It is anything but discreet. The 15sq m ceramic mosaic by artist Roy Cowan, commissioned in 1972 by NMA Wright Stephenson for its new headquarters at Europa House in Wellington, is a big, bold sunburst of colour and form celebrating New Zealand’s agricultural, horticultural, forestry and fishing industries.
“Some of my work colleagues loved it,” says legal and policy adviser Diana Pickard, who worked in the building from 2006-08. “And some hated it. But what grabbed my attention was the sheer scale of work and the artistic effort that would have gone into making all those ceramic tiles.”
Now, it hangs in darkness, cloistered behind interior walls added during refurbishments in 2008 and 2017. As the building fell into disuse, Pickard began a one-person campaign to have the work, comprising seven large panels, saved. She contacted family members of Cowan, who died in 2006, art historians and dealers, a previous mayor, regional museums and Te Papa – the most logical choice to look after such an iconic work, she says. There were no takers.
Her work took a more urgent tone in August when the owners of the building, PSPIB/CPPIB Waiheke, applied to Wellington City Council for resource consent for a new Jasmax-designed building on the site. The earthquake-prone Europa House would be demolished. Pickard ended a letter to the editor of the Post with a call for help – “Hello, is there anybody out there?”
Bronwyn Holloway-Smith and Sue Elliott are out there. In 2018, they formed Public Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand (Pahanz), a research initiative based at Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts at Massey University, to find, document and protect what remains of our 20th-century public art. It follows an earlier project by Holloway-Smith to unearth the 12 missing murals of E Mervyn Taylor, recorded in her 2018 book Wanted. Some were found; some were rescued from imminent demolition; some remain painted over or hidden behind a wall; some, including a large carved tōtara panel designed for the NZ Meat Producers’ Board in 1958, are still lost. The book became a call for action to prevent further losses.
With funding from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, Pahanz in July launched our first public art register on publicart.nz, providing images, maps, background information and the provenance of 387 works of 20th-century public art.
“It emerged as something that needed to be done and we were in a position to do it,” says Elliott, Pahanz co-director and chair of the Wellington Sculpture Trust. “With so many works at risk and disappearing at speed, we knew there was a need for this.”
First steps
In documenting these works, and in telling their stories and those of the artists, they argue, local authorities, public institutions, building owners and communities will be more likely to appreciate them and do a better job of protecting them.
They began with workshops in Auckland and Wellington to thrash out the boundaries and definitions before setting off on a road trip from Cape Reinga to Bluff. The resulting list of public works then went through an auditing panel. It evaluated each work against their definition of public art – an artwork in a public space commissioned by a public body or for public good or intended for a specific site that is publicly accessible (including private spaces such as shopping malls and building foyers) or visible to the public.
Those that made the cut were researched and artists or whānau contacted to ensure they had the correct information.
The resulting database is a catalogue of familiar names from Rita Angus to Robin White. It includes recognisable works by less-recognisable artists, such as Napier’s Pania of the Reef, made by the Italian Marble Company of Carrara in 1954, the Bucket Fountain in Wellington’s Cuba St by architect Graham Allardice (1969), and James Turkington’s glass mosaic mural at the Parnell Baths in Auckland (1957).
There are works integrated into the architecture, including Milan Mrkusich’s extraordinary leadlight windows for St Joseph’s Church in Grey Lynn, Auckland, and Shona McFarlane’s stained-glass artwork in Westfield Manukau. There are also locally commissioned works by little-known artists who may be ignored in the art history books, but whose works, Elliott argues, local residents can’t imagine ever not being there: the memorials, the Peter Pans, the children’s mosaic in the Alexander Heritage and Research Library in Whanganui, made by students at the nearby Queen’s Park School.
As Elliott says, these deserve a place on the register as much as anything else. “There is that whole thing of works being hidden in plain sight – people take things for granted, and it’s not until they’re gone that people say, ‘Whatever happened to such and such?’”
It is also a case of “love the one you’re with”. While councils celebrate the “shiny new” public artworks, “the ones that have been part of the fabric of their communities don’t get the same spotlight put on them. Part of what we are doing is trying to hold a spotlight to those works.”
It is not a best-of or an attempt to build a canon of public art. “We have tried to take a neutral approach that reflects the breadth of public art practice in Aotearoa in the 20th century,” says Holloway-Smith. “For everyone who loves a piece of work, there is someone else who detests it, so we are not trying to build a hierarchy of works on the website. It is more just saying, ‘That is what is out there, go and visit it and see what you think.’”
As it should be, says Susan Ballard, art historian at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. “That openness is really important in terms of allowing other people to make decisions about what is important or not.”
Scrolling through the website, she pauses at a “particularly ugly work. But it is still important to know it is there. Tastes change and we can throw things out that seem not very important, then later go, oh, that was important. There are some works you might call minor, but they are not minor to the people who live with them.”
Lost causes
The register also includes works that have been deaccessioned, sold, lost and built over – Cowan’s mural is on the home page – and works that test the boundary between architecture and art. Wellington’s City-to-Sea Bridge was a collaboration by Paratene Matchitt and architects Rewi Thompson and John Gray. In researching the work for the database, Pahanz was able to attribute the “celestial pou” and the creatures on the outward facing walls to Matchitt.
