporters.

And so new works to the market are created by casting from old molds, giving a lick of paint to rejected works left in the studio, and - in the purest form - newly born out of sketches and concepts left in notebooks and on scraps of paper.

Zombie editions: giving new meaning to the expression ‘the shock of the new.’
Illustration: Pippin Barr

Tasteful

2009-10-15T21:56:00.000+13:00

Hancock bequest

2009-08-25T21:08:00.001+12:00

James Nairn Petone Foreshore 1894
LW Wilson Lake Wakatipu from the 25 Mile Peak 1894
LW Wilson Lake Wanaka, Otago 1898
John Weeks Parisian Facades 1926
Doris Lusk (Roses - still life) Flowers 1945
Agnes Wood Salome II 1983
Robert Warren (Still life - pottery and fruit)
Dennis Knight-Turner (Nude)
Pablo Picasso The Bull
Charles Blomfield Maori Canoe
Kumio Nakazyo Indian Corn
Lindsay McLeod 3 Nuns
Frances Hodgkins Stall Holders
Garth Tapper The Club
Patrick Hanly Pacific Hope
Allen Maddox Flower Piece
Nigel Brown Suburban Clothes Line
Melvin Day Bull
Thomas Arthur McCormack Lillies
Thomas Arthur McCormack Apples 1911
Brent Wong Clouds, Islands, Dunes 1991
Tosswill Woollaston Makara 1972
Patrick Hanly Ginko Garden 1985
Dorothy Kate Richmond Smoke Haze over Nelson

City Collection

2009-08-25T21:00:00.000+12:00

This is a draft list of the Wellington City collection which was primarily purchased as a furnishing collection. Exceptions are some commissions like the Culbert work at the City Gallery, the Mattchit in the Library and the Gordon Crook banners in the Town Hall.

Of the 340 works listed 124 are prints (a number of them commercial reproductions), 58 photographs of varying importance and 23 portraits of mayors and other dignitories.

You can request a print out of the catalogue with more detail (including small images) from the Wellington City Council.

Artist: Accarisi, L
Title: Portrait of John Duthie, Mayor
Media: Oil on canvas

Artist: Barraud, Charles Decimus
Title: Portrait of Te Puni

Artist: Barraud, Charles Decimus
Title: Portrait of Sir George Grey
Media: Oil on canvas

Artist: Beetham, William
Title: Portrait of Edward Jerningham Wakefield

Artist: Butler, George
Title: Portrait of Francis Henry Dillon Bell, Mayor

Artist: Colley, F.W.
Title: Portrait of Thomas William Hislop, Mayor

Artist: Dargie, William
Title: Portrait of Sir Charles Norwood, Mayor

Artist: Ellis, Frederick V.
Title: Portrait of Sir William Appleton, Mayor

Artist: Fanning, Joan
Title: Portrait of Pat Lawlor

Artist: Kac, Juliet
Title: Portrait of Ian Lawrence, Mayor

Artist: Lynch, Julia B.
Title: Portrait of Sir Francis Kitts, Mayor

Artist: McIntyre, Peter
Title: Portrait of Lord Freyberg of Wellington

Artist: McIntyre, Peter
Title: Portrait of T.C.A. Hislop, Mayor

Registration:ART00014
Artist: McMaster, James
Title: Portrait of John Plimmer

Artist: UNKNOWN
Title: Portrait of Thomas George Macarthy

Artist: Markham, Philip
Title: Portrait of Sir James Belich, Mayor

Artist: Nairn, James
Title: Portrait of Alfred de Bathe Brandon, Mayor

Artist: Nicoll, Archibald
Title: Portrait of Sir Robert Macalister, Mayor

Artist: Otterson, Henry
Title: Portrait of Sir George Maurice O'Rorke

Artist: Otterson, Henry
Title: Portrait of Judge H S Chapman

Artist: Sutton, W.A. (Bill)
Title: Portrait of Sir Michael Fowler, Mayor

Artist: UNKNOWN
Title: [unknown Victorian gentleman]

Artist: Noble, Anne
Title: Antarctica (Fuji Antarctica Museum, Nagoya, Japan)

Artist: Noble, Anne
Title: Iceberg Garden, Antarctica

Artist: UNKNOWN
Title: Portrait of Samuel Brown, Mayor

Artist: Ross, Andrew
Title: Upper Cuba Street

Artist: Worth, H.V.
Title: Portrait of Edward Gibbon Wakefield

Artist: Worth, H.V.
Title: Dr. Isaac Earl Featherston

Artist: Elliott, Robinson
Title: Portrait of His Grace the Duke of Wellington K.T.

Artist: Noble, Anne
Title: Wilhelmina Bay, Antarctica

Artist: Lucas, Alfred
Title: Field Marshall His Grace the Duke of Wellington Reviewing the Troops in Hyde Park

Artist: Lucas, John
Title: Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

Artist: Noble, Anne
Title: Antarctica (1) (Discovery Museum, Dundee)

Artist: Greatbuck, William
Title: The Duke of Wellington's Last Banquet

Artist: UNKNOWN
Title: His Grace, the first Duke of Wellington

Artist: UNKNOWN
Title: God Save the Queen: the Celebration of the Diamond Jubilee

Artist: Ross, Andrew
Title: Taputeranga Island

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: Corner of Lambton Quay and Stout Street; State Insurance building and Public Trust building
Media: Paper

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: Wellington Chinese Masonic Society Building, Frederick Street
Media: Paper

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: Harbour Board Office, Customhouse Quay
Media: Paper

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: MLC Building, Lambton Quay
Media: Paper

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: Odlins Building and Film Centre, Cable Street and Jervois Quay
Media: Paper

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: Herd Street Post Office Building
Media: Paper

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: Wellington Free Ambulance Building, Cable Street
Media: Paper

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: AMP building, Featherston Street
Media: Paper

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: Stewart Dawson's Building, Willis Street and Manners Street opposite Te Aro Park
Media: Paper

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: Taranaki Street
Media: Paper

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: John Chambers & Son building, cnr Jervois Quay and Cable Street
Media: Paper

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: Wellington Returned Services Association building
Media: Paper

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: Old Interisland Ferry Building
Media: Paper

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: Hotel St George and Hotel Waterloo
Media: Paper

Artist: Atkinson, Leslie
Title: At the Foot of Mount Tongariro

Artist: Noble, Anne
Title: Antarctica (11) (Discovery Museum, Dundee)

Artist: Cleveland, Les
Title: Coffee House Girl

Artist: Cleveland, Les
Title: Morning sun outside a pakapoo den in Taranaki Street, Wellington

Artist: Binney, Don
Title: Over Oaxaca

Artist: Binney, Don
Title: Pacific Frigate Bird

Artist: Avon Fine Prints Ltd
Title: Print of: Samuel Brees, View looking down Hawkestone Street, Wellington, with Mr Brees' cottage. [1845?]

