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.

Receiving the Greg Semu Archive

One of the joys of being an archivist at the Auckland Art Gallery is the contact I have with artists, so it was with a great sense of anticipation that I arranged to meet with photographer Greg Semu on a recent visit to Auckland to discuss the deposit of his archive with the E H McCormick Research Library. Greg agreed to the long-term loan of his negatives, proof sheets and reels of film.  

When I went with one of our registrars to collect the material, our first archive from a Pacific artist, Greg asked whether he might add to the loan.  So now, we are lucky enough to have in addition, hundreds of prints, examples of Greg’s commercial work in the form of magazines and videos, exhibition ephemera and diaries, as well as the negatives.

Greg generously allowed the Research Library to exhibit items from the archive immediately. With Home AKL soon to be shown, we decided to mount a display in the Library’s exhibition case to celebrate the loan and give Gallery visitors some idea of the practice of a very significant New Zealand photographer. 

Better to Give: The Greg Semu Archive will be on display until Monday 22 October outside the Library entrance on the Mezzanine level. You can also find out more about all the artists represented in Home AKL (and ask them questions!) on the exhibition's Facebook page. 

Upload statistics to Facebook and Flickr

After my illustrated lecture for the Auckland Photography Festival on the camera artists included in Home AKL, I wondered what are some of the statistics about photos being loaded into major sites on the web daily.

Photographer Chris Corson-Scott kindly researched this information and here is his report:

Number of photos uploaded to facebook:

per minute: 140,000

per hour: 8,400,000

per day: 201,600,000


Flickr is way behind with:

per minute:  3,500

per hour: 210,000

per day: 5,040,000

A visit to Documenta13

Our Assistant Registrar Fiona Moorhead has joined the ranks of Gallery bloggers to share some snapshots of her recent travels...

Documenta is a contemporary art event held in Kassel, Germany once every five years. During the 100 days of Documenta, the population of Kassel swells as hundreds of thousands of art fans make the pilgrimage to this small town in the middle of Germany.  You have to wonder how the town's citizens deal with this onslaught, and what they think of the strange and wonderful artworks left behind.  This year, for Documenta13, I made the journey, and here are a few thoughts and images I've taken away from this visit.

A notable feature of Documenta is the variety of venues: in addition to the main venues of traditional museum and gallery spaces, the event spreads across the city, invading city gardens, a planetarium, natural history museum, an abandoned hotel, shops, cinemas, the train station and a children's library, just to name a few.  Many artists present works that are incidental to the location in which they are presented, but some artists create works that respond to their environment. 

One artwork that had a strong connection to its location was Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's work 'Alter Bahnhof Video Walk' which was based in the Kassel Hauptbahnhof (main train station). 

Visitors were invited to borrow an iPod loaded with a video and sound piece, which instructed you to follow the video maker's movements through the station.  The narrator mused on the physical location (taking you to the platform where trains departed to concentration camps during World War II), as well as more internal wanderings, through ideas of memory, place and relationships to loved ones.  The result was an intriguing form of augmented reality, where the events taking place in the video seemed to segue into reality.  The 'guided tour' feeling of the work offered another perspective to our experience of Documenta, where, armed with maps, we navigated through Kassel, trying to find Documenta venues, and sometimes encountering unexpected things along the way. 

With hundreds of artists' projects, lectures, congresses, film screenings, performances and other events, no one can possibly see the full gamut that Documenta has to offer. Instead, we all see just a small slice, and like our experience being guided around the train station by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, we are at times engaged with the physical experiences, and other times wrapped up in our own imaginations.

Pop Art Pets!

Andy Warhol’s portrait of a Daschund was the inspiration for our final studio session for Animals in Art. The idea that a pet dog could be the inspiration for an artwork really appealed to the children, and they loved looking at photos we had found of Warhol with his own pet Daschund Archie.

Working from photographs of their own pets, or favourite animals, the children combined collage, printing and ink drawing as they experimented with colour and multiples, with some great results!

Animals in Art - The Studio's VIP (Very Important Pet!)

My darling dog Jackson joined us in the studio on the Animals in Art studio course! He was a hit with the kids and proved to be an exceptional model for them to draw. We were looking at the sixteenth century painting by Lavinia Fontana, Portrait of a Lady with a Dog.

After some preliminary sketches, we moved on to painting with acrylics and inks. As you can see the paintings are wonderful! The confident way the children worked with colour, line and pattern resulted in some very dynamic paintings.

