MTG – Douglas Lloyd Jenkins

Rose Chapman: I’m sure you all know Douglas Lloyd Jenkins who’s the Director of the MTG, and we’re just dying to learn about the new building and when it’s going to be open and all those things, so without further ado … Douglas, thank you very much. [Applause]

Douglas Lloyd Jenkins: Thank you. I’m going to start with a disclaimer; it’s wantonly promotional. And please don’t think us rude but we’re going to end this quite quickly at the end of the talk. It’s just that we’re managing a very interesting situation; we have about sixty-seven days until we open, so you can figure out the opening date. So things are a little chaotic, but I did want to come here today because I came a little while back and showed you the plans of the building, and I did promise I would come and tell you a little bit more about the content. And so that’s really what I want to talk about today.

How many of you’ve done a drive past recently? Some of you obviously don’t get to Napier quite often enough. [Chuckles] The building is looking splendid and spectacular; we’re getting wonderful feedback from it. Many of you will remember that very early on in the project there was an earlier skin for our museum that the press nicknamed ‘The Armadillo’ – it was a large, glass dome shaped building that we’re actually quite pleased we didn’t build. Richard Daniels, our architect, has done a very lovely job of building a building in a heritage area, and now the building is there people can understand the vision that we had, to complete what is essentially Napier’s town square with a fine building that [microphone interference] obviously was not an Art Deco building, but sat comfortably alongside Art Deco buildings.

This motif that you can see on the screen is [interference] what we call our wrap, and this is what is currently wrapped around the glass faҫade of the building to prevent you seeing what’s going on in between, although it does have little round holes in it that allow you to peer in if you really want to. [Chuckle] And really, this graphic image was created to illustrate to the passing public the complexity of the collection. And I’ve talked about this numerous times – we have the largest, and I think most spectacular of the regional collections. And what people don’t often understand is what areas are covered by that collection, and which areas that we choose to profile. So there are items from the fine arts, the decorative arts, from history, from Taonga Māori, from military history … you name it and we’ve got it.

You can understand that fundraising for this building has been quite a major effort, and we got a lot of support from private sponsors. I got a phone call one day from the mayor, [Barbara Arnott], and she said, “I’m bringing [a] potential sponsor through next Friday and he has a personal interest in medieval German manuscripts.” Thanks, Barbara! [Chuckles] [I] go to my collection manager – she says, “No problem”; comes back with a printed page from a very early German bible. So it is really amazing [chuckle] what you can find in our collection when you have to. So the wrap is designed to really tell you the sort of museum we are going to be.

Now I’ll start with a question that we’re asked all the time; MTG – what does it mean, [sneeze] and why have we changed our name? MTG simply stands for Museum, Theatre and Gallery, the three cornerstones of our existence. Museum and Archives are [a] well-known component of what we do, Gallery … art gallery, also [a] very well-known component what we do; but we always had this wonderful facility called the Century Theatre that was never properly profiled, and so we’ve bought it up front and we’re using the initials MTG. Initials are very common in the gallery world; the current sensation is an institution called MONA, which you might think is a pretty weird name for a museum. MONA, Museum of Old and New Art, in Hobart has revolutionised the museum world, and revolutionised tourism in Hobart. In my own small way I hope to do the same thing in Napier. The National Gallery of Victoria is always referred to as the NGV; you’ll know MOMA [Museum of Modern Art] and the V&A [Victoria & Albert Museum], so initials are very common in the museum and art gallery world. If you’re very young, MTG stands for meeting – it’s the text symbol for meeting. [Chuckles] If you’re really, really old it stands for mortgage. [Laughter] You can choose which of those groups you want to sit in, but I’m happy to say that the MTG doesn’t have a mortgage, so let’s go with meeting … meeting place, meeting of ideas, meeting of cultures.

Why did we transition out of Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery? Well in actual fact this institution has been on site since the 1850s, and this is our seventh name, so we’re used to shedding our skin. We also wanted to sort of leave behind maybe the sort of dowdiness of the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery. MTG Hawke’s Bay still places us in the world, but it allows us to be a bit bigger and a bit more expansive, and it’s been a very interesting experience for myself and my staff thinking about what the difference between Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery and the MTG is. But there’s [there’re] a few people out there who’re still getting their heads around it – I get that it’s not very catchy. It is catchy as long as you use it – “Have you seen the new MTG?” “Are you going to the MTG?” Use it and it’ll catch on. Our branding people that [who] came from Auckland said, “You know they’re just going to call it the Museum, don’t you?” And I said, “Yes, I do know that, but I think it’s important that we have the sort of name that reaches out to the wider world.”