Artist: Avon Fine Prints Ltd
Title: Print of: Samuel Brees, View looking down Hawkestone Street, Wellington, with Mr Brees' cottage. [1845?]

Artist: Avon Fine Prints Ltd
Title: Print of: Samuel Brees, Barrett's Hotel and Lambton Quay, Wellington ca 1843

Artist: Avon Fine Prints Ltd
Title: Print of: Samuel Brees, Barrett's Hotel and Lambton Quay, Wellington ca 1843

Artist: Avon Fine Prints Ltd
Title: Print of: Samuel Brees, Makaenuku Pa

Artist: Avon Fine Prints Ltd
Title: Print of: Samuel Brees, Makaenuku Pa

Artist: Avon Fine Prints Ltd
Title: Print of: Samuel Brees, The Aglionby Arms (Burchams)

Artist: Cotton, Shane
Title: Nineteen Ninety Three

Artist: Ross, Andrew
Title: Stairs, Cuba Street

Artist: Dickie, Colin
Title: Wellington Harbour - Looking towards Somes Island from Karaka Bay
Media: Oil on board

Artist: Ellis, Robert
Title: Motorway/City No.1

Artist: Ellis, Robert
Title: Motorway/City No. 2

Artist: Ellis, Robert
Title: Motorways

Artist: McIntyre Wilson, Matthew
Title: Kete

Artist: Thomson, Elizabeth
Title: Site

Artist: Hanly, Patrick
Title: Inside the Garden
Media: Paper

Artist: Harrison, Rodger
Title: The Old Farmhouse, Sanson

Artist: Hullmandel, Charles Joseph
Title: Lithograph of 'View of Nelsons Haven, in Tasman's Gulf, by Charles Heaphy' 1841

Artist: Taratoa, Kelcy
Title: Episode 0021

Artist: Lucas, Courtney
Title: Trampoline

Artist: Government Printer
Title: Print of:' Lambton Harbour and Wellington, April 1841', by Charles Heaphy

Artist: Avon Fine Prints Ltd
Title: Birdseye view of Port Nicholson in New Zealand, by Charles Heaphy - Print

Artist: Illingworth, Michael
Title: Tawera

Artist: Jennings, C
Title: Hills and Harbour

Artist: Levy, Keith
Title: Sea and Landscape No. 6

Artist: Levy, Keith
Title: Sea and Landscape no.12

Artist: McCahon, Colin
Title: North Otago Landscape

Artist: Rotman, Jono
Title: South Wing, Mt Eden Men's Remand Prison

Artist: McIntyre, Peter
Title: Willis Street

Artist: Masters, Wendy
Title: The Harbour Fountain

Artist: Merrett, Thomas Edward
Title: Wellington Harbour

Artist: Merrett, Thomas Edward
Title: Wellington Harbour

Artist: Merrett, Thomas Edward
Title: View from Flagstaff Hill

Artist: Lucas, Courtney
Title: Cave

Artist: Morris, S
Title: Patterns

Artist: UNKNOWN
Title: Print of: Luke Nattrass sketch City of Wellington, New Zealand 1841

Artist: Neilson, Don
Title: Wellington Harbour

Artist: Neilson, Don
Title: Lake Pukaki District

Artist: Ngan, Guy
Title: Wellington City

Artist: Palmer, Stanley
Title: Looking North, Western Viaduct

Artist: Cauchi, Ben
Title: New Zealand Playing Cards

Artist: Cauchi, Ben
Title: Axe

Artist: Cauchi, Ben
Title: Loaded Palm

Artist: Cauchi, Ben
Title: Tiki

Artist: Reeves, B
Title: [Cityscape]

Artist: Smither, Michael
Title: Wave Invading Rock Pool

Artist: Lucas, Courtney
Title: Rope

Artist: Steven, A. M
Title: Horizon

Artist: Ross, Andrew
Title: Bodega and Company, Willis St

Artist: Smith, Bronwyn
Title: Armada

Artist: Van Hout, Ronnie
Title: Untitled (Four Days in Nelson and Canterbury)

Artist: Wilde, Fran
Title: Wellington Harbour

Artist: Woollaston, Tosswill
Title: Mts. Owen, Arthur and Campbell from Motueka

Artist: Baillie, John
Title: Evening Shadows

Artist: Proudfoot, D
Title: [Mobil Street Race]

Artist: Mitchell, J. Campbell
Title: The Firth of Forth

Artist: Percy, Sidney R.
Title: [Romantic Landscape with Two Figures]

Artist: Crook, Gordon
Title: Untitled [Wall hangings]

Artist: Crook, Gordon
Title: Banners

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: Untitled

Artist: Nairn, James
Title: Petone Foreshore

Artist: Brown, Nigel
Title: Peace Rider

Artist: Ross, Andrew
Title: The Murray Roberts Building

Artist: Conly, T H
Title: The First Charter Parade, 22nd Battery, RNZ Artillery. 11 December 1981
Media: Oil on board

Artist: Hotere, Ralph
Title: Red on Black

Artist: Lall, Durga
Title: Woman

Artist: Mair, Eleanor Kate
Title: The Fisher Boy
Media: Oil on canvas

Artist: Manuku North School
Title: Tukutuku panel

Artist: Ross, Andrew
Title: Rintoul Street

Artist: Mrkusich, Milan
Title: Passive Element

Artist: Ross, Andrew
Title: Athletic Park

Artist: Reynolds, John
Title: Valley of Dry Bones

Artist: Ritchie, Ross
Title: Three

Artist: Tuffery, Michel
Title: Tolu fa’atoluse i kalu alia

Artist: Tuffery, Michel
Title: Untitled [spear form]

Artist: Tuffery, Michel
Title: Untitled [spear form]

Artist: Tuffery, Michel
Title: Mo'o Mo'oga mo le lumana’i

Artist: Tuffery, Michel
Title: Fale va’a o’oe na ole ave ave leai se toe fa’afo’i mai

Artist: Day, Melvin
Title: Vertiginous

Artist:
Title: Painting of Mayoral Chain

Artist: Walters, Gordon
Title: Tawa

Artist: Taepa, Ngataiharuru
Title: Nga Kaawai O Te Kopu Series, #2

Artist: Ross, Andrew
Title: Dismantled Gates, Shed 21

Artist: Wilson, LW
Title: Lake Wakatipu from the 25 Mile Peak

Artist: Brodsky, A & Utkin, I
Title: Columbarium Architecturae (Museum of Disappearing Buildings)

Artist: Dumini, Adolfo
Title: Henrietta?

