Should institutions be judged by the way they treat their collections?

We’re blessed with fine regional public galleries up and down this country. Many sizable public, private and university collections are held for public display. This is common wealth, with a shared sense of ownership, and every artwork sends out many tentacles of connection. Yet their treatment today is, shall we say, variable. 

In Paul Little’s recent lead feature in the NZ Listener, ‘The Great Art Heist’, a chorus raised concern over the amount of the national art collection on display. A long list of great artists not on the walls on a recent visit to Te Papa is provided. 

This is an outcry at least as old as Te Papa’s 27 years, when the National Art Gallery closed and its collection was incorporated into the new national museum. The lack of dedicated space for the art collection and the way works were displayed caused controversy right from 1998. Numerous attempts by Te Papa to reframe and isolate how it shows the collection have been met by calls – myself included – for more to be on show. It is precious. Yet, Te Papa has its own distinctive bicultural mandate in what it does. Equally fine lauded collections are owned by ratepayers with Auckland Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery, and regional galleries nationally. 

Collections also move, and co-mingle. Stats I’ve seen suggest more people see work in the Auckland Art Gallery collection elsewhere, than they do in the gallery itself. 

Over summer I saw the excellent Robyn Kahukiwa survey show, Tohunga Mahi Toi (produced by New Zealand Portrait Gallery and Te Manawa) at Aratoi in Masterton. It’s currently at the Suter Gallery in Nelson (until May 3) and toured extensively in 2025, and it includes work from a range of public collections.

The ‘70s was a decade of public collection building throughout the country. The value placed on investing in the public collection of art has been chipped away at since, in particular with the neoliberal changes of the 1980s. We are encouraged to value everything new, and not spend too much time on cultural history.

During this time collecting has reduced, or sometimes frozen entirely in the regions. Yet our galleries have continued to be dynamic. The picture is more complex than just counting objects. 

As culture changes, so do the forms art takes. Galleries have had to fund far more. Participation and experience have become more valued. As has balancing the Western museum tradition with kaupapa Māori – a Māori approach. Attention has shifted to commissioning short term installations, and an increase in the number of events and exhibitions. 

Thanks to the computers in our pockets, how we engage with culture has also changed radically. Our streets are full of public art we take images of. Generally our values have changed – think how long the consumer items in your house now last. 

All this sees the collection of art objects in competition with other priorities. But this doesn’t make it less important. Indeed it all makes fighting for art collections even more vital, as an activity under threat. 

We do not lack art or places to see our art, but the reliability of going to places to return to a masterpiece –  is something we clearly lack. 

Some regional galleries have responded boldly in recent years to calls for more of their collections to go on display. During a renovation of their collection area in 2023, the Dowse in Lower Hutt made an Aladdin’s Cave of its galleries – putting over 1000 items on display. At Taranaki’s Govett Brewster in 2019, artist and current Artspace director Ruth Buchanan examined the power dynamics behind collecting through organising the display of the collection across the galleries. 

This summer I visited three public gallery exhibitions across the North Island which illustrated for me why, despite all these changes, the exhibition of public collections matter.

Like Te Papa, Palmerston North’s Te Manawa has had a sometimes troubled relationship with its art-loving public over its collection since the Manawatū Art Gallery was amalgamated with a science centre and museums in 2000. Art collecting had dropped off in the 1990s.

In 2018 locals lobbied for Te Manawa to retain its separate public gallery, in its distinctive 1977 building. With demolition averted, the collection was rotated through display in the building, including the use of giant collection store racks. Collecting contemporary art has been active again since, though paused due to “budgetary constraints” over the last financial year. Curator Sian Van Dyk passes on the good news that with Blumhardt Foundation match funding secured, Te Manawa has committed $10,000 per year for 2026-2028 for the purchase of ceramics and textiles. 

Van Dyk has also worked to establish the national Fair Trust Art Prize, with work by the winning artist entering the collection. The 2025 inaugural winner was Emily Hartley-Skudder.

How stacked the Te Manawa collection is in contemporary classics is evident in the current superb exhibition of work by Palmerston North born, long time Melbourne based painter Brent Harris. It’s called Home and Back Again and is on until July 19. 

Harris has been much collected and celebrated in Australia, and significant public shows in Auckland and Christchurch since 2019 sees Harris now belatedly being claimed as an artist of significance here. The superb large 2025 paintings in Home and Back Again leave no doubt as to that assessment’s currency. 

There’s a reason for the delay. The exhibition title is a play on ‘to hell and back again’, a reference to how Harris fled Palmerston North and a difficult relationship with his parents, only to return after the death of his father in 2016. 

Recent paintings are paired with work from the Te Manawa collection that inspired Harris when he saw them in the gallery as a youth. How wonderful that they are able as a group to be returned to and return together to the wall.   