One of the things that we’re very, very pleased about – and one of the reasons that people maybe haven’t had a close look at our building – is that there’s a massive programme of road works [chuckle] going all around it. Marine Parade’s been closed, Tennyson Street and Herschell Street still are closed; they’re being rebuilt. I’m so happy that the council decided to time that prior [coughing] to our opening, ‘cause there was talk at one point [that] they were going to start just after we opened, which would’ve been incredibly helpful. But no, they’re timing it so it’s all going to open looking beautiful.

But one of the things that is really, really wonderful about our building is that now we occupy an entire city block, and it’s a wonderful sort of metaphor for just really what the museum is now – what the MTG is. And so in our left to right order we have our lovely 1930s building by Louis Hay. This is one of the real surprises of this redevelopment in that the emphasis has been on the new building, but the restoration of the Louis Hay is outstanding. I can’t wait to show people, to reveal what it means to once again come up that proper Louis Hay staircase, in through the beautiful oak doors and into the restored Octagon, which is just looking spectacular.

Those of you who will remember the old Bestall Gallery – it now has the dado rail back. It’s now back looking like a 1930s exhibition gallery, and it’ll be really, besides the Sarjeant [Gallery Whanganui], one of the few in the country that’s of that period. And that’s going to be the emphasis of the regional archive. I’ll talk about it in a minute.

In the middle we have of course the lovely Century, which is now called MTG Century Theatre, built and designed by Guy Natusch in the 1970s; an important work of late modernism and one that we really wanted to preserve. So we’ve gone out of our way to make very minimal changes to the Century but to bring the foyer space a bit more up to date and to allow better use of circulation. That’s pretty much going to be home to our performing programme, which is now a big part of what we do.

And of course Richard Daniels’ new building, which as I say, [is] designed to fit in but not to be mistaken for Art Deco. I have occasionally followed the Art Deco tourist guides on the street and they’ll stand in front of something quite contemporary for a moment, and people say, “Is this Art Deco?” [Chuckles] I’m really hoping no one stands outside our building and says, “Is this Art Deco?” We’re in a funny position in that we don’t have too many glamorous shots of our glamorous building yet; they’re actually underway now, but I have got this nice little pointy bit here. But come and experience the building.

We open with fourteen exhibition display spaces – it all depends on how you count them – you can even force fifteen out of that if you want to. And we’re committed to nine changing exhibitions a year. We often think of ourselves as a museum that behaves like an art gallery, so we have what people would think is a museum collection, [cough] but it’s constantly changing like an art gallery does. So we have a new show every three or four months; we’ll be keeping up that rhythm.

We only have one permanent exhibition and that’s the earthquake. The earthquake exhibition is brand new, and that will be up for eight years, because we have to hit the ninetieth anniversary in eight years time [recorded in 2013] with a new show, and ten years after that with a centennial show. So you can see we’re committed to and planning the earthquake exhibitions [chuckle] eighteen years in advance. [Chuckles] Bit sad really. The wonder of this earthquake exhibition is that because we’ve been closed for three years and we’ve catalogued the collection, we now know a lot more about the earthquake than we did. And also, with the Christchurch earthquake it’s given us some good comparative things to look at, so that’s going to be very interesting.

[Showing slides] I’m just going to take you through a couple of the shows – the entire upstairs floor, the first floor of the gallery new building, consists of four galleries, and they’re being put together and used together for one opening show which is called Architecture of the Heart. And it looks at the way that New Zealand artists and creative people have considered notions of home and domesticity. One of the things that we wanted to do from day one was to show ‘The Collection’ to the people of Hawke’s Bay; it’s their collection, the Trust governs it on behalf of the people of the Bay. It’s a fine, fine collection, and we wanted to start with something that really did reveal how good and how lovely it is. This exhibition takes a very broad look at what it means when we say ‘home’; what we actually mean, from the 1910s and ‘20s when ‘home’ didn’t actually mean here at all, it meant Britain – through to sort of more contemporary interpretations by recent migrant artists on what this word ‘home’ might mean. So there’s a wide range of works in there.