Artist: Schreiter, Johannes
Title: Hameln Fazit 35/1976/F

Artist: Shay, Robert
Title: Untitled [double-walled vessel, blown-glass]

Artist: Shay, Robert
Title: Rouge Royale

Artist: Wilson, LW
Title: Lake Wanaka, Otago

Artist: Simmons, W.H
Title: [Seated old woman and child]

Artist: Brown, Elliott James
Title: Cuba St, Wellington

Artist: Weeks, John
Title: Parisian Facades

Artist: Black, Peter
Title: Woman and Lizard, Wellington Zoo

Artist: Lusk, Doris
Title: [Roses - Still life] Flowers?

Artist: Warren, Robert
Title: [Still life - pottery and fruit]

Artist: Black, Peter
Title: Moore's Antiques, Wellington

Artist: Turner, Dennis Knight
Title: [Nude]

Artist: Picasso, Pablo
Title: The Bull

Artist: Blomfield, Charles
Title: Maori canoe

Artist: Nakazyo, Kumio
Title: Indian Corn

Artist: McLeod, Lindsay
Title: 3 Nuns

Artist: Leenards, Gerda
Title: Morning
Media:

Artist: Hotere, Ralph, Culbert, Bill
Title: Fault

Artist: Lennie, Jean
Title: H. Temple White O.B.E., 1958

Artist: Matchitt, Paratene
Title: Waharoa [Bird Gate] from the Installation Nga Tohu no Te Wepu, 1990

Artist: Taepa, Ngataiharuru
Title: Nga Kaawai O Te Kopu Series, #1

Artist: Petone Technical Institute
Title: Te Pou O Witako

Artist: Petone Technical Institute
Title: Te Pou Tauiwi

Artist: Black, Peter
Title: Rainbow's End

Artist: Weigall, Henry
Title: Bust of the Duke of Wellington
Media: Metal

Artist: Morell, Joan
Title: Sir Michael Fowler

Artist: Anderson, Sue
Title: Untitled [abstract horses in field]

Artist: Waggstaff, C.E
Title: Portrait of Field Marshall, His Grace The Duke of Wellington K.G

Artist: Walsh, John
Title: Untitled

Artist: Hodgkins, Frances
Title: Stall holders

Artist: Tapper, Garth
Title: The Club

Artist: Svenson, Jessie Edith
Title: Part of Lambton Harbour in Port Nicholson

Artist: Bruck, Stella
Title: Centenary Exhibition N.Z. 1940

Artist: Cole, William
Title: Wellington Harbour on the occasion of the opening of the old Band Rotunda, Oriental Bay as swimming changing sheds.

Artist: Petherick, Jnr, James
Title: Wellington New Zealand 1842 in New Zealand woods

Artist: Hanly, Patrick
Title: Pacific Hope

Artist: Maddox, Allen
Title: Flower piece

Artist: Brown, Nigel
Title: Suburban Clothes Line

Artist: Day, Melvin
Title: Bull

Artist: McCormack, Thomas Arthur
Title: Lilies

Artist: McCormack, Thomas Arthur
Title: Apples

Artist: Estall, Stephen
Title: [Untitled]

Artist: Estall, Stephen
Title: [untitled]

Artist: Lai, Richard
Title: Windy Point

Artist: Wong, Brent
Title: Clouds, Island, Dunes

Artist: Enting, Brian
Title: Rangihiroa's mirror

Artist: Comley, Dorothy
Title: Port View

Artist: Comley, Dorothy
Title: Houses in Nepal

Artist: Price, Neil
Title: Riviera

Artist: Price, Neil
Title: Red T-shirt with arms

Artist: Price, Neil
Title: Man of Steel with Plastic Phallus

Artist: Price, Neil
Title: Red helmet with leather

Artist: Price, Neil
Title: Clown to Clown

Artist: Price, Neil
Title: Red stool with legs

Artist: Price, Neil
Title: Hand and Foot 1

Artist: Price, Neil
Title: Hand and Foot 2

Artist: Price, Neil
Title: Reluctant Swimmer

Artist: Lee-Johnson, Eric
Title: The Puriris

Artist: Nicholson, W.M
Title: [untitled]

Artist: Nicholson, W.M
Title: Untitled

Artist: Hos, Kees
Title: Lost City

Artist: MacLennan, Stewart Bell
Title: [Visitors from the city]

Artist: Webb, Marilyn
Title: Lake Mahinerangi 5

Artist: White, Robin
Title: Southland Monkey Puzzle

Artist: White, Robin
Title: Red Barn, Lincoln

Artist: White, Robin
Title: Self-portrait with Conrad and shells

Artist: Kay, Robin
Title: Pohutukawa

Artist: Kay, Robin
Title: Windows

Artist: Kay, Robin
Title: Red Dawn

Artist: Wilkinson, Lester
Title: Margaret with Pincushion

Artist: Ngan, Guy
Title: Series Six Variation

Artist: Quirk, Bonnie
Title: Entry into ( Brown state)

Artist: Woollaston, Tosswill
Title: Makara

Artist: Drawbridge, John
Title: Girl at Window No.1

Artist: Hamon, Rei
Title: [Manuka with spider web]

Artist: Leitch, Peter G.
Title: Kapiti Island, North Island, NZ

Artist: Smither, Michael
Title: [Mount Taranaki]

Artist: Hanly, Patrick
Title: Ginko Garden

Artist: Greig, Rhondda
Title: [Day Closes]

Artist: Taylor, Cynthia
Title: Conversation 1.