The connections with Harris’s work sing: the bold and exquisite graphics and colours of Gordon Walters and Michael Smither; the eloquent landscape lines in McCahon and Woollaston; and the attention to the psyche through comic grotesque forms in Fomison. All find refined abstract pop charge in Brent Harris’s smart, ticklishy-witty expression of his inner world.

Home and Back Again at Te Manawa records a number of Brent Harris works gifted by the artist. Gifts play a significant role in building a public collection. They will soon dry up if the donor does not have confidence in the donee.

First opened in 1919, Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery has been built on collecting that at first spoke to the town’s colonial civic aspirations. Buying trips were undertaken in Europe. But, as Martin Edmond’s very engaging 2024 history outlines, it’s had some big ups and downs with the whims of its council. Building a fine contemporary national collection was ignited in the 1970s here as well.   

The new collection show Gifted: A Legacy of Generosity (until March 15) is a record of the esteem the gallery is held in. The gallery’s ambitious redevelopment project has also been matched – it seems from this show – by gifts. It makes for a strong exhibition. 

Take the late sculptor Warren Viscoe’s wonderful large wooden ‘Screw’ (1965), donated in 2025 by artists James Ross and Gretchen Albrecht. It’s paired neatly for a rumination on national iconography with two wee Gregor Kregar ceramic sheep. They are, like All Blacks, in numbered jerseys. The wall label records the sheep as having been gifted by current director Andrew Clifford and partner Karen White in 2024, “on the occasion of stock agent Carl White’s 80th birthday.”  

In this way collections and their donors together tell interesting stories. And sometimes it’s about beloved art passing from private to public hands on death. Take Sir Robert Jones gift in 2025 of Michael Illingworth’s ‘Untitled’ (1980) – a marriage portrait in which still lives fruitily indicate genitalia. 

Gifts come in other forms. Gifted has a section devoted to some restored historic paintings thanks to 2021 funding from the family B&C Hewett Charitable Trust. The restoration of the heritage galleries seeded the trust’s idea to have the old art looking as good. To date 13 paintings have been restored, with another five now undergoing treatment. 

The restoration work sees arresting family portraits from the 1920s by Vivian Smith (a British born Whanganui and Wellington art teacher) really pop. Vivian’s daughter Lilian Ida Smith bequeathed 800 items to the Sarjeant providing a unique whanau history. Wall text informs us this may be the only public collection in which Vivian Smith’s work is held. Collections aren’t just about rolling out the well known names – institutions have the opportunity to show different sides to our social history through art. 

Toi Tauranga reopened late last year with a smart eclectic group of contemporary exhibitions. On the new gallery exterior is a striking new in situ addition that speaks to not all work needing to be permanent. Mana whenua artist Maera Timutimu’s commission ‘Tai timu, tai pari - the ebb tide, the flood tide’, is made from local whenua pigments. Recording sinuous trails across the tidal harbours mudflats and rock faces, the work will, with the weather, deteriorate.   

Upstairs is a small gallery devoted to small works from the gallery’s collection. iven the large volume of most of the other spaces, the space provides refuge. Indeed it’s also, having spent time with any number of newer artists and ideas, a relief to be surrounded for a moment by artists I’ve enjoyed seeing the work of for decades. 

This speaks to the curator’s experience – the exhibition is suitably titled Old Friends (on until April 5). It is thoughtfully curated by a former director who had a lot to do with this young gallery’s collection, Penelope Jackson. 

Three of the artists – Nigel Brown, Edward Bullmore and Robin White – spent time living in Tauranga, long before the gallery was established in 2009. They gifted their work to support the establishment of the gallery.  

Jackson’s familiarity with these works leads to some smart visual pairings. Robin White’s ‘Back in the Bay of Plenty’ (2014) sees the artist on Mount Maunganui’s main beach, with the distinctive cone of maunga Mauao behind. This is next to 1975’s ‘Florence and Harbour Cone’, a painting of Ōtepoti Dunedin where White also lived. 

Across the gallery Bullmore and Brown in self-portrait look out penetratingly, reorienting our gallery gaze. Cleverly, the work is hinged out at a right angle from the wall, revealing a ballpoint drawing on its underside.

Toi Tauranga also doesn't have an acquisitions budget presently. Gallery director Sonya Korohina tells me they’re reviewing their collection policy and she’d like to explore fundraising annually for work, as well as actively work with artists they are showing to commission work they can acquire. The gallery has storage space it didn’t have before – so here’s hoping.

In his self portrait Brown also stands before Mauao. With the tragic events at the maunga this summer, could there be an opportunity for a collection show on this theme that helps? 

These are the sorts of opportunities a nimble use of a collection can provide. Art can powerfully bring our past before us in the present, at just such times when we need to reflect. If we want the return of a National Art Gallery we need to spend more time in the media celebrating what public art collections do for us.