On the left is a Gary [Martin] Ball work called ‘Waiting for Saturday Night’; it’s a local art work, but that’s actually … I think it’s Keith Richards … it’s one of the Rolling Stones, ‘Waiting for Saturday Night’, but it’s a nice, iconic seventies work.

A beautifully carved letterbox of unknown origin; what better way of locating yourself in [your] home than … you are the space behind your letterbox.

Ian Scott – as you may know, an important sixties and seventies artist who died just last week, so we’re kind of be the first institution up with an Ian Scott after his death; a ‘Lattice’ painting. Ian Scott has an interesting relationship with abstraction – you could actually go to him and get one of these to match your couch and cushions. The rule in art and decoration is always buy your painting first and then match your couch and cushions. [Chuckles] Keep that in mind. But Ian Scott was always keen to play with that, so [coughing] you could say to him, “Here’s my couch and here’s my cushions – I need a [?] toned lattice painting.” [Chuckles] So he was very much interested in that notion of home.

And on the far right is a detail from a Juliet Peter’s painting which is of her own home, and painted in the 1950s in Ngaio in Wellington. And we’ve actually got a whole section of artists depicting their own homes, and it’s really, really interesting. One of the things, I think, if you were an artist in 20th century New Zealand you often had to stay at home ‘cause your studio was at home, and so they tended to end up painting your own environment.

So this show has got paintings, photographs, works of craft, works of design; it’s got a few loans from the major collections, from Auckland Art Gallery and from Te Papa, but it is largely our collection and it’s looking better than ever before. We have spent a great deal of money on conservation, not only of paintings which is relatively inexpensive you’ll be surprised, but of frames, which is horribly expensive. So things are going to look better than they’ve ever looked before; things that you’re familiar with, like ‘Dalton Street Backyards’ by Roland Hipkins, or ‘Renaissance’; some of those sort[s] of works are just looking sensational.

Ūkaipō is our new taonga Māori show. Those of you who’ll be familiar with our previous exhibition, Ngā Tuku Matā – that was up for twenty-three years, which is not a rotation schedule I’m very proud of. [Chuckles] Only the last … well, I’ve got to admit, seven of those were my doing; but the decision, the commitment we’ve made, is to bring taonga Māori exhibitions onto the same rotation schedule as the rest of the gallery, so there will be a new show approximately every year. Our collection is enormous. The taonga Māori collection is four times the size of Rotorua’s; so you’d imagine that Rotorua has a big taonga Māori collection, and it does. Ours is four times larger again, so it’s a collection that for twenty-three years we had a very small amount of work on display, and so we’re now moving to this moving, changing schedule.

This is the major new wing ground floor gallery; this exhibition is based upon the notion of ‘nurture’, and it’s a splendid exhibition; it’s just being installed now. I’ve never seen a taonga Māori exhibition in the country that looks even anything close to it. We’ve just yesterday quite literally … the walls of the gallery are made [coughing] of folding paper … and we’re just starting to pull them apart, like a Chinese lantern almost, it’s a really amazing thing. It’s also been put together by an all-woman team – curator, kaitiaki and designer – and it’s really quite an innovation and I think the notion of ‘nurture’ is a really excellent one to start with.

So new works you’ve never seen before; a few favourites, and you can probably guess what the favourites are, but a new major push in that area, and a lovely publication to go with it. And I should probably say that there are three books coming out – one, ‘Architecture of the Heart’ written by Lucy Hammond and myself; a book to support this show written by [?Ngoto?] and a third related area, [?Arcuana?]; and a third book to come out with the Archive show, so we’re keeping up that reputation we have for publishing.