Artist: Leitch, Peter G.
Title: Ngauruhoe

Artist: Park, Lyndsay
Title: Home-smoked produce

Artist: Fanning, Joan
Title: Tree Ferns

Artist: Lovell, Sylvia
Title: Sailing, Lake Horowhenua

Artist: Lovell, Sylvia
Title: Lake Horowhenua

Artist: Lovell, Sylvia
Title: Plimmerton in Storm

Artist: Laurenson, Olive
Title: Girl in Red Head Dress

Artist: Blair, Philippa
Title: Aeroplane Angel

Artist: Hanly, Patrick
Title: Butterfly Vacation

Artist: Leahy, Tony
Title: Autumn Leaves

Artist: Edwards, Victoria
Title: Untitled

Artist: Thompson, Robert M
Title: The Appearance of Red Tracks No. 2

Artist:
Title: Ratana Church, Raetihi

Artist: Aalst, van
Title: Bay of Islands

Artist: Pratt, John
Title: Bird of Paradise

Artist: Blake, Jamie
Title: Mitre Peak

Artist: Cleavin, Barry
Title: The hungry sheep looks up

Artist: Drawbridge, John
Title: Interior with Bottles

Artist: Kay, Mary
Title: Portrait of the artist as a weighing virgin

Artist: Elliot, Margaret
Title: Baring Head through rocks

Artist: Cornwell, Graeme
Title: Grit 200 Mr. Judd's Roof

Artist: Baker, Richard
Title: Ngauruhoe

Artist: Livick, J.M
Title: Phil and Pete

Artist: Tricker, Gary
Title: The Beginning To travel is a better thing than to arrive- R.L. Stevenson

Artist: Tricker, Gary
Title: The matter of time/The easy rider

Artist: Markham, Shirley
Title: City Series 3

Artist: Shepheard, Carole M
Title: Dream Weaver

Artist: Dolores, Edward
Title: Night Garden

Artist: Ransom, Peter
Title: The Mauve Bridge

Artist: Watkins, Denys
Title: Research

Artist: Thomson, Elizabeth
Title: Exploring new territory

Artist: Bishop, Merle
Title: Too Late

Artist: Abbott, Liz
Title: Rachel and Nick

Artist: Elliott, Reiko
Title: Kurumabiki (Kabuki Series)

Artist: Elliott, Reiko
Title: Tsuchigumo (Kabuki Series)

Artist: Lander, Mark
Title: Pacific Trilogy

Artist: Burrows, Karel
Title: Chair 1

Artist: Burrows, Karel
Title: Lonely

Artist: McIntosh, Fiona, Watson, Tania
Title: Botanic Gardens

Artist: Nicholas, Darcy
Title: Hine Rangi

Artist: Nicholas, Darcy
Title: Lord of the Forest

Artist: Chadwick, Katherine A
Title: Woman with Head; Urinal Mrs fish Theatrical Production Poster for 2 plays by Mark Casson at Bats Theatre, Wellington.

Artist: Feu'u, Fatu
Title: Manaia
Media: Paper

Artist: Watson, Ruth
Title: An introduction to gaming

Artist: Hotere, Ralph
Title: A Union Jack

Artist: Muru, Selwyn
Title: Nga Tuupuna o te whenua

Artist: Reynolds, John
Title: Blind Prophet

Artist: Chilcott, Gavin
Title: Opiated Wine Jars and Heart Pot

Artist: Ellis, Robert
Title: Kuparu

Artist: Kahukiwa, Robyn
Title: Wai Tangi

Artist: Waru-Rewiri, Kura te
Title: Whakapapa

Artist: McIntyre, Mary
Title: Moa Summer 1.

Artist: Feu'u, Fatu
Title: Pale Auro

Artist: Hellyar, Christine
Title: Germinal

Artist: Tuck, Barbara
Title: Repetitions

Artist: Frizzell, Dick
Title: Just outside Taumarunui

Artist: McWhannell, Richard
Title: Untitled (Three heads in profile)

Artist: Matchitt, Paratene
Title: Tuamata kahawai

Artist: Dolezel, Jenny
Title: Love Picture

Artist:
Title: Maori carving

Artist: Watkins, Denys
Title: Parkinson's Study

Artist: Markham, Philip
Title: Waiting For a Start

Artist: Billich
Title: Reach for the Sky

Artist: Tuffery, Michel
Title: A'ai Siva, A' ai Siva, A' ai Siva

Artist: New Zealand Illustrated
Title: Print of: Te Heuheu's Old Pa of Waitahanui, at Taupo Lake, by George French Angas

Artist: New Zealand Illustrated
Title: Print of: Volcano of Tongariro with Motupoi Pah from Roto-aire Lake, by George French Angas

Artist: New Zealand Illustrated
Title: Print of: Mount Taranaki, War canoe, by George French Angas

Artist: New Zealand Illustrated
Title: Print of: Motupoi Pah and Roto-aire Lake Tongariro in the distance, by George French Angas

Artist: UNKNOWN
Title: Print of: Louis Le Breton, Port Otago 1840

Artist: Hocken Library
Title: Print of: Charles Henry Kettler, View of Part of Dunedin, and Upper Harbour, from Stafford Street

Artist: Government Printer
Title: Print of: Charles Heaphy, Lambton Harbour and Wellington, April 1841

Artist: Hill, Faye
Title: Central Otago

Artist: Hill, Faye
Title: Central Otago 2

Artist: Avon Fine Prints Ltd
Title: Print of: Samuel Brees, View looking down Hawkestone Street, Wellington, with Mr Brees' cottage. [1845?]

Artist: Avon Fine Prints Ltd
Title: Print of: Samuel Brees, Makaenuku Pa

Artist: Avon Fine Prints Ltd
Title: Print of: Samuel Brees, Barrett's Hotel and Lambton Quay, Wellington ca.1843

Artist: Avon Fine Prints Ltd
Title: Print of: Samuel Brees, The Aglionby Arms (Burchams)

Artist: Petherick, Jnr, James
Title: Petone 1839
Media: Wood

Artist: UNKNOWN
Title: John Plimmer

Artist: Esplin, Tom
Title: Blues and Ochres

Artist: Bett, Elva
Title: Still Life, Flowers

Artist: Laurenson, Olive
Title: Windswept Trees

Artist: Hiruma, Kazuyo
Title: Memories of Water 1

Artist: Hiruma, Kazuyo
Title: Memories of Water 2,3, 4, and 5

Artist: Kahukiwa, Robyn
Title: He Tatai Whetu

Artist: Moffitt, Trevor
Title: Looking and Talking

Artist: Moffitt, Trevor
Title: MacKenzie the sheep stealer

Artist: Pearson, Jacky
Title: Save the Children BT Global Challenge yacht

Artist: Webb, Marilyn
Title: Protection work-pale poppy 2

Artist: Zusters, Jane
Title: 'Stepping of the Planet' (for Marcus)

Artist: Faulkener, Neil
Title: See-saw, Majory Daw

Artist: Faulkener, Neil
Title: Little Boy Blue

Artist: Faulkener, Neil
Title: Little Bo-peep

Artist: Faulkener, Neil
Title: Nuts an' May

Artist: Buckley, Andrew
Title: Portrait of Elizabeth R & Philip

Artist: Richmond, Dorothy Kate
Title: Smoke Haze over Nelson

Artist: Wells, Kate
Title: Wellington rug

Artist: Gauldie, Matt
Title: Portrait of Mark Blumsky, Mayor

Artist: Heath, Eric
Title: That'll Teach Them...

