One year on

It’s been an entire year since we opened the doors of the newly restored and expanded Auckland Art Gallery!

Crowds enter the Gallery on opening day

I've been enjoying reading back through the archives of this blog to see the years of hard work that led up to this moment, right from the moment we closed our doors and emptied the galleries. A webcam kept the public (and staff!) up-to-date as demolition began. In 2009 we let people see into the future with an animated ‘fly-through’ of the Gallery. In early 2010 we looked back at the progress to date with a nifty timelapse video. Finally work drew to a close and on 6 June 2011 we were able to announce an opening date!

But before that could happen, we had to start moving everything back in… Being allowed to explore the newly restored building was an exciting and humbling experience. The moment when the first painting was hung in the developed galleries was momentous. Finally we took over the new office spaces and the Gallery and its Māori dimension commissions were blessed in a dawn ceremony.

And finally on 3 September 2011 we opened, with fanfare and fun and performances and street art and crowds. Hearing the feedback from visitors in those opening weeks never gets old:









In the last year we’ve:

• Held 32 exhibitions
• Seen the gallery spaces taken over by dancers, string quartets, blues bands, and hip-hop crews
• Released multiple publications
• Won 12 awards for our beautiful building
• And welcomed more than 677,000 visitors through our doors! 

Thank you to everyone who's visited us in the last year. It's exciting every day to see people experiencing the galleries and our collection, and we've got plenty of surprises in store for you, so stay tuned...

Tales from the Cloakroom

The majority of our blog entries come from back-of-house staff. But if you're after 'better work stories' the best place to go is our talented team of Gallery Guides. With visitors from all walks of life coming through the doors every day, they've all got stories to tell of an unusual encounter or a truly bizarre question.

Just as a taster, here's a list of the strangest things visitors have checked into the cloakroom:

• An empty bowl of noodles
• Half a beer
• A large bowl of hummus
• A herb garden in a bucket
• Shoes
• A ceremonial axe
• A giant helium balloon
• Many bunches of flowers
• A whole raw fish

I guess we should be grateful none of these made it into the galleries! Thanks to Bella Burgess for compiling the list to date.

Three cheers for the preps!

The creation of an exhibition is a huge team effort, and at the end of the process it all comes down to the team of preparators and technicians who physically install the artworks in the galleries. Each exhibition comes with its own challenges - whether it's moving very large, heavy or fragile objects, installing 7,081 tiny objects in the right configuration, or abseiling down a wall to hang a work in a tricky spot. The photos below show the Gallery’s install teams in action - from 1954 to today.

1954: The Museum Microcosm: Items from the Auckland War Memorial Museum

1971: Morris Louis (In 1971, not only was it okay to handle artworks without wearing gloves – it was okay to handle artworks while smoking your pipe!)

1981: Artichoke. The legendary exhibition where every painting in the collection was put on display.

1995: Transformers. Installing the 5000 polystyrene balls of Nike Savvas’ installation Simple Division.

2001: Bambury: Works 1975-1999. The installation of this exhibition of Stephen Bambury’s work required a steady hand and a head for heights.

2001: 1st Auckland Triennial: Bright Paradise: Exotic History and Sublime Artifice; Ashley Bickerton, Them [detail], 1998

2002: Love and Death: Art in the Age of Queen Victoria.Before the development project, large works like Frederic Leighton’s The Syracusan Bride, 1865-6 had to enter the building via crane over the café balcony …

… and then be shuffled past the muffins and paninis in the café …

… before finally arriving in the gallery for installation. Of course, large works would also have to exit the building using the same circuitous route. Hooray for our new, spacious loading bay and goods lift!

2003: Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith

2005: Mixed-Up Childhood. Assembling the fragile glass structure of Louise Bourgeois’ Cell 1990-3.

2005: Mixed-Up Childhood. Unpacking a fragment of Jake and Dinos Chapman’s The Return of the Repressed 1997.

2005: Framing the Past

2006: Summer Daze. Don Driver’s McKechnie Brothers Mural, 1967.

2008: The collection was packed up and moved into offsite storage before the building development project was begun.

