Happy birthday Tauranga Art Gallery

Tauranga Art Gallery celebrates its 10th birthday this month. Photo/file

This month Tauranga Art Gallery staff and supporters are wishing themselves a very happy birthday - it's been 10 years since Tauranga Art Gallery's inception.

The push to open a public gallery was the remarkable result of hard slog by the core group of art enthusiasts in Tauranga.

The Tauranga Art Gallery, after more than a decade of working towards this result, opened on Labour Weekend in 2007 and has offered a wide range of historical, contemporary and cultural art experiences and activities ever since.

This October the gallery celebrates 10 years but also that this year has been their most successful one to date, achieving significant milestones and successes.

For the 2016-17 financial year, a total of 86,610 art lovers visited the art gallery, which has been its highest amount. The phenomenal success of the Paradox street art festival can be attributed for these numbers - Paradox brought nearly 50,000 people through the art gallery doors throughout its three months.

Tauranga Art Gallery's foot traffic sees not just art appreciators through the doors, the gallery offers various art initiatives and art education programmes.

The financial year just been also saw the highest number of young people to have ever taken part in gallery art education programmes with 10,949 participants. Visitors and users across their digital platforms also increased. To top things off, Tauranga Art Gallery was named one of the top seven art galleries in New Zealand by Culture Trip, an international travel and lifestyle website earlier this year.