Exhibitions
Events
On display
Christchurch Art Gallery Collection Storage Tour
Christchurch Art Gallery's storage facility. Photo: John Collie
Friends
Past event
Meet at the front desk
$15
Have you ever wondered how loose canvases or unframed works on paper are stored, or how decorative objects such as ceramics, glass and sculptures are cared for?
The storage of artworks is a major priority for any public art gallery or museum and the majority of the paintings in the Gallery’s ever growing collection—currently numbering over 6,500 items— are housed on large sliding metal racks.
Join deputy director Blair Jackson for a rare peek behind the scenes and view the Gallery’s state-of-the-art storage facilities.
Friends only event.
Meet Blair Jackson in the Gallery foyer.
Booking strictly limited to 15 people.
Related reading: Collecting, Friends
Notes
How to Book Friends Tickets
To book tickets from your phone, follow these simple steps (or click here for instructions with images).
- Find the event you’d like to book for on our website www.christchurchartgallery/friends
- Scroll down until you see the Book Now option; click on the down arrow to select the date you’d like to book then click book now
- Check you are booking for the event you’d like to attend
- If you are booking for a Friends only event, you will notice the number of tickets is greyed out. To login and access Friends only tickets, click on the door image at the top of the page
- Enter your email address and password
- Now that you’re signed in, you can enter the number of tickets you’d like to purchase
- Check you’re happy with your cart before you checkout
- Let us know who is attending the event
- Let us know of any special requests and tick the Terms & Conditions box then complete your sale
- Pop your payment details in then submit. And don’t forget to save your ticket to your phone for easy access on the day of the event
Don’t forget we’re here to help so get in touch if you have any problems!
friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz | 03 941 7356
Notes
Underworld 2 by Tony de Lautour
This article first appeared as 'Painting offers a multiverse of symbols' in The Press on 21 June 2017.
Notes
Walk the Beat
Volunteer guide Rod McKay talks about his life, being an art tourist, and guiding Gallery tours.
Notes
The Art Whisperer
Christchurch Art Gallery volunteer guide Bella Boyd talks about her love of guiding, her favourite works in the Gallery collection and interpreting art with poetry.
Commentary
Mediating Reality
In the late 1980s, a significant shift for photography in Aotearoa New Zealand was identified in two art publications. The essays and images in these books showed how artists were utilising new strategies, breaking away from the prevailing documentary photography tradition that was, and still is, widespread in Aotearoa. Six Women Photographers (1986) was edited by artists Merylyn Tweedie and Rhondda Bosworth for Photoforum; and Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography (1989) was the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Gregory Burke for City Gallery Wellington. The artists included in both publications questioned in various ways the assumptions and rules of image making, manipulating the media and making a political move from the standpoint of taking a photograph, to making one. No longer was a photograph considered a truthful representation of reality. Instead, photography was seen as a product of, and a participant in, current social and cultural values.
Commentary
Do You See?
With the death of Julie King late in 2018, art and art history in Aotearoa New Zealand lost one of its great champions and major scholars. Julie was born in Yorkshire and grew up and was educated in Alnwick, Northumberland; she moved to Christchurch in 1975 to take up a role lecturing in the newly formed art history department at the University of Canterbury. She retired three decades later, having pioneered the teaching of New Zealand art in Canterbury.
Director's Foreword
Collections Matter
Since late 2006 when I started as director of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, I’ve written several times about our art collections in Bulletin forewords. Given their centrality to our daily work and our reason for being, this is unsurprising. So it’s good news that we’re focusing on collections in this edition of our quarterly journal.
Interview
Patrick Pound, gathering thoughts through things
Based in Melbourne Patrick Pound is simultaneously artist, collector, curator, visual list maker and lecturer in photography. He spoke with Serena Bentley, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, about the logic of documents and museums of things.
Article
Reflections on riches
While the Gallery may be closed, our archive collections continue to develop. As I write, three aspects of managing an archive are happening simultaneously. We are adding new material, cataloguing it, and assisting a researcher to use the archive. All the challenges and pleasures of archive management are on the table.
Article
Brought to Light
Finally, it's finished! It is now four months since we closed the doors on the previous incarnation of Christchurch Art Gallery's collection exhibition, and the intervening period has been a very busy time for all our staff. When Christchurch Art Gallery opened in 2003, the plan, reiterated in the Paradigm Shift document of 2006, was to refresh the hang of the collection galleries after five years. Since then the display has of course not remained entirely static, and visitors will have noticed regular changes as new works entered the collection, light-sensitive works were changed and small focus exhibitions created. But Brought to Light: A New View of the Collection is something altogether more-a refreshment of our entire collection display (not just what, but why) and a re-evaluation of the physical space of the galleries themselves.