The 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake show will occupy the basement of the new wing. We learned from the old gallery that people quite like the sensation of a low, dark space for the earthquake, even though the Hawke’s Bay came on a bright, sunny morning. You can make an earthquake slightly more terrifying if the ceiling’s only just there, [chuckles] so we put it back in the basement; we’re not hiding it, it’s just the best place for the experience. As I say, Eloise Taylor’s done a marvellous research job here; we’re going to untangle some of the myths around the earthquake; we’re going to start some new ones [chuckles] … some new characters, some new people, some new ways of engaging. We’ve worked particularly hard with a new children’s programme around the earthquake. When the Christchurch earthquake happened we were sort of a little concerned that you know, we might lose our status. [Noise on recording] There’s a joke around the gallery that the Hawke’s Bay earthquake is New Zealand’s best natural disaster. [Chuckles] We didn’t want to be knocked off … you know, for all the sadness of the earthquake, we didn’t want to be knocked off that peg. But the interesting thing is that what Christchurch has done is regenerate an interest in 1931 enormously. And the [coughing] funny thing is, now that the country’s had two major earthquakes the academic and scholastic interest in earthquakes has gone right through the roof. So now both earthquakes are being studied for comparisons, not only geographically but in terms of social history … how people responded. One of the interesting characteristics I think, is that in the 1931 earthquake in Napier – I’m not quite sure of Hastings – but in Napier you got a free new chimney care of council, and then you [?] it out. In the Christchurch earthquake I think you were allowed on the John Campbell show [chuckles] every night of the week at seven o’clock. [Chuckles] So the culture of maybe just getting on with things, you know … a free chimney and off you go … was the rule, at least for Napier City Council so it was quite a different environment. And of course we have also learnt from that through our research, more about the reality of the trauma that also took place; and you know, a lot more detail has come out. So it’s going to be a fascinating show; we’ve commissioned a special design from a Wellington designer for this. It’s going to be very much an immersion experience; there’s no shaky floor – that sort of stuff we’ve moved on from, but it’s a great immersion experience. Again there’s some old favourites. Earthquakes is [are] a bit of a funny thing, because the earthquake is like performance art – if you weren’t there you kind of missed it, and there’s not a lot of evidence you can hold in your hand of an earthquake – I can give you a broken tea cup and say, “This was broken in the earthquake”, and you’re going to say, “Well that’s a broken tea cup.” And we’ve certainly got some gifts that came in the forties and fifties that we think were broken in the earthquake, glued back together and given to the museum, but they don’t look particularly interesting either. So it’s been quite a challenge to figure out how to make this performance event … this moment you had to be in … how to make it resonate seventy-something years after it’s anniversary.

One of the nicest things we discovered was this set of hand-coloured photographs taken just immediately after the earthquake by a leading photographer who went through and hand-coloured them. And it’s really quite lovely, because whether intentionally or by accident, his colourisation of the city really beautifully matches Roland Hipkins’ colourisation of the city in ‘Renaissance’. We’re going to produce one of those ‘Hawke’s Bay Earthquakes in Colour’ – you’ve all seen ‘World War II in Colour’ – we’re going to do a ‘Hawke’s Bay Earthquake in Colour’ based around these photographs.

Oh, this is a recent acquisition, which is fantastic; we got a phone call from Scotland: “Would you like the morse code key from the ‘Veronica’, that sent the message to the world of the earthquake?” Of course we said, “No, not interested.” [Laughter] “Yes, get it out here as fast as you can!” And this is one of the fantastic things about this project, is that we’re getting phone calls from around the world and from round the country saying, “I think you are the natural home for this.” And that has transcended Hawke’s Bay people. Sometimes it’s people like this who have a connection – this person’s grandfather or father [coughing] was on the ‘Veronica’ [when] it sent the message. But sometimes it’s just people who have got something precious that [who] are looking at our website, reading about us in the paper, and saying, “This just seems the right fit.”

As many of you will know I’m quite involved in the history of fashion. We got an offer quite recently [coughing] for an actual, real one-off Christian Dior ball gown from 1965 that this woman had had made in Paris in the salon for her, at a cost more than the price of a small car. She wore it once to an Auckland event that you maybe have all heard of called the Pakuranga Hunt Ball, which was one of Auckland’s most spectacular social events of the sixties. And during supper she took one bite of a chocolate éclair, and the cream went phssst! [Laughter] Down the front of her brand-new Christian Dior pale blue silk ball gown. Husband went ballistic; screamed and yelled at her, and she never ever wore the dress again. And I think all the women in the audience can understand that story, [laughter] … the trauma. And she rang up and said, [audience members talking] “I think you’re the home for this dress.” And I said, “Yes, we’re the home for this dress”, because that is a story that … it’s not a Hawke’s Bay story, but there isn’t a Hawke’s Bay woman in the mid-sixties who wouldn’t have done a lot of things to get a Christian Dior original. Our tourist audience are going to love seeing it, and that story resonates with everybody who could understand what that really meant. And so we’re getting all these sort of great things coming into the collection, some much too late to be up on day one. What we’re trying to do with this MTG is step up – be a national player in some key areas, one of which is the history of costume.