Artist: Frizzell, Dick
Title: Portrait of Fran Wilde, Mayor

Artist: Tuffery, Michel
Title: Calvery Lua'a

Artist: Edmonds, Jacqueline
Title: Cat-in-a-basket.

Artist: Wynn, Colin C
Title: Tasting the Southerly: HMNZS Wellington From Barretts Reef

Artist: McKee & Gamble
Title: Print of: Luke Nattrass sketch City of Wellington, New Zealand 1841

Artist: McNabb
Title: Adelaide 11

Artist: Cowan, Roy
Title: Wellington

Artist: Reidy
Title: Wellington's Eco House - 9 Regent Street Newtown

Artist: Drawbridge, John
Title: Flight

Artist:
Title: [untitled - carpet]

Artist: Small, Kate
Title: Thorndon Pool

Artist: Schmidt, Sandra
Title: Membrane Dissected

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: Taranaki [#1], Wanganui, 17 November 2002

Artist: Aberhart, Laurence
Title: Taranaki, Midhurst, 11 July 1991

Artist: Barrar, Wayne
Title: Twin tunnels, Manapouri Underground Power Station [from the series 'An Expanding Subterra']

Artist: Barrar, Wayne
Title: Moa Point (four viewpoints with accelerated algal growth) from the site of the former sewage outfall [closed 1998], Wellington, 1999/2002

Artist: Morris, Simon
Title: Blue line 54 minutes

Artist: Morris, Simon
Title: Blue line 56 minutes

Artist: Sasaki, Ai
Title: Untitled

Puppy love

2009-05-22T09:22:00.001+12:00

Jeff Koon's Balloon Dog at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich

Cutting the pie

2009-05-07T06:54:00.002+12:00

CNZ Travel Advisory

2009-04-19T22:00:00.003+12:00

The following Creative New Zealand staff and Council members will be attending the Biennale to support the exhibitions:
Carla van Zon (Manager International)
Tanea Heke (Project Manager, Venice)
Katrina Smit (Communications Adviser)

Alastair Carruthers, Arts Council Chair
Jenny May, Arts Council member
In the case of the two Council members, Creative New Zealand will only be covering part of the costs associated with their travel/associated costs.

Creative New Zealand will also be covering the costs of:
Commissioner, Jenny Harper
Artists. Judy Millar and Francis Upritchard
Curators Leonhard Emmerling, Heather Galbraith and Francesco Manacorda
Technical Production Manager, Bruce Edgar
The NZ Venue Attendants: Frances Loeffler, Robyn Pickens, Julia Holderness, Thomasin Sleigh, Serena Bentley, Marnie Slater, Ariane Craig-Smith, Shelley Jahnke-Bishop and Simon Glaister

Note: this does not include any personnel that would be required to support the events programme.

Venice Budget

2009-04-19T22:00:00.001+12:00

Click on image to enlarge

Formal

2009-04-09T17:28:00.000+12:00

Thank you for your response.

We are happy to provide the requested information, however, in some instances the information is either not available (i.e. matters are at the planning stage only, and in some cases, subject to contractual negotiations) or matters are not yet confirmed. I have indicated below, in response to your specific questions, when we expect to be able to provide the information you are seeking:

1. Is Bic Runga going to Venice to support the art shows?
The events to be held in association with the exhibition are still being planned. No final decisions or commitments have been made as yet. We expect to make public announcements about the events/programme from mid- to late April 2009.
2. Are Moana and the Moa Hunters going to Venice?
As for response to (1) above.
3. What is the "reading room" all about? what sort of furniture is being displayed? and how was it transported to Venice?
As for response to (1) above.
4. Where the opening will be held i.e. Francis's venue or Judy's or both?
Answered.
5. What sort of events will be held alongside the Venice exhibitions?
As for response to (1) above.
6. How many CNZ staff and associates will be travelling to Venice including Board members?
We will provide this information when the Creative New Zealand delegation has been confirmed, which we expect to be after the Arts Council meeting to be held in the week following Easter. At this stage, final decisions on attendance have not been made.
7. How is the private fund raising going?
8. We would also like to get a copy of the CNZ Budget for Venice, is that possible?
We will provide budget information after the Arts Council meeting to be held in the week following Easter.

If you would like a more formal response (in terms of the Official Information Act), we would be happy to discuss this with you or provide it, but hopefully this is helpful as an interim response. You can also raise this matter with the Ombudsman if you are not satisfied.

The work has clearly been mistreated and needs attention

2009-03-29T20:23:00.000+13:00

Stains, scars and botched repairs on Wellington's Henry Moore sculpture Bronze Form.

More Moore

2009-03-25T09:01:00.000+13:00

Knife Edge Mirror Two Piece's large scale and difficult-to-reach areas (created by the curving forms) present unique challenges to the conservation team during the annual cleaning and maintenance. In order to treat every inch of the sculpture, at least six people must work a minimum of three days, using an elaborate system of mechanical lifts, scaffolding, and ladders.

Treatment of Knife Edge Mirror Two Piece begins with a thorough inspection of the sculpture. Next, the team rinses both pieces with water, using a pressure washer on a low setting. The sculpture is then washed with water and a mild, non-ionic detergent without perfumes or colorants. This step is the key to removing the dirt, pollen, and pollutants that disfigure the sculpture. Left untreated, these pollutants would eventually lead to corrosion of the metal and loss of patina. Finally, the sculpture is waxed and buffed. Applied by hand, the protective wax coating (consisting primarily of carnauba wax mixed with other natural and synthetic waxes) preserves the brown-red patina. The highly polished surfaces, however, are especially vulnerable to changes and require additional treatment. These areas are polished with an extremely fine grade of microalumina powder and coated with a synthetic resin before being waxed. The entire sculpture is buffed, both by hand and with mechanical devices.

