Impala Land

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

A rough guide...

 ...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

Comment on roundabout exhibition

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

Walters: Stevenson

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

Walters press release

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.

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.

* 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

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

Yes Minister

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