There are two archive exhibition galleries. Now, you’ll remember the Regional Archive was the space behind the reception desk, and it is the home of local history research. It was, you know, about as big as this. Regional Archive now occupies the entire 1930s building, so it’s fifty times bigger, and this is a real commitment from us to the history of the region. Strangely and perversely, because we’re as old as the province is itself, we use the provincial government boundaries of the nineteenth century, rather than the regional council boundary. I’d say flippantly, that gives us Woodville and gives us [Gottfried] Lindauer, [chuckles] otherwise he’d be a – what is that? Tarawera [Tararua] artist. So that’s partly the logic, but there are other logics. We have this incredible holding – it is really an amazing holding; it is the place to come for local history research, and now we can do it on a grand scale.

So what you will remember as the McLean Room and Gallery … the little gallery that used to be the centre of the Octagon … that is now called the Bernard Chambers Reading Room, and that’s a much larger scale library, reading room, research environment. The old Malden Gallery, which we’ve moved the name McLean to, is the actual archive store. You’ll remember when [sneeze] Gail went off to get something she’d be gone for quite some while before she came back. Now she’s [just] got to pop through to the next room and there will be someone in that room handling the material.

The old Octagon which is now completely restored, has four new exhibition cases in [it] which will profile holdings from the collection, but the big thing is that the Bestall Gallery next door is now a dedicated, committed Regional History Gallery, so the content of that gallery will be driven by the history of the region. [It’ll] be a changing exhibition, but it means that we can just tell the regional stories again and again. One of the things that we were hearing from tourists particularly is that it seemed that Hawke’s Bay didn’t have a history before 1931. We were pushed to re-show that history; we do have this regional obligation, so we want to talk about the other parts of the region. So we’ve made this commitment to the institution of local history.

Right. We’re opening with a nice, ironic title – it’s called, ‘Take This With You When You Leave – Treasures of the Archive’. This is a great project; we were supported by the regional council as the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of history of local government in the region, which happened while we were closed. They’ve sponsored a lovely publication here. As I say, it’s got this nice, ironic title, ‘Take This With You When You Leave – Treasures of the Archive’. The regional council were great, they just said, “We want you look at the treasures in the archive”, but they didn’t kind of give us any definition of ‘treasure’, and so we hired a curator from Wellington, Georgina White – she’s actually been up working with us for almost two years on this project. She’s spoken here, hasn’t she? And she did some focus groups here as well with local historians. Wonderful curator. She decided to look at the nineteenth and early twentieth century and ask what the people of that time considered to be a treasure, and why – what did they treasure? So it’s not a show in which there’s a lot of gilding or flashy diamonds or anything like that, it’s a show about the ordinary things that people think are important to them through the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and so some wonderful, wonderful work in it … far left, the good ship ‘Serge’, which is a little tiny watercolour of the ship ‘Serge’ that bought Napier artist Alfred Hardy Finnis to Hawke’s Bay. This little object is a kind of paperweight type ball thing that you could insert little tintype photographs of your family into. This is the cover to a lovely ambrotype or daguerreotype image, and this is one of our great treasures. It’s actually both; it manages to be in two places at once, in both Georgina’s show and in Architecture of the Heart. And these are the diaries of Alfred Chapman who was a central Hawke’s Bay settler who kept a beautiful diary, but he illustrated it with the most beautiful illustrations, and this is actually the story of … there were two brothers; it’s either him or the brother who ordered a cornopean which is a sort of trumpet type thing … the journey to go and get when it arrived, I think in Wanganui. But what Georgina’s talking about is what it meant to early settlers to have music in their lives – that’s what they treasured. They couldn’t bring their pianos – or some of them did, Jane Campion brought hers [chuckles] – but you know, what it meant to have music. And you know, one of the nice things too, is that you’ll remember that there’s always been a piano in the gallery, and the Bechstein piano moved back in the gallery and they’ll be playing some of the valued music from this period, so that’s a lovely thing for us. Beautiful, beautiful book – the proofs have just come back a couple of days ago, so we’re all tremendously excited.

