Te Papa - 25 years at Our Place

Friday, 10 February 2023

33,982,656 visitors have come to Our Place, Te Papa Tongarewa.

That’s more than six times the population of Aotearoa.

As the behemoth institution blows the candles out on its 25th birthday cake on Tuesday that number will be nudging 34 million.

It’s been a quite a ride – literally, at the beginning. That Time Warp theme-park ride generated many column inches as purists lambasted the museum’s audacity to modernise.

But modernise it did, unapologetically.

**READ MORE:

* Te Papa's gender pay gap grows worse

* Te Papa, taonga and the coronavirus

* Surrealist art, including pieces by Salvador Dali, comes to New Zealand for the first time

* How Courtney Johnston became the youngest Te Papa boss

**

Kaihautū Māori co-leader Arapata Hakiwai​, who came to Te Papa from the old Buckle Street museum, remembers the jibes hurled at the museum: too dumbed down, too populist, “too Māori”.

“It was challenging what the old museum didn’t have.

“Te Papa was a real shake up in museum terms. Yes, there were theme rides. At the time I thought ‘this is good’ but on reflection I’m not quite sure about that. [But] I could understand it was breaking new ground.”

Te Papa’s relatively new Tumu Whakarae chief executive Courtney Johnston​ called it “radical disruption”.

For her, it was a living lesson.

One of her first jobs in Te Whanganui-a-Tara was as a visitor host at the new Te Papa, under founding CEO Dame Cheryll​ Sotheran, while studying art history at university.

“I was being taught about Te Papa as a study in museum transformation. When I look back on it now with the benefit of hindsight, what I really see is an exercise in radical disruption.

“What they did brilliantly is push really far. I don’t think they hedged their bets.

“It wasn’t just moving collections or moving buildings it was moving a culture … It certainly burnt off some of the existing audience … but at the same time it massively opened up to people who had felt excluded or insulted by their treatment before. It was the cusp of change.”

Change is central to any museum’s survival. And over the years Johnston says the museum has proven that it can tackle the “really big stuff”.

“Whether it’s climate change, decolonisation, identity – and we can do it in a way that’s welcoming and even fun. Our strategy is about using our unique position to foster healing and reconciliation, a healthy environment, and sense of belonging. They are lofty goals, but that’s the future we want to see for Aotearoa.”

If the museum wanted confirmation of its vision – to be a Tiriti-based museum where a commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi is fostered and Māori exercise tino rangatiratanga – it got it in a 2019 Guardian article on the Te Taiao Nature exhibition.

“At a time when museums around the world are struggling with how to become more diverse and inclusive, Te Papa is leading the way in its symbiotic relationship with New Zealand’s Indigenous people. Bi-culturalism isn’t an afterthought at Te Papa – it’s the institution’s life blood,” the article said.

Johnston says the challenges ahead include enabling communities to decide the future of their taonga that are in the museum’s care.

“It’s tricky, it’s complex and it’s absolutely the right thing to do. Being relevant and accessible to as many people as possible, especially those next generations. Creating space for those voices that haven’t been heard, and who aren’t well represented in our collections – investing in those unheard stories.

‘’We’ve done some great work in the trans community, and we have new research coming out this week on Asian mental health.”

Rethinking the story

Te Papa has already made changes following a deep dive into its collection in 2018 which revealed that too much of it told the story of Aotearoa through a white, male, eurocentric, middle upper class lens.

”We’ve updated our formal collecting priorities to ensure in future the collections will better represent women and many other groups traditionally not represented in museum collections.”

Across all its collections the museum actively targets those voices and communities that aren’t well represented, she says, giving the example of its Covid collecting from Asian New Zealanders who had created T-shirts and masks responding to Covid-related racism.

In the last couple of years visitors could see a strong focus on women artists in the museum’s art collections, she says. Te Papa had staged major retrospectives of Rita Angus and Robin White and acquired important works by White and A. Lois White at the BNZ collection auction. The museum was currently featuring a large new commission by Mataaho – a collective of wāhine Māori artists.