Image: Bronze Form as it was originally intended as part of Large Figure in a Shelter

Collect them while you can

2009-03-05T10:18:00.000+13:00

Callum Arnold; Alexander Bartleet; Dave Beazley; Hannah & Aaron Beehre; Gregory Bennett; Lex Benson-Cooper; Israel Tangaroa Birch; Tracey Black; Benjamin Buchanan; Kushana Bush; Jonathan Campbell; Steve Carr; Liyen Chong; Ruth Cleland; Eddie Clemens; Chris Clements; Matthew Couper; Maryrose Crook; Tjalling de Vries; Matthew Dowman; Julien Dyne; Scott Eady; Lianne Edwards; Thomas Elliott; Matt Ellwood; Simon Esling; Finn Fair; Emma Fitts; Carol Fletcher; Graham Fletcher; Sam Foley; Richard Freestone; Nicola Gibbons; Darren Glass; Jacquelyn Greenbank; Aiko Groot; Sam Hartnett; Ray Haydon; Glen Hayward; Andre Hemer; Kristin Hollis; Sara Hughes; Matt Hunt; Gavin Hurley; Lonnie Hutchinson; Andy Irving; Gina Jones; Simon Kaan; Richard Kearney; Sonia Keogh; Hannah Kidd; Jee Young Kim; Gregor Kregar; Peata Larkin; Hoon Li; Peter Madden; Tim Main; Richard Maloy; Gina Matchitt; Liz Maw; David McCracken; Paulus McKinnon; Andrew McLeod; Gary McMillan; Kim Meek; Peter Miller; Dane Mitchell; Sam Mitchell; Roger Mortimer; Phil Murray; Seung Yul Oh; James Oram; Richard Orjis; Miranda Parkes; Reuben Paterson; Benjamin Pearce; Jessica Pearless; Clinton Phillips; James Robinson; Joe Sheehan; Kathryn Stevens; Matt Summers; Kelcy Taratoa; Lorene Taurerewa; Tim Thatcher; Katie Thomas; Ruth Thomas-Edmond; Martin Thompson; Andy Tolhurst; Mark Ussher; Janna van Hasselt; Krystie Wade; Nick Wall; Rohan Wealleans; Richard Wedekind; Pete Wheeler; Brendon Wilkinson; Sarah Williams; Kate Woods; Wayne Youle.

Editorial

2009-03-02T15:31:00.000+13:00

A sinking feeling about Venice
The Dominion Post | Saturday, 28 February 2009

New Zealand's last exhibitor, Merylyn Tweedie - who presented a jumble of wires, boxes, furniture and computers that, according to one reviewer, looked and smelt like a building site - refused to talk to journalists.

The London-based Ms Upritchard also deserves commendation for her candour. No, her art doesn't really have anything to say about New Zealand, she told The Dominion Post. No, she doesn't want it to, and no, she doesn't care.

Clearly Ms Upritchard hails from the same school as David Cerny, the Czech artist who was commissioned by his government to produce a work celebrating the Czech Republic's presidency of the European Union.

It was not until the work, Entropa, was installed at the European Council building in Brussels that anyone noticed he had treated the commission as a practical joke. In a giant, stylised jigsaw puzzle, Bulgaria was depicted as a hole-in-the-floor toilet, Luxembourg as a tiny lump of gold with a "For sale" sign attached to it, France as being on strike and the Netherlands as being under water.

The work, which is still on display and, according to some reports, is appreciating rapidly in value, has generated amusement for those who are not the butt of Mr Cerny's humour, but embarrassed the Czech Government, which had wanted to celebrate the glory of a unified Europe.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that Ms Upritchard's Biennale exhibit will attract anything like the same attention. If it fares anything like Ms Tweedie's, it will sink without trace.

But she operates according to the same principles asMr Cerny. Take the money and cock a snook at thoseout of whose pockets it is coming.

It is costing Creative New Zealand $650,000 to exhibit her work psychedelic-coloured medieval figures and the three-dimensional paintings of fellow exhibitor Judy Millar, who also seems perplexed by the notion that New Zealand should benefit from her presence in Venice.

"I think there is a problem in New Zealand in that New Zealanders seem to want art to be able to be used for some reason," she said.

Ms Upritchard is perfectly entitled to produce psychedelic representations of whatever she likes. The same holds true for Ms Millar. Neither is obliged to focus on New Zealand subjects. Nor are they obliged to explain their work to philistines who are not immediately struck by its brilliance.

But their independent stances would ring truer if they did not rely on funds from New Zealand taxpayers, many of whom are contemplating an uncertain future, to exhibit in Venice.

Perhaps it is Creative NZ that should be answering the questions. Why is it spending more than half a million dollars exhibiting work overseas that says nothing about New Zealand and can be seen only by the handful of New Zealanders wealthy enough to travel to Italy?

Surely it could find a better use for the money. If it cannot, there are plenty of cash-strapped taxpayers who could.

Willingness

2009-02-22T17:23:00.001+13:00

Sunday Star Times 22 February 2009. Click on image to read.

Python

2009-02-20T20:36:00.001+13:00

Haacke and Connor

2009-02-19T14:21:00.000+13:00

Top: Hans Haacke News.
Bottom: Fiona Connor, Notes on Half the Page

Snap

2009-02-01T21:46:00.001+13:00

Lamps, on the floor leaning against the wall, Hany Armanious sculpture, art books and Julian Dashper drum skins. Top Hamish McKay, bottom Michael Lett

Art at the movies: The Horses Mouth

2009-01-25T21:04:00.000+13:00

Alec Guinness ponders Bratby

MAD Folding

2009-01-25T14:39:00.000+13:00

MAD in general

2009-01-25T14:38:00.001+13:00

MAD on Norman

2009-01-25T14:35:00.000+13:00

Dwyer original

2009-01-20T15:52:00.001+13:00

As at Hamish McKay's gallery

Dinosaurs

2009-01-19T09:39:00.000+13:00

The Age old story

2009-01-14T14:11:00.000+13:00

The Dominion Post catches up on an October story printed in Australia's The Age. (Click on image to enlarge).

Risk Management

2009-01-12T13:24:00.001+13:00

• Accept and involve the public as a legitimate partner.
• Plan carefully and evaluate your efforts.
• Listen to the public's specific concerns.
• Be honest, frank, and open.
• Coordinate and collaborate with other credible sources.
• Meet the needs of the media.
• Speak clearly and with compassion.