Now, ‘cause we don’t exist yet … we are living in a virtual world. If you haven’t been to our website do have a look; it really does tell you what we’re going to be doing and what we’re up to. But from an archive point of view the big change here is you can now look up the catalogue for the archive online. So you can come to us knowing what it is you want to look at; you can sit at home, say, “Have they got any material on my family?” Or you know, the grandfather’s firm or whatever; and then you can come to us having printed it out, or you can even email it to us, and we can have it ready for you. Or you can know, you know, whether it’s worth coming in to see us … you can plan your trip. And of course that’s for people outside town as well, so anyone from round the world can go on [and] check when we’ve got the material. This is a [an] enormous, enormous change from having Gail having to say, “Yes I know it’s somewhere”, [coughing] “I think I’ve seen it.” And this has been one of the real advantages [cough] of being closed. People have been saying to me, “What are you doing? Having a holiday?” We got the largest single lotteries grant of the 2012-13 year to catalogue the archive. They came on board; we had a staff of up to about six people working on it. They’re all recent museum graduates in their twenties, you know, their first job; so we then had to teach them to spell. [Chuckles] But we’ve done that as well [chuckles] – what we didn’t realise is we’d have to teach them grammar after we taught them to spell. But hey – we got there; pretty proud of it, it’s looking great. Do go on, it’s live now …

Pam: No, no – probably next week, early next week.

Douglas: Go on … sometime soon. [Laughter] You can’t go online and find this – there’s not a picture of it; you can go online and you’ll see a description. And so the reveal is, you have to come in to us to actually see it. There are lots of photos, and that’s one of the other nice things – there’s a lovely collection of highlights on this as well, so you can go in and look at the best aspects of the collection that we’ve put online.

And we really want to grow this, it’s really where we want to go. We’ve made a decision that because we’re such strong [coughing] applied arts institution we’ll go with our applied arts first and strongest, but there’s some lovely, lovely stuff. When Pam revealed this to me when it was first live, I went on and I thought, ‘Oh! We’re a grown-up museum.’ [Chuckles] We’ve moved the institution into the twenty-first century; we are now doing what’s quite common in other museums – we’re not particularly pushing boundaries, but we’re there. We’re there as a twenty-first century digital institution.

We have a very, very active public programme, so it’s not just about our exhibitions; it’s about opening events, lectures, workshops, special film. I get asked a lot … we’re not reopening the Century Cinema on a weekly film showing basis because we really do need to acknowledge that Cinema Gold does a fantastic job here, and the Globe does a fantastic job in Napier. The Globe seats thirty people; we seat three hundred people. It just is no longer viable for us to show a film to six or eight people. You know, some of you will have gone to see … I’ve experienced some of the time with Cinema Gold you actually think you are the only people in the theatre, and then two seconds before the film starts two more people come in. But we were like that – we were showing films to nine or ten people in a three hundred-seat cinema – it’s just no longer viable. But we realise how much people love seeing films in the Century – it’s the proper film experience, and so we’re keeping the film festivals – the International Film Festival and [cough] the Italian Film Festival and will be adding to that with other film festivals. So it will be more an events-based cinema where you come for a concentrated period of time, rather than wandering down on a Thursday or Friday night. Also, in the time that we’ve closed technology has changed and film is now no longer film; film is now digital, and we’re in the process of upgrading to ensure that we can deliver contemporary film.

And a big school holiday programme … we currently do about eight thousand students a year. We’re expecting that number to go through the roof when we open. We’ve kept our education programme running while we were closed but we’re expecting those numbers to really go through the roof, and we’ve got a lovely education suite within the building now.

