SMAG clears air over art
The Southland Museum and Art Gallery (SMAG) Trust Board has cleared the confusion over where art will be displayed in Invercargill.
At a meeting yesterday, the SMAG trust board moved to recommend to the Invercargill City Council that the new arts centre would be the primary displayer of art in the city.
It came about after council chief executive Claire Hadley wrote to the board chair Toni Biddle seeking clarification over the roles SMAG and the arts centre would play in future in terms of the displaying of art.
Confusion over the matter arose at a council meeting last week because the council indicated it was going to hold off proceeding its arts centre project while a strategic review of SMAG was under way.
Several councillors wondered why council staff suggested the project should be put on hold, given that in June they approved for it to go ahead in the Long Term Plan.
Hadley said it would be unproductive to recruit a project leader until the scope of the project was known, which would not be clear until the SMAG strategic review determined what role art would play in its future.
In the letter to the board, Hadley asked if it would accept the proposal that the new arts centre replace the Invercargill Public Art Gallery and SMAG as the city’s art centre.
The board was against the idea that art be taken away from SMAG.
Board community representative Gwen Neave said the trust had been charged with the care and wellbeing of some of the artworks in its collection and could not just give them away.
‘‘Why would we want to give away that trust?’’
Consultant Tim Walker, who prepared the proposal for the arts centre, had indicated to the board that it was not a case of either SMAG or the arts centre having the art, but both coexisting, Neave said.
Cr Darren Ludlow said he still believed art would play a part in historical exhibitions, but SMAG would not necessarily curate exhibitions of one artist’s work.
‘‘That’s the stuff I would expect to see in an art gallery.
‘‘While we’re not necessarily in the position where we want to remove the AG from SMAG, we are prepared to acknowledge we will not be the primary art gallery in the city, but that art may well play a strong part in what we do.’’
While originally the board wanted to wait for for the review to be completed to get the full picture, it recognised it would be putting the arts centre on hold until a decision was made.
The board then resolved to recommend to council that SMAG endorsed the arts centre as the facility with the primary focus on art in Invercargill and that SMAG wanted to be part of the discussion on the future of art in the city.