MTG’s ‘Eye Spy, Curious Stories’ designed for visual and tactile experience: Laura Vodanovich

A current exhibition, Eye Spy: Curious Stories was designed to provide visual and tactile experiences.

Laura Vodanovich is MTG director

OPINION

Museums and galleries aim to provide lifelong learning experiences for visitors, both on-site and on-line.

Learning experiences come in a variety of ways from casual interaction through to formal education lessons. For children, simply being exposed to and exploring all the different items on display in the galleries, along with hands on activities can be enough.

A current exhibition, Eye Spy: Curious Stories was designed to provide visual interest and tactile experiences, making it perfect for younger families. Along with information boards to lift, there are sounds to listen to, one item to smell, a digital screen to allow deeper exploration and a wall that has been growing since the exhibition was installed.

With Eye Spy: Curious Stories having its last day on Sunday, November 10, it is not too late to come in and enjoy this experience with your friends and whānau.

More structured learning is provided by our education team, who create new programmes with each changing exhibition and tailor these to the needs of individual schools, teachers, and students.

One of the ways our educators reach out into the region is by partnering with other museums to deliver programmes off-site and next week our team are doing just that at Central Hawke’s Bay Museum in Waipawa.

As well as hands-on teaching our educators also provide fun creative activities for children to participate in during school holidays, as well as creating content for the museum’s drop-in-zone - popular with families during weekends and school holidays.

Children are just one of our target audiences. For other age groups there is a wide range of ways to learn, be inspired, challenged or surprised at MTG Hawke’s Bay Tai Ahuriri.

Our permanent and changing exhibitions offer opportunities to engage with new subject matters as well as familiarising yourself with old favourites.

We have one last exhibition to install before the end of the year, Art Deco on the Edge, celebrating 100 years since the Paris Exposition, as well as 40 years since the creation of the Art Deco Trust, and Te Matau-a-Māui / Hawke’s Bays own take on all things Art Deco.

Art Deco on the Edge will be open to the public from Saturday, November 30.

To delve a bit deeper, we offer curatorial and artist talks, public lectures, tours and more. Our film schedule also provides a range of options for everyone and over the next couple of months we have an amazing line-up: Show Me Shorts (Thursday 24 October); Metropolitan Opera - Nabucco (2 November); Art Beats - Botticelli – Florence & the Medici; LASFF 2024 – (Latin America & Spain Film Festival) (24-24 November); and National Theatre - The Motive and the Cue (5 December)

On Saturday 19 October, a free ‘art bus’ will take people from outside MTG to Hastings Art Gallery and then on to Waipawa for some great art offerings. At Hastings Art Gallery, Cindy Huang will give an artist’s talk about her new exhibition Offering, and at Waipawa there is Paerangi Waipawa - a unique exhibition of seven ringatoi Māori spread throughout the town centre.

The bus departs from outside MTG at 10.15am and returns back to MTG at 4.35pm – what a great way to have a day out experiencing art around Te Matau-a-Māui / Hawke’s Bay. For more details please look on our website.

Whether art, history, culture or film is your area of interest there is always something on offer at MTG and around the region, so I encourage you to get out and engage in the rich and vibrant arts and cultural landscape on your doorstep.