Everywhere you go at the moment you’ll find one of these on your seat, because Pam and I have been extremely [cough] anxious. We really encourage [microphone interference] people to join the Friends. There is a charge when we reopen; it’s no surprise I think, to say that the charge is $15; a Friends membership of $45 means you can come every weekend for 86 cents. It’s a great deal – if you actually exploit your Friends membership we’ve estimated there’s between $400 and $500 of benefits for $45. Please understand that every cent of your entry charge goes back into the running of the museum; none of it goes to the general fund of Napier City Council. We spend this money bringing things to you. If we stop charging then we bump down to a budget of a very small [?], so you are supporting us by coming but you’re supporting us by being a Friend, so everywhere you go now there’s a special deal. Pam, what’s the special deal?

Pam: Join before the 21st and get $5 off.

Douglas: So $40 if you join before 21st September, so it’s a great deal.

And then finally – I think this is actually probably the first privileged public reveal; the 21st September is our opening weekend – that’s our first day open to the public. It’s a Saturday, so you are the first to know that it’s actually the 21st; it’s a big day for us. As I say, sixty-something days in our countdown. We’re going to be there; we’re being positive and optimistic, we’ve got a lot to do, but it’s going to be splendid. I really do believe the MTG will be the flagship of Hawke’s Bay tourism, but also the flagship of sort of cultural endeavour. The MTG’s a very smart place, but it’s a very warm and welcoming one. We know that, and as I say it’s a meeting place … a meeting place for friends, a meeting place of ideas. It’s a beautiful building, we’ve got a superb opening programme, and you know, I look round this room and I know that you’re going to be there because … well, you’re here on a freezing cold morning, and we’ve got central heating. [Laughter] But I just really need you to be talking your friends about how exciting it is, and how worthwhile it really is going to be. So that is me. Thank you.

[Applause] Are there any questions?

Question: For families and things that join up ..?

Douglas: Yes – children under fifteen are free, so it’s only adults that pay. And there is a family rate … a couples rate isn’t there?

Pam: Joint membership.

Douglas: You know, we are doing our very best to get people in and make this really work. There’s what they call a ‘cup of coffee’ economy, you know, how many cups of coffee is the gallery [coughing] worth to you? And I can tell you in Auckland now, a cup of coffee’s getting up round five bucks; and two or three cups of coffee … I reckon it’s worth it for the old Museum and Art Gallery.

Question: Do you have a café in the museum?

Douglas: We will [coughing] be having a café. We’ll probably be doing it on a pop-up [cough] basis when we open, which just means a very simple coffee and cake stop, but we will be developing a more sophisticated one in due process. There are add-ons coming, so it’s like, with six you get steak knives. We’re opening September, but right through the summer we have different add-ons coming; we’ll be revealing different programmes, different parts of the building. One of our plans is to occupy a lot more of Herschell Street and have a changing programme of contemporary art in Herschell Street; that’ll roll out late next summer rather than in the cold spring of September. Question: So Douglas, you know what I’m going to ask you – backstage in the theatre … is it better than it was?

Douglas: The Century Theatre remains essentially unchanged – you won’t recognise very much … basically there’s been no maintenance since 1976. And I don’t know how many of you have got a bathroom that dates from 1976, but it means that it [chuckles] … it will be done.

Question: When we join, can we get our information online?

Douglas: Yes, Pam runs a [an] enews service that keeps you up to date. We also [coughing] have a rather lovely blog, which is the staff talking about the process of us getting ready. There’s some lovely stuff on that, because you get a more in-depth experience about being involved with the gallery. We’re also going to be rolling out a volunteers programme, because we are going to need some assistance with our dramatically larger institution, so we’re going to need some specialist people who are keen to do an hour or two [coughing] on the ‘do not touch’ front, [chuckles] who might like to come in and be schooled on how best to tell people to get their mitts off the art, [chuckles] which is you know, a really nice way of involving yourself in the gallery. So all of those things are going to be rolled out [coughing] hopefully.

Closing: Douglas, thank you very much for a very entertaining as well as a very informative talk, and we must all remember MTG. Actually, it’s almost easier that trying to say, ‘Hawke’s Bay blah, blah, blah, blah’ …

Douglas: That was one of our problems, that we had this very long-winded name that didn’t fit in anywhere.

Yes. And I’m one of the ones that think of mortgage. [Laughter] But thank you very much indeed, and I do appreciate the fact that you’ve come today because I know you must be absolutely frantic with all the things you need to do and get done before 21st September. But again, thank you very much indeed.

Douglas: Thank you so much. [Applause]