2008: The Enchanted Garden

2008: The Walters Prize. Installing the 7081 tiny canvases of John Reynold’s Cloud, 2006.

2009: Yinka Shonibare

2009: The Julian and Josie Robertson Promised Gift: An Exclusive Preview. With only nine hours to install, this exhibition went up in double-quick time. (Artwork shown: Pablo Picasso, Mère aux enfants a l'orange (Mother and children with an orange), 1951, promised gift of Julian and Josie Robertson)

2010: Call Waiting: A Celebration of the New Gallery 1995-2011 (See our previous blog about the installation of this artwork here.)

2011: Toi Aotearoa: New Zealand Art 1965-1900. The first work to be hung in the developed Gallery was Colin McCahon’s 1952 painting On Building Bridges.

2011: Installing Choi Jeong Hwa’s Flower Chandelier, 2011 in the North Atrium.

2011: Whizz Bang Pop. Installing the Boyle Family’s The Gisborne Triptych, 1990 in the Parkview Gallery.

2011: Whizz Bang Pop. Installing Luc Piere’s Tower, 1973 in the Parkview Gallery.

We're in!

With the exception of the Library, shop and Friends staff, we are now ensconced in our new offices inside the Gallery.

There were a lot of boxes to be moved... (and this doesn't include what was sent to be archived)

I've put this next picture of a certain manager's office in for Gallery staff - it's almost unrecognisable all packed up. Visualise stacks of paper covering every available surface (including the floor) and you might be able to identify it!

While it's exciting to be back in the Gallery again, we will miss the view of Aotea Square from the balcony outside our lunchroom:

The trucks start arriving:

It'll be a while before our office spaces are 100% finished but here's a progress shot, taken before movers and IT staff invaded:



I'll post some more progress shots of the gallery spaces soon - or if there's anything specific you'd like to see, comment and let me know!

Preserving the past

Paintings conservator Ingrid Ford celebrated 10 years with the Gallery over the weekend. Here’s just a short list of some of her many achievements for the conservation department during the last decade:

• Playing a significant part in the preparation of works for the Gallery’s opening exhibitions, treating numerous paintings in a wide range of styles and periods
• Overseeing the treatment, glazing and reframing of Lindauer’s historic portraits of Māori 
• Conserving artworks sent to the Gallery from other regional museums and art galleries
• Increasing public understanding of conservation, giving public lectures as well as tours of the conservation studios
• Being asked to represent the Dunedin Public Art Gallery as their conservator when they had the touring Pre-Raphaelite exhibition from the Tate Gallery
• Acting as secretary for the professional body of conservators, the NZCCM, for six years

Happy tenth anniversary, Ingrid! And thank you for everything you’ve done for the Gallery in the last decade.
You can find out more about the conservators and what they do here.

Behind closed doors

Here's a quick update in pictures of what's been happening at the Gallery since our phased handover of the building began...

Our registration team moved in and the artworks started arriving...

And our photographers moved into their new digs (but there's still some unpacking to do!)... but best of all...

...There is art on the walls once more! This McCahon is the very first artwork to be installed in the developed Gallery spaces.

One down, approximately 800 to go! So now it's all hands on deck for our registrars, conservators, curators, technicians and designers as we prepare to welcome you into the Gallery on 3 September.

Edited to add: I've just realised the title for this blog post mirrors one my predecessor wrote almost exactly three years ago showing the empty Gallery spaces after it closed for development! And now we're moving back in... a serendipitous surprise.

Coming home

When I started working at the Gallery in November I joined a people in exile. For more than three years the staff have waited in their temporary office environs, planning for the moment when the Gallery building would be returned to them in all its glory.

Now that the day is approaching there's been a discernible shift in the atmosphere in our offices. While there is still a huge amount of work to do (and a few anxious faces!), there's a real feeling of excitement and relief that at last it's all happening.

On June 13 members of Haerewa, our Māori advisory group, led staff members and members of the Hawkins construction team through the building for a blessing of the new and restored spaces. We filed quietly through the empty galleries, under the direction of our kaumatua Arnold Manaaki Wilson.

More recently an open afternoon was held so family and friends of Hawkins and Gallery staff could come and see the project that's consumed us for such a long time.