The collection

Twenty-five years on there is still debate around how the museum operates – the display of the collection for one.

Dominion Post art critic and commentator Mark Amery says we don’t see enough of the collection exhibited. “There’s not enough energy in the quick turnaround of shows.”

It’s difficult, says Johnston, not least because the collection gets bigger each year.

When Te Papa opened the new $8.4m Toi Art gallery in 2018 it calculated that to show the entire art collection you would need 74km of wall – that’s a distance from Wellington to Wairarapa.

“We are the biggest lender of artworks around the country to support other art galleries. We are also trying to balance … between presenting the collection and presenting new works by artists for audiences.”

And some of those works are large single pieces which take up a whole gallery, she says. Dane Mitchell’s Iris, Iris, Iris, takes up two gallery spaces. Kate Newby’s She’s Talking To The Wall exhibition is another work taking up a whole gallery space, Johnston says.

“You could do an exhibition of 17th century European prints and put 300 of them up in a packed display – sometimes you’re going to do that – and sometimes you’re going to give a work the space to breathe.

“I feel where people are coming from, but we’re trying not to be boring, striking that middle of the road balance but trying to be interesting to our audiences, relevant to our artists who are working today …

“A big part of our work is turning up the dial in the volume of the voices that haven’t been heard enough, and to enable that to happen you do have to turn the dial down a bit on some of the voices that we are very familiar with.”

The good work

Since 2003, the government mandated Te Papa to develop a formal programme for the repatriation of kōiwi and kōimi tangata (Māori and Moriori skeletal remains) from international institutions to iwi. Starting even before then it has now repatriated more than 600 ancestral remains from all over the world

Last year Māori and Moriori ancestral remains were repatriated from Vienna’s Natural History Museum after 77 years of negotiations.

This was the first repatriation from the European institution and the biggest from Austria.

The remains of more than 100 Moriori were returned in 2022 from London's Natural History Museum. It marked the culmination of 15 years of research and negotiation work.

In 2016 Te Papa returned a priceless Hawaiian ‘ahu‘ula (feather cloak) (feather cloak) and mahiole (helmet), which spent more than two centuries away from Hawaii, after being gifted to Captain Cook in 1779 by Chief Chief Kalani’ōpu’u.

Hakiwai (Ngāti Kahungunu, Rongowhakaata, Ngāti Porou, and Ngāi Tahu) says Te Papa is connecting many treasures back to Pacific communities, museums, galleries or institutions so that they are actually in their rohe, among their people.

“That's what we are dedicated to as opposed to enshrining them.

“If you have a community that would love to have these treasures back, to uplift them and to continue that renewal and cycle of culture, to me that’s more empowering than being in the back of the [storage] house on a shelf …

“As a national museum what is our national responsibility? With museums and galleries and iwi around the country there’s great opportunity for these taonga to go back.”

Negotiations between Rongowhakaata iwi and Te Papa continue over the return of Te Hau-ki-Tūranga – the stolen wharenui at the centre of the museum’s Ko Rongowhakaata exhibition.

Te Papa had apologised for its colonial history, as had the Crown. There was no question – the wharenui belonged to Rongowhakaata, Hakiwai told Stuff last year.

Johnston says it was a huge enterprise returning a wharenui.

“We certainly don’t think of it as part of Te Papa’s collections but the signing [of the Treaty settlement] doesn’t resolve the process of how that return [will happen] and the place that wharenui will hold in its community. Our job now is to support [the iwi].”

There have been some hugely successful paid exhibitions

Almost four million people have visited Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War, an exhibition created with Weta Workshop, since it opened in April 2015.

Other popular paid-for exhibitions include The Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy: The Exhibition, with more than 219,500 visitors and Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality, with almost 200,000 through the doors. More than 140,000 saw the Whales Tohorā exhibition.