Source: Seven Cardinal Rules of Risk Communication. Pamphlet drafted by Vincent T. Covello and Frederick H. Allen. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, April 1988, OPA-87-020.

Live and let Di

2009-01-06T11:07:00.000+13:00

Click on image to read the enthralling text.

Auto spiral

2009-01-05T11:35:00.000+13:00

Guggenheim-like structure for the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the summit of Sugar Loaf Mountain

Flash art

2008-12-31T04:19:00.001+13:00

Here's the rub

2008-12-30T15:41:00.001+13:00

Value

2008-12-14T14:16:00.000+13:00

Gallery collection valued at $18.7m

ROB MAETZIG
Taranaki Daily News
Monday, 08 December 2008

New Plymouth's prestigious Govett-Brewster art collection has rocketed in value so much that it is now worth three times the government valuation of the building that houses it.

Information obtained by the Taranaki Daily News shows the collection, which now comprises 862 works, carries an insurance indemnity value of $18.7 million.

This value does not include the $140,000 the Govett-Brewster Foundation and the New Plymouth District Council paid last month for eight new works for the collection.

The value is also separate to the value of the Len Lye collection which comprises around 4000 items and is also stored at the Govett-Brewster.

In addition, the gallery also stores seven long-term loan art collections which includes a total of 107 artworks.

Art enthusiasts in New Plymouth say the size and value of all these collections, and the fact they are currently held in increasingly cramped storage facilities, underline the importance of the proposed $10 million Len Lye Centre.

This centre, proposed to be built alongside the Govett-Brewster gallery, would house the Len Lye collection which would free up space for more efficient storage of the gallery's collection.

District councillor Lance Girling-Butcher, who is also chairman of the council's Len Lye committee, said storage room at the art gallery was now getting critically short.

"The climate control system is also getting near the end of its useful life, and this year there have been problems with leaks," he said.

"It is important that this is rectified, given the value of the collections that are housed there."

Len Lye supporters must raise $10 million to build the centre before the council will fund the annual operating costs, and even now there is debate over whether ratepayers should meet these costs.

Mr Girling-Butcher said the committee was working hard to get the operating costs down, and he was confident this would happen.

And he added the latest information showed how important it was for New Plymouth to have improved facilities for storage of its internationally-recognised art collections.

"It's a complex and interlocking thing," he said.

"Even if we don't get the Len Lye Centre, we're going to have to invest in upgrading the storage facilities."

Govett-Brewster director Rhana Devenport said the gallery's collection, although still modest in its size when compared with other collections at the likes of Te Papa, was a very important contemporary collection.

"It's hats off to all the previous directors for the job they have done," she said of the collection, which had its beginnings in 1970.

"What they have done over the years is buy up important artworks soon after they were created - that's where they have really added value. For example, one Colin McCahon work called Am I Scared, purchased in 1976 for $500, now has a value of $450,000."

Ms Devenport said the need for more space to permanently house the collections was now getting desperate.

"We really do have a tiny amount of storage space left, and the collections are growing all the time."

Joke

2008-12-10T19:54:00.001+13:00

What do you call a deer with no eyes?
No idea.
What do you call a deer with no eyes that is made of mahogany?
Still no idea.

City Gallery hard at work

2008-11-27T12:04:00.001+13:00

From: Heather Galbraith
Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:42:40 +1300
To: Heather Galbraith
Subject: We are moving next week - 4 December, new details attached

<>
(apologies in advance for cross posting and for sending a group email… at the moment time is of the essence!)

Kia ora koutou,

City Gallery Wellington staff are moving to new temporary office premises during the building development. We are not going far - across the road to Level 2, Anvil House on Wakefield Street - and our telephone numbers will stay the same. We expect to be back in the City Gallery building in August. For more information about the City Gallery development please go to our website www.citygallery.org.nz .

For the folk we are currently working with, access to our computers may be a bit sporadic from the afternoon of Wednesday 3 December until Monday 8 December when we should be back to full IT strength. I will be helping with packing but also potentially working remotely (when I need a computer) so hopefully service should be (pretty) uninterupted during this period.

Also, if you are in Wellington, keep your eyes peeled for a new suite of works within the Courtenay Place light boxes that we are producing. Give us a sign will be installed from 17 December 2008 for a period of six months and features new work by (in alphabetical order); Joseph Churchward & David Bennewith, Gavin Hipkins, Sarah Maxey, Kate Newby, Stanley Nives (Kelvin Soh) and Jim Speers. Press releases will be circulating towards the end of this week regarding the project. It will be on display during the much anticipated TYPESHED11 conference in Wellington (www.typeshed11.co.nz during which the book on Joseph's work edited and designed by David will be launched, and Kelvin, Sarah and David will all be presenting papers), plus Sarah Maxey has a solo show at Bowen Galleries also in February 2009.

In addition to the light box project, the SQUARE” video programme will continue on the flat-screen monitor within the main entrance to City Gallery during closure, changing monthly, plus our Education team are currently delivering two highly popular art in public space sculpture trails to primary and secondary school students.

For information about Francis Upritchard and Judy Millar's projects for the 2009 Venice Biennale please go to www.nzatvenice.com

Warm regards,

Heather

Heather Galbraith
Senior Curator/Manager Curatorial Programmes

tel. +64 (0)4 801 3987
Fax. +64 (0)4 801 3950

City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi
Civic Square
101 Wakefield Street
PO Box 2199
Wellington
Aotearoa New Zealand

City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi is temporarily closed for a major addition to its building. The enlarged new-look Gallery will reopen in September 2009. with three exciting new gallery spaces and a state of the art auditorium. Walk-through access from Harris St. to Civic Square will also be added. Keep up to date with news and progress on www.citygallery.org.nz

Frogs in the news

2008-10-31T09:07:00.000+13:00

From The Times

October 30, 2008

Italian museum boss, Corinne Diserens, sacked after leaping to defend a crucified frog

Kippenberger's controversial Feet First

Richard Owen in Rome

The director of an Italian museum that defied the Pope by refusing to remove a modern art sculpture portraying a crucified green frog has been dismissed from her post.

Corinne Diserens, the Swiss head of the Museion museum of contemporary art at Bolzano in the Italian Alps, was “released from her duties with immediate effect” by the new provincial government in Alto Adige after local elections.