Crowds look into the North Atrium

Exploring the galleries

Viewing Albert Park from the sculpture terrace

On the move

As we announced last week, the Gallery's main building will open its doors on September 3 - but there's still a lot of work to be done behind the scenes in the coming months!

Hawkins are putting the finishing touches on the building (which you can continue to peek at on our webcam), while staff are preparing to move back in after three years in 'exile'.

Our security team has already settled into the developed building, and next up are the conservation teams. They're not exactly light packers, though - here are some pictures of the painting conservation lab as they prepare for the move:

Tools of the trade

Boxes...

... and more boxes...

... and there's still all this to be packed up!

Meanwhile the paper conservation lab is giving the moving crews a good workout. There's all manner of heavy, unwieldy and fragile equipment, and it all has to come down from the ninth story of one building, across Queen Street and up to the new space.

You might not think this would be a problem - after all, that's what burly moving crews and moving trucks are for, right? Well, not in the case of this instrument:

This is a microscope used by the paper conservators and it can't be exposed to the kind of vibrations caused by moving vehicles. So it has to travel 'on foot', which means a painstaking voyage with two moving men, two bits of carpet and one conservation assistant (not shown) to supervise.

It's going to be a long day for these guys!

*Because of the move, the NEW Gallery will be closing one hour early (at 4pm instead of 5pm) on Thursday 9 June. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

The fixer-uppers

There's an article about our amazing conservation team in the latest Auckland City Harbour News. You can also view it online on Stuff.co.nz - and it comes complete with a slideshow and audio! Well worth a watch to find out more about their work.

When paintings get itchy feet

Have you ever wondered how works of art get moved around from place to place? It’s not as simple as wrapping them up and popping them in the post! Exhibitions Project Coordinator Judith Cooke experienced the whole process last month when she accompanied a historic painting from the Gallery’s collection on its journey to Melbourne. Read her tale below:

Eugène von Guérard's Lake Wakatipu with Mount Earnslaw, Middle Island, New Zealand, 1877-79, goes to Melbourne

Recently I accompanied the Gallery's von Guérard painting Lake Wakatipu with Mount Earnslaw to Melbourne where it will be shown with its pair Milford Sound (on loan from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney). Von Guérard visited the South Island in January 1876, visiting Milford Sound and Lake Wakatipu. On his return to Melbourne he worked the two grand paintings. Lake Wakatipu and Milford Sound were exhibited in 1877 at the Victorian Academy of Arts and then at International expositions in Paris (1878), Sydney (1879), Melbourne (1880) and London's Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886). In London, the paintings were sold into private hands and eventually returned to Australasia when they were purchased by the Mackelvie Trust in 1971 (for permanent loan to the Auckland Art Gallery) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

These two large canvasses will hang side by side as the finale works of the NGV's exhibition Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed. Opening on 16 April, this is the first major exhibition of von Guérard's work since 1980 and will travel to Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. The catalogue includes Auckland Art Gallery curator Jane Davidson-Ladd’s recent research on the source of the waka. The curators and NGV are thrilled that the Gallery has made the work available for loan and tour.

Registrar Anne Harlow and I met on Sunday morning at our off-site store where the crated painting was picked up. Waving goodbye to Anne, I stuck to our crate like glue as it was trucked to the airport for palletisation onto a dedicated pallet.

After a few hours of waiting around in the bond store keeping the crate well in view, it was eventually loaded into the freighter (Boeing 747) as ‘last on and first off’ (see pic of its location in the plane below). No race horses on this flight fortunately!

In Melbourne the crate and I were met by Global Specialised Services and an NGV registrar. After a smooth and quite speedy clearance I travelled in the truck with the crate to NGV Australia in Federation Square where we were met by members of the exhibitions and registration team. Here the crate was carefully unloaded, receipted and left to acclimatise in the gallery for 24 hours.

Unpacking the crate

Checking the painting's condition

Installation was delayed thanks to a small hold up with some display case construction. On Wednesday morning the crate was opened, the painting unpacked, condition reported (no change) and installed. Once it was safe on the wall, my job was done. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the safe transit of Lake Wakatipu to Melbourne.

- Judith Cooke