Our regular artist Benny did a lovely painting of Jackson. When asked about his choices of colour for my white and black dog, he responded that ‘Jackson has fallen in the paint’! We love that and think that Benny’s dog may well become our Studio mascot.

Jim Vivieaere and Colin McCahon

I have been really busy working towards the opening of Home AKL on Saturday 7 July and have had no time to contribute to this blog recently.

In searching for a quotation by Jim Vivieaere today I came across two unsourced portraits.

One is of Jim and the other is of Colin McCahon. I think that one of Colin may have been taken in 1950.

As these portraits were unknown to me I thought that I would share them.

With apologies to the unknown copyright holders - if they are known to anyone, please send comments on to me.

Inspired by The Spider!

The children in the 6-8 year olds 'Animals in Art' studio course made some fantastic responses to the Alexander Calder work The Spider, seen in the Degas to Dalí exhibition. Working with the idea of animals as symbols in art, the children chose an animal that best represented a quality or characteristic that they possess. Charlie expressed his playful side when he chose to depict a monkey!

The children enjoyed the challenge of simplifying their chosen animal into the most basic lines, and removing any detail. We worked with string and glue to create a printing plate of their animal. Once this was dry, we ran it through the printing press with soaked paper on top to take an embossing of the plate. The results were spectacular!

Our mystery guest will be revealed in our next blog, as will our Studio mascot...

In the meantime, make sure you don't miss out on the exciting holiday workshops coming up, as well as the first lot of studio courses for term 3. Bookings are open!

Loyal dogs, wise owls and sneaky snakes! Sunday studio course with the 6-8 year olds

We are having a great time exploring animals in art with the 6-8 year olds in the Sunday studio courses at the moment. We began by looking at a number of Victorian paintings in the Tales of Love and Enchantment exhibition. The paintings we focused on were Legend of Sir Patrick Spens by James Archer, Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind by John Everett Millais, Married by Water Sadler, and Her First Love Letter by Marcus Stone. In each of these paintings we used the animals as clues to the story in the painting. The children loved the idea that the tortoise represents love, and that by painting it lumbering away from the couple in Married, Sadler has used the animal as a symbol to show that the couple was no longer close.

Walter Sadler, Married, 1896

Oil on canvas, Mackelvie Trust Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

In the Degas to Dalí exhibition we discussed the Spider by Alexander Calder. The children really responded to the simple lines of the work and the way it moved with the wind. Drawing on the children's knowledge of animals from stories and movies, we brainstormed animals as symbols as we thought about what animal best represented our personal attributes. The children's simple line drawings of an animal was made into a printing plate using string and glue. We'll have some images of their prints soon!

Check out our next blog to see the VIP who visited the children in the studio during our second class!

Haerewa Tribute to Arnold Maanaki Wilson 1928 - 2012

Dr Arnold Manaaki Wilson, MNZN, QSM, Arts Foundation Icon, PhD (Honorary), DipFA (Hons)

Arnold will be dearly missed as the Kaumatua of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and kaumatua of our close Haerewa whanau. He led the way for the Gallery in Māori protocols and made everyone in it culturally safe. He blessed Haerewa and with those blessings made us a strong, cohesive group. He blessed every part of the gallery and touched everyone who entered it and those who worked inside, and he blessed the artworks on the walls and in the stores. He imbued the Gallery with his wairua and we mourn his passing.

Arnold was a cultural hero. He will be remembered in the wider community of Aotearoa New Zealand as an extraordinary sculptor and carver. He was at the forefront of the group who challenged the established norms of traditional Māori art and created a new era of Māori Modernism. He was a change agent and his work reflected the new expressions of Māori art that opened the way for younger artists and contributed to burgeoning of Māori art of the 21st century.

Arnold was a remarkable art educator. He taught in secondary schools and as his students, he made us proud of the art forms, we inherited as Māori. He brought the community and huge groups of students together to make murals that told the stories of hapu and iwi around the country from Ratana Pa to the Far North. He led the way in the establishment of guidelines for The Arts, Nga Toi in the NZ Curriculum for schools. Through his work in education, he touched the lives of thousands of students from diverse backgrounds and therefore altered the cultural profile of Aotearoa New Zealand.

We thank his wife Rangitinia and his whanau for lending him to us.

Moe mai ra Arnold ki roto i nga ringaringa manaaki o te Matua-nui-i-te-rangi.

Elizabeth Ellis for Haerewa, Fred Graham, Mere Lodge, Bernard Makoare, Jonathan Mane-Wheoki and Lisa Reihana.