The decision was a result of “the difficult financial situation” caused in part by “unauthorised spending”, officials said. Reports indicated that the museum was running a budget deficit of €500,000 (£390,000).

Supporters of Ms Diserens, including Hans Heiss, the head of the local Green Party, said that the real reason was “the row over the frog”.

Ms Diserens maintained that Kippenberger, who died in 1997, considered the work – Feet First – to be “a self-portrait illustrating human angst”.

Pope Benedict XVl took offence while on summer holiday in the mountains near Bolzano, describing the work as blasphemous. The Vatican sent a letter in the Pope’s name to Franz Pahl, the president of the Trentino-Alto Adige regional council (who also opposed the sculpture), saying that it “wounds the religious sentiments of so many people who see in the Cross the symbol of God’s love”.

Mr Pahl went on a hunger strike to demand the removal of the frog, declaring that it was “a grave offence” to the devoutly Roman Catholic population of the area. The museum agreed only to move the sculpture from the entrance to an upper floor.

Ms Diserens remained defiant, saying that “art is always a provocation, and contemporary art is hardly ever understood immediately”. The number of visitors to the museum had increased, “especially the young”, she said.

She was backed by Fabio Cavallucci, the head of the civic art gallery in Trento, who said: “The relationship between art and politics is never an easy one, but to be sacked because of one work of art is really incredible.”

The newspaper La Repubblica said that the row over the Kippenberg frog had damaged the ruling centrist Südtiroler Volkspartei, which in the recent local elections saw its support drop below the 50 per cent mark for the first time, losing its overall majority.

A local far-right party, Die Freiheitlichen, increased its vote from 5 per cent to more than 14 per cent.

Étant donnés

2008-10-19T21:28:00.000+13:00

Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés

Look alike

2008-10-15T02:58:00.000+13:00

Images: Left Anthony Gormley's cast iron sculpture Another Place, Right Max Patte’s cast iron sculpture Solace in the Wind.

Extreme curation

2008-10-13T03:22:00.000+13:00

Ueno Royal Museum curators placing a work by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama

Love Fest

2008-10-08T13:56:00.000+13:00

Love in the US

Sixth Avenue in New York City
E W Fairchild-Martindale Library, Lehigh University Asa Packer Campus
Pratt Institute campus in Brooklyn, New York
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana
Scottsdale's Civic Center
"LOVE Park" in Philadelphia
New Orleans Museum of Art's sculpture garden
Middlebury College campus, Vermont ^[2],^[3]
University of Pennsylvania campus, Philadelphia
Museum of Art at Brigham Young University, Utah
Ursinus College campus in Collegeville, Pennsylvania
Pool area of the Red Rock Resort Spa and Casino in Las Vegas
Wichita State University campus in Wichita, Kansas
City Park in New Orleans, Louisiana

Outside the US

Taipei 101 in Taipei, Taiwan (also displays Indiana's 1-0)^[4]
Shinjuku I-LAND Tower in Nishi-Shinjuku office district in Tokyo, Japan
Orchard Road in Singapore
Plaza del Sagrado Corazón in Bilbao, Basque Country Spain
Outside 1445 West Georgia Street in Vancouver, Canada
Praca do Rossio in Lisbon, Portugal
CentralWorld in Bangkok, Thailand
Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai,China
Chatsworth in Derbyshire, UK, as part of the Sotheby's Beyond Limits exhibition, 2008.

List from Wikipedia

Not reveal

2008-10-07T13:18:00.000+13:00

Images: Left, an Issey Miyake shop fitting. Right, banner for Picasso exhibition.

I knew that.

2008-09-29T03:58:00.001+13:00

Answers to First words on OTN

1. Sage Tea, Toss Woollaston
2. Cultural Safety: Contemporary Art in New Zealand, Greg Burke
3. Putting the Land on the Map, Wystan Curnow
4. The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont, Martin Edmond
5. Contemporary New Zealand Painters: Volume 1, Jim and Mary Barr
6. New Art, ed Jim Allen and Wystan Curnow
7. New Zealand Painting: An Introduction, Gordon Brown and Hamish Keith
8. Rita Angus: An Artist’s Life, Jill Trevelyan
9. A Concise History of New Zealand Painting, Michael Dunn
10. Frames on the Land: Early Landscape Painting in New Zealand, Francis Pound
11. The World Over, Wystan Curnow
12. Two Hundred Years of New Zealand Painting, Gil Docking

Don't ask

2008-09-18T11:59:00.000+12:00

Paris Hilton trying to get out of a sports car.

New Galleries for Wellington

2008-09-15T00:47:00.000+12:00

City Gallery Press release 15 September 2008

WATCH THIS SPACE...

We are delighted to announce that City Gallery Wellington is entering a crucial period of growth and change, embarking on a $4million development initiative. The Gallery closes for development construction, as well as seismic strengthening of the existing building, on 19 October 2008 at the conclusion of the Fiona Hall: Force Field exhibition.

The development project, designed by award-winning architect Stuart Gardyne of Architecture+, will involve a new two storey addition as well as seismic strengthening of the existing building.

The new wing includes the multi-purpose Adam Auditorium with the new Russell Hancock Gallery replacing the existing cinema on the ground floor. Walk-through pedestrian access provides a link from Harris Street to Civic Square.

Upstairs there will be two new gallery project spaces, the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery dedicated to the work of Wellington artists and the Roderick and Gillian Deane Gallery dedicated to the work of Maori and Pacific Island artists as well as a reading room/AV space.

The enlarged, new-look City Gallery Wellington is scheduled to re-open in early September, 2009. Follow the progress and keep up to date at www.citygallery.org.nz.

Images (from top to bottom): an external view from above of City Gallery Wellington's new tower; the second image is a cross section of the building showing the new Adam Auditorium and the West Gallery on the ground floor, and on the first floor the new Roderick and Gillian Deane Gallery of Maori and Pacific art, the new reading room/AV space and the existing South Gallery; the third image shows the Roderick and Gillian Deane Gallery of Maori and Pacific art on the first floor featuring a virtual exhibition of works by Darryn George; the bottom image shows the Russell Hancock Gallery. All images are architect's impressions generated by Architecture+.

Letter litter

2008-09-10T17:36:00.001+12:00

Letters to the Sunday Star Times re the Goncharova article and post

Goncharova

2008-09-07T17:41:00.000+12:00

Kim Knight in the Sunday Star Times 31 August in response to the OTN story The 12.8 million dollar question. See also Sellers Market follow up. Click to enlarge.