From the MTG: Feedback wall a big hit

The feedback wall in the museum. Photo / Supplied

I'm hoping everyone in the community is safe in their bubbles and has what they need to look after themselves during this lockdown.

Thankfully the fabulous team at MTG Hawke's Bay Tai Ahuriri are all troopers and pretty quickly got themselves set up at home to carry on with work while we're in lockdown.

Here's hoping that the lockdown being "hard and early" will indeed achieve the desired outcomes.

I should note at this point that I'm writing this column on Thursday, so don't yet know what the Prime Minister's announcement will be on Friday.

Obviously we appreciate and support the need to do all we can in regards to the Government's actions relating to Covid-19, but it is nonetheless frustrating to have the museum closed again.

Especially as we had only reopened three weeks before lockdown. So naturally we can't wait to be able to re-reopen the doors again.

One of the things introduced when we reopened the museum was our feedback wall. This has proved hugely popular already and we're loving the responses we're getting.

While the ideas for exhibitions are wide and varied there are some themes that are starting to emerge – dinosaurs is a common one, along with LGBTQI, feminism, art from the collection and local history stories: horticulture, canned fruit, wineries, etc.

While some of these would be easier to provide than others, we don't really have much in the way of dinosaurs at the museum for example, they still give us some clear idea and direction about what our visitors want to see.

It has been especially pleasing that one of the exhibitions we worked on while we were closed is resonating well with the visitors we had over the three weeks we were open.

Kuru Taonga: Voices of Kahungunu has received lots of great feedback. People are loving how visually stunning it is, enjoy listening to iwi telling the stories of their people and appreciate the range and nature of the exhibition. One kaumātua commented that "every school child in Hawke's Bay should go through this exhibition".

Just before we reopened we appointed our two new educators, Denise Sewell and Haidee Lissington.

We're delighted to have these two talented people join our team, bringing with them a range of skills and experience and a whole new level of enthusiasm about our education programme.

They're also full of new ideas about how we can further develop our programmes, incorporating the new curriculum and technology. Kuru Taonga will provide great content and opportunities for their education programmes and they're excited to take schools through.

While we are closed work continues as ever on future plans. Curators are researching upcoming exhibitions, the collections team are cataloguing and enhancing the database, educators are working on new lesson ideas, the exhibitions team are planning new exhibitions designs and layout, and so on.

The team always have more work to do than can be achieved in our normal working weeks. So, while we'd prefer to be open, sometimes being closed gives us an opportunity to push our thinking further and come up with bigger and better ideas – watch this space!

Laura Vodanovich is MTG Director