Others skirt the boundaries of Pahanz’s definition of public art. Works in galleries and museums were initially excluded as they were considered already cared for, but there has been some “polishing the edges,” says Holloway-Smith. A work by Cliff Whiting in Tūhura Otago Museum was included as it was installed as a permanent work and is highly site specific, “so, even though it is within the walls of the museum, the panel decided it should be included, particularly in the context of Cliff Whiting’s practice as an artist, which was very much in the public space, working with mana whenua”.
While scale isn’t high up the list of criteria, smaller works, such as a framed screenprint, might not qualify if they are easy to remove. “We are looking for things that have a sense of permanence.”
Some of the featured items push at the boundaries of permanence and even art – is the 14m sculpture Our Lady of Lourdes in Paraparaumu art or icon?
In its inclusivity, the database tracks the ever-changing role of public art. The earliest work is Pātea’s Aotea Waka Memorial, made by FA Jones and others to commemorate the 15th century settling of the area by Turi and his hapū and erected in 1933.
From the 1950s, there is the emergence of modern Māori art, blending indigenous tradition and contemporary European modernism. This period also reflects a post-war appetite for government-commissioned contemporary art for civic buildings, hospitals and universities, often in partnership with leading architects of the day. During a building boom in the 1960s and 70s, large corporations accumulated artworks for their walls. A second boom in the 1980s, coupled with privatisation of government departments, led to many being sold, destroyed, lost or, like Cowan’s, covered up.
Government employment schemes in the 1970s and 80s gave young artists opportunities to work on community cultural projects such as mural painting. In the following decade, councils began developing their own public art policies. Wellington City Council’s Art Bonus Scheme allowed property developers to add height to their buildings in return for commissioning and displaying public art, though later changes in legislation removed council protection from many of these works. In 2016, Northern Lights by Philip Trusttum, installed at 44 The Terrace in Wellington, was dismantled on the grounds of earthquake risk. (It is not included in the database as yet.)
While it is hoped the sheer fact of being listed will go some way to saving works during future redevelopment, Pahanz is working to reinstall significant works that have been neglected or removed, and place plaques near important works.
In July, the six-panel tapestry Forest in the Sun, designed by Guy Ngan and made by textile artist Joan Calvert in collaboration with weavers Jean Ngan and Dorothea Turner, was reinstalled in the Beehive, where it hung from 1977-2003 before being moved to Te Papa Tongarewa.
Pahanz is working to preserve a Bill McCardle mural made for the Avalon Studios television centre in the 1970s. “It had been taken down and was very nearly sent to landfill, but has been saved,” says Holloway-Smith. “It’s a very important part of our social history.” It is also categorising works based on the standing of the artist, taking into account “the impacts of systems of privilege and disadvantage on the development of an artistic career”, the work’s artistic merit, its aesthetic, historical, social, cultural and spiritual significance, its scale and, to a lesser degree, its site specificity. It will work with Heritage NZ and councils to gain heritage listings for works in the highest two categories, those considered of national significance that have stood the “test of time to allow an enduring association with the artwork to be formed, and for heritage values to become apparent”.
Global efforts
Government agencies around the globe are taking similar steps. The Norwegian government has a professional body called Koro to curate and manage its collection of about 8000 artworks in public spaces. In 2016, Historic England added 41 post-war public sculptures made between World War II and the mid-1980s to the National Heritage List in a bid to curb the growing number of sculptures, architectural friezes and murals being lost, destroyed, stolen or sold. But the sheer scope of the Pahanz enterprise, recording all works that fit its definition of public art, makes it unusual. As Holloway-Smith said, “We opened a box and out popped a mountain.”
Even before embarking on the more multifarious nature of 21st-century art, another 900 works from last century are to be audited and documented. And still Holloway-Smith and Elliott are keen to hear of anything they may have missed.
“We don’t know what we don’t know,” says Elliott. “We are calling on the public who may have something much beloved that we have not yet got on our list to be audited.”
Absences will be noted. The register is weighted towards urban environments – of the 387 works, 235 are in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch or Dunedin – and there are no works sited on marae. The glowing simplicity of Joanna Margaret Paul’s Stations of the Cross made for St Mary Star of the Sea in Port Chalmers, then covered over by more conventional reproductions, is missing. Ohakune’s carrot is also not there.
Having exhausted the initial funding, Pahanz’s future as a research organisation is also uncertain. Holloway-Smith and Elliott have formed a charitable trust to carry on with the project. In the meantime, they are turning their attention to the Cowan work in the doomed Europa House. In a vivid example of how publicly commissioned works of art can disappear from memory, documentation accompanying the application to redevelop the site includes no mention of an artwork and it is not a requirement that it be listed in the demolition consent plan. The council’s senior arts adviser Eve Armstrong says it has no powers to require the work be saved, as it is not listed in the district plan.
“However, we definitely have an advocacy role to ensure owners know about the artwork and understand its significance, in the hope they will then look to retain it or ensure it is protected. The mural is well known in the creative community, but we’ve contacted the architects to make sure they and the owners are aware of the artwork.”
Phill Stanley, development manager at Dexus, which manages Europa owner PSPIB/CPPIB Waiheke, said it will investigate the artwork’s condition before demolition “and then engage with relevant stakeholders on next steps”. Based on current timelines, “we expect to be able to update the community mid-2024″.
Elliott and Holloway-Smith are still hopeful the work will be able to be incorporated into the new building at 109 Featherston St – that, says Elliott, “is our ideal”.