The bad news

The on-again-off-again exhibition, education and storage facility planned for South Auckland's Hayman Park is parked. The government rejected its $40 million budget bid in 2015. Stuff reported in 2019 that it was resurrected as one of the museum's seven 'strategic priorities' for 2017-21, but it remains on ice.

Amery says this is a great tragedy. “They haven’t looked for lighter footways to make the collection more accessible to Auckland. It’s quite sad. That all feeds into a feeling that things are in a fairly conservative place in outreach work.

“We need to see more of the collection out, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be in the Wellington building.”

And, says Amery, ‘’Whetūrangitia/Made As Stars at the Dowse and Toi Tu Toi Ora at Auckland Art gallery are just two recent significant group exhibitions that indicate for me that Te Papa aren't looking to lead the recognition of important discussion in our arts, but rather repackage to please everybody. Pleasing rather than challenging.’’

Staff morale hit an all-time low in 2019 on the back of a third restructure within a decade. Staff at the time called the environment toxic.

It was very bruising and broke the trust with leadership, says Johnston.

“Staff culture is much happier and healthier now.”

There was global criticism over Te Papa’s controversial restructure in 2019, under which Andrew Stewart and mollusc expert Bruce Marshall were redundant.

The restructure replaced five science collection managers with two collection managers and three lower-paid jobs – two assistant curators and one technician. At the time critics feared the move would compromise the care of the national collections. International scientists signed a petition to oppose the museum’s restructure. Stewart was later appointed to the role of assistant curator, vertebrates. Marshall retired but is still at Te Papa as a research fellow.

Te Papa’s $3 million acquisitions budget has not increased in two decades and the Government says it has no plans to increase it. Amery says the collecting power of our museums has “eroded dramatically over the decades, leaving them often to stagnate or be dependent on private collectors”.

Perhaps reading the country’s economic situation, Johnston says she will not be pushing for an increase.

Te Papa’s annual report from 2019-20 revealed the gender pay gap was more than doubled the national gender pay gap of 9.50%.

It grew to 21.59% in 2020, up from 20.45% in 2019. At the time the report said the gap was “an area of concern” for the museum.

Museum investment

Aotearoa’s commitment to museums and the relevance they have in our communities can be seen in others celebrating milestones, including Pātaka Art + Museum, which this year will mark 25 years since its new museum and gallery was opened in September 1998.

Enormous investment is being injected into Canterbury Museum ,which is getting a $205m redevelopment over the next five years.

That plan involves demolishing large parts of the museum, restoring the historic parts of the complex, installing base isolators and incorporating into the museum the Robert McDougall Art Gallery.

The museum will close in April for five years for the revamp, but is opening a pop-up venue in the city in the interim.

Meanwhile, as Te Papa quietly celebrates its quarter-century, both Johnston and Hakiwai say they are proud of what the museum has achieved.

For Hakiwai it’s the incorporation of te ao Māori and all that entails, “from our co-leadership model, to our iwi-in-residence, the repatriation of tīpuna, the tikanga we observe in our day to day’’.

“Being one of the first Crown agencies to be known by te reo Māori name was a massive statement from the start, and we work hard to live up to that vision.”

For Johnston it’s simple: Changing the popular perception of what a museum can be.

“Perhaps after 25 years we can finally put an end to the cliche of the ‘dusty old museum’!”

The numbers

• 34 million – the number of visitors projected by February 14, 2023

• 1,784, 939 – the number of visitors during its busiest financial year 2015-16

• 68 – the number of days Te Papa closed in 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown. Before that the longest time it was closed was for two days in a row – once after a flood, once after the Kaikōura earthquake.

• 2,002,977 – the number of visitors Te Papa had in its first year. The original visitor target was 700,000 a year.

• 2 million-plus – the number of items in its collection

• $43.6m – the long term current Crown funding. 2021-22 had Covid-specific funding

• 600 – the number of museum staff, from scientists to pastry chefs.

• 4 million – coffees served.

• 1.65 million – shakes of the earthquake house.