Rhana Devenport, the Director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery from 2006 to 2013, liked to think of the “New” in the name of New Plymouth as a challenge to be innovative in art and “audacious in the city’s dreaming about itself.” The Len Lye Centre, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, stands as a great example, with its dazzling architecture and unique forms of art.
Because those planning the Centre were insistent that a building devoted to Lye’s art had to reflect its energy – to have what he called “Zizz!” – they conducted a lengthy survey of architects. The proposal they chose came from Andrew Patterson who used Lye’s favourite sculptural material, polished stainless steel, for the exterior of the building to capture light and create movement. James Elkins once described art as an “object that stares back at you,” and the Centre is a perfect example. Inside, it employs another local material in its bold concrete columns. Like the Centre, Lye’s sculpture is an unusual meeting of art and engineering; and that’s how he first bonded with New Plymouth (or Ngāmotu, to use its Māori name), through the help he received from resident engineer John Matthews.
Overseas, Lye is best known for his films – there’s even a UK postage stamp celebrating his filmmaking – but in Aotearoa he’s more often talked about as a sculptor. It’s important that the Centre includes both galleries and a cinema since films and kinetic sculptures are both vehicles for Lye’s innovative art of motion. His sculpture is unlike other machine-based art because it is closely linked to movement in nature and the human body.
The campaign to raise the $11.5 million needed to build the Len Lye Centre began around 2006, and with no funding available from the District Council, some dismissed it as a pipedream. But the target was reached through the generosity of donors and central government, and the centre opened in July 2015. When I think of the huge number of people involved, I am struck by the contrast with Lye’s own modus operandi. Struggling to fund projects during the Great Depression, he developed a new, one-person method of film-making. He also pursued a largely DIY approach to sculpture, but he was frustrated with the limits of what he could achieve by hand. Today Lye has a large backup team – the Len Lye Foundation (a non-profit trust which includes artists, art historians and engineers), the expert staff of the centre (including Lye Curator Anna Briers), relationships with the Ngā Taonga film archive and the School of Engineering at Canterbury University, and many individual supporters.
Those who raised funding for the centre cited the potential for art tourism. The great examples have included Frank Gehry’s sculpture-like Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, which revitalised Basque country, attracting millions of visitors to a depressed industrial area. A recent BERL report estimates that the Len Lye Centre is helping to boost the local region’s economy by $13.7 million per year, with over 80,000 visitors a year, about a quarter of them from outside New Plymouth.
Few New Zealand cities have as much to offer the cultural tourist as Ngāmotu New Plymouth. Besides the Len Lye Centre and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, there is a rich Māori history, a coastal walkway (including Lye’s Wind Wand), the Puke Ariki museum, botanical gardens, festivals such as WOMAD (though that’s taking a break in 2026), and of course an amazing mountain.
Before Lye’s death in 1980, the District Council signed an agreement with the artist, who left his collection to “the people of New Zealand,” to be stored in New Plymouth on condition that it be displayed and kept in good order. Yet the Len Lye Centre still has critics who ridicule the idea of art tourism, claiming that visitors would have been come in any case because of the surfing, tramping, cycling, etc. The Post has described the local “war of words” over the centre as “ferocious.” Kylie Klein Nixon once reported in the Sunday Star-Times that the doubters see the gallery as “a criminal drain on Taranaki’s resources and an affront to the dignity and decency of ordinary farming folk.” And “You’d think the locals had been robbed at wind-wand point by Len Lye himself.” Making her own first visit in October 2025, Nixon described the Lye Centre as “jaw-on-the-floor stuff,” and added: “I’ve been all over the world, and I don’t know another country where a small [city] would have a gallery of this calibre.”
The centre is celebrating its anniversary by the powerful two-part exhibition Direct Bodily Empathy— Sensing Sound (until October 2026) which stimulates both seeing and listening. Lye planned his sculptures not only as visual compositions but also as sound sources. A special part of the exhibition is A Score for the Len Lye Centre by the artist/composer Mia Salsjö who has transformed the centre’s architectural shapes into music, performed by a 13-piece string ensemble from the NZ Symphony Orchestra, plus a synthesiser playing recordings of sculptures in action.
With more advocates than critics, the Len Lye Centre has become part of the New Plymouth way of life. That includes local children, who respond to his art with the physical empathy he always encouraged. When a school party of small children watch a Lye sculpture perform, some immediately start to dance. The artist was always fascinated by the free forms of children’s art. Rachael Buchanan wrote a marvellous account (in Meanjin) of how her early years in New Plymouth had been influenced by Lye’s art. When she was nine, “The energy in his sculptures and films mirrored the energy I felt in myself at the time.” She and her siblings were sometimes so excited that “our screams mixed with the long echo of Flip and Two Twisters so we didn’t know if it was us or the art that was making the noise.” As an adult, Buchanan reflected on the fact that children are “people whose own newness in the world makes them, perhaps, far more comfortable with radical, confronting, wild new works of contemporary art than the adults who might accompany them.”
