Woman of vision at art gallery
Warren Feeney looks back at Jenny Harper’s reign as director of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu.
It might be difficult to believe now, but before the appointment of Jenny Harper as director of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu (CAG), the Christchurch City Council was seriously considering a World Cup football photography exhibition to address falling visitor numbers.
In 2005-06, the year before Harper’s arrival, annual visitor numbers were at 288,293, much less than half the attendances recorded in its opening year of
2003. By 2011, Harper had implemented a programme of exhibitions that had amassed record annual visitor numbers of
527,000 by January 23, 2011. Yet, this turnaround in attendances and heightened interest in the city’s public gallery is only one measure of her success. Its permanent collection has been transformed from a substantial regional collection to one of nationalsignificance, bolstered by works from prominent international artists.
And then there is the unprecedented scale of fundraising that has taken place since the acquisition of Michael Parekowhai’s Chapman’s Homer in 2013, a catalyst for a fundraising strategy that raised $3 million to buy four more ‘‘significant’’ works, and an additional $3 million for an endowment fund for future works of art. Harper’s responsive attitude has meant the council has reduced its annual acquisition’s fund from $250,000 in
2015 to a meagre $80,000.
It was evident in 2006 that Harper was more than up to the task of clarifying who was responsible for deciding on the programme for the city’s public gallery – whether an exhibition of a sporting event or otherwise.
When the Gallery opened in
2003, Harper had been one of four academics invited to comment on its programme for The Journal of New Zealand Art History. Harper expressed some doubt, concerned that the ‘‘cherished’’ Robert McDougall Art Gallery had ‘‘simply been transferred to its new site’’.
Once inside, she said, ‘‘the whole affair is a little too sedate and strangely static’’.
As former director of the National Art Gallery in Wellington and director of museum projects at Te Papa Tongarewa in the early 1990s, she had experience of the neo-liberal policies implemented by the Labour Government at that time.
This was the period in which the visual arts became a newlyborn creature capable of delivering social agendas about ‘‘national identity’’, as they were simultaneously identified as an economic resource for tourism.
These strategies coincided with the emergence of the first generation of fully professional gallery managers and staff, now required to balance the demands of public expectations with their own ambitions and count visitor numbers as the method to receive appropriate funding from councils. It is still a demanding and complex set of agendas.
Her appointment in 2006 opened the door to many contemporary artists who had previously been absent from the Gallery’s programme. The list includes Julian Dashper, et al, Michael Pare-kowhai and Yvonne Todd, and locally, Hannah and Aaron Beehre, Robert Hood, Joanna Langford, Miranda Parkes and Ronnie van Hout. However, this support for New Zealand artists in exhibitions also saw the demise of other levels of support, among them the Cranleigh Barton Award for drawing. Established in 1993, the national award was held every two years and offered the opportunity to be selected to exhibit in one of New Zealand’s leading public galleries.
It also gave emerging artists a newfound status alongside their seniors. Arguably, it would appear that criticisms of the award and perceptions of its limited perspective on what drawing could be, may have informed such decisions, but many artists regretted its demise.
The decision to tour Shane Cotton’s The Hanging Sky from 2012 to 2013 to the Institute of Modern Art Brisbane and City Gallery Wellington – when the Christchurch Art Gallery was closed – also raised some concerns. Although, there may have been an assumption in 2012 that the gallery would soon reopen and exhibit The Hanging Sky, the notion that it wished to publicly state that it remained operational to its peers in the professional arts community seemed paramount to more immediate concerns about creating opportunities for local artists and its arts community.
To Harper’s credit, during the gallery’s closure its Outer Spaces programme delivered many highlights. Hannah and Aaron Beehre’s Waters Above Waters Below, Jess Johnson’s Wurm Whorls Narthex in the C1 building and Ronnie van Hout’s Comin’ Down on the rooftop of the C1 building, all shifted perceptions of the world we now lived in, normalising, to a certain extent, the experience of post-quake Christchurch.
In 2013 and 2014, Outer Spaces also featured works on paper exhibitions at the Peterborough Street Library. The Pear Tree Press, drawings by Philip Trusttum, the Caxton Press and Fernbank Studio were all a revelation, and it was disappointing not to see this series sustained as an outreach programme when the CAG reopened in December 2015.
If Harper’s programme added significantly to the mix of contemporary artists that the CAG exhibited and collected, it was, at times, also constrained by assumptions about a familiar fine arts hierarchy that prioritised conceptual art, sculpture, video, painting and photography over design, craft and illustration.
In celebrating 125 years of the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Art in 2007, Art School 125 demarcated substantial attention to painting, to the detriment of design, illustration and craft/ objects. Those missing artists included children’s illustrator and writer Gavin Bishop and designer Bret de Thier.
The absence of design, craft and objects in the CAG’s collection also needs attention. Contemporary jeweller Lisa Walker finally made it into the Gallery’s exhibition programme in 2016, but hers and Karl Fritsch’s work are absent from the public collection.
Ceramics are equally under represented. Historical works in the collection by potters like Yvonne Rust and Doris Lusk are yet to be complemented by those of contemporary ceramic artists like Paul Maseyk or Richard Stratton. Neither are Ma¯ ori, Pasifika or Asian New Zealand artists well represented.
The reason why and how a work of art gets into a public collection tends to fade rapidly. In the end, it is the day-to-day experience and response of the often unsuspecting gallery visitor works like Bill Culbert’s Bebop or Bridget Riley’s Cosmos that really matters. Harper has given the current generation of visitors, and the innumerable visitors yet to come, the opportunity for such an experience and that is important.
Works of art represent an idea worth taking seriously and the opportunity for such an encounter for those who come to the central city and take time out to visit the Christchurch Art Gallery has been significantly enriched over the past 11 years.
Harper’s time as director has substantially extended the potential of that experience and she is to be thanked for her vision and commitment to doing so.
Harper has given the current generation of visitors the opportunity for experiences and that is important.
❚ Jenny Harper’s final day as the director of the Christchurch Art Gallery is on March 27.