AVENAL McKinnon is glowing as she chats about the latest portraits adorning the walls of the New Zealand Portrait Gallery.
JUST days prior, the gallery’s director received the news she’d been so badly hoping for: The Portrait Gallery doesn’t have to move again.
It’s been around since 1990, but limited funds have meant the gallery’s future has been in a constant state of peril. It’s been forced to move several times, and at one stage, was homeless.
McKinnon, has worked tirelessly in her five years as director, to secure its future. For the past year the gallery has lived in Shed 11 on Queens Wharf, but the lease expires on July 14.
As D-day loomed, so did the possibility losing the Shed, a place McKinnon’s come to love.
And then the news – the Government has given the gallery a $750,000 grant – enough to secure a 25-year lease with the option of a further 25-year renewal.
“I was so excited. The gallery has been going for 20 years, and this is the first real recognition of the work. It’s a platform from which we can launch,” enthuses McKinnon. “Bill Williams and his wife Judy set up the Trust, and they were all volunteers – It was run on an absolute shoestring budget. What we’ve always been missing is a real gallery, a designated space where people can return. It’s been so hard giving the keys back each time.”
Before the grant, McKinnon had to second-guess all the small things one normally wouldn’t think about because she wasn’t sure there would even be a gallery.
She hesitated it when it came to listing it in the phonebook (“it was one of those risky calls”), or even whether to create business cards.
“It’s marvellous to be able to say ‘you’ll find us in Shed 11’. I can give you a Wellington Waterfront map, and it says “The Portrait Gallery”, it’s just wonderful,” she says.
When McKinnon took the director’s job in 2005 she had two priorities: find a gallery, and get funding. Now she’s done both.
“There have always been individuals who have been passionate about the gallery, and would spend long hours putting an exhibition together, and persuading people to do the research,” she says. “[Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage] Chris Finlayson has also seen how worthwhile it is.”
McKinnon says the gallery reaches an audience beyond just art lovers.
“At the Adam Portraiture Awards an American lady came up to me and said, ‘the one place in New Zealand I wanted to come back to on my last trip was this gallery’. I was so thrilled.”
McKinnon thinks the gallery was the lucky recipient of the grant during a time when the arts are struggling economically, because what they are doing is feasible.
“We were realistic in terms of what we could do. It’s the usefulness of an old building, the recycling of something that is, and making it something new,” she says. “We’ve had almost a trial year here as well, so obviously that’s been looked at well.”
The well-renowned Adam Awards have helped to raise the Portrait Gallery’s profile.
“We’ve always had Denis Adam as a patron, and the Adam Awards have been amazing, especially because we have international judges. Even when we didn’t have a building, we had the awards,” McKinnon laughs.
It also helps that McKinnon has quietly and skillfully put together a well known board including Chairman Sir Michael Hardie Boys and has honed her international connections with similar Portrait Galleries around the world.
London’s National Portrait Gallery director Sandy Nairne described the 2004 Adam Award winner Ryozo Nishida as an “amazing talent”, says McKinnon. “‘We’re always watching what’s coming from New Zealand’, he said”
Not a bad compliment, considering that gallery is one of the most visited national monuments, attracting well over a million visitors a year.
The confirmed funding means New Zealand’s Portrait Gallery now has the opportunity to edge closer to the status of the international galleries. Last week McKinnon secured a big-deal portrait of national hero Sir Peter Blake. “We so wanted to acquire it, but we didn’t have the money,” she says.
However, after the grant was confirmed, Kevin Roberts, the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi worldwide (who has lived in Auckland) agreed to fund the purchase of the portrait.
“He said, ‘[Blake] was a hero, and he was my friend’,” says McKinnon. “[Roberts] wants people to find their friends and their heroes here.”
Her focus now is on planning for the just-confirmed future. She has already organised a rugby exhibition by British cinematographer David Matches to coincide with the 2011 Rugby World Cup.
“He has been charting New Zealand rugby players for six years. He takes photos of the players as they leave the field, so they have all the marks of the game on them,” says McKinnon. “He only has 20 seconds to take each picture, and he literally has thousands of photos that he has to confine to about 100. The length and the breadth of the walls will be filled with them.”
And Avenal McKinnon hopes that for at least the next 25 years the Portrait Gallery on Queens Wharf will continue to be full.
Sophie Schröder