When Wendy Harsant retires from the position of Gallery Director at Nothcote’s Northart gallery in December (or as soon as the appointment of her replacement allows), it will mark for the end of an era for Wendy, for Northart, and for the North Shore visual arts community.
Northart broke new grounds for the North Shore, and Wendy was there right from, even before, its inception. She started work with the Westshore Community Arts Council, now the Northart Society in March 1998, nearly 22 years ago. “There was no contemporary gallery on the Shore where you could view the work of established North Shore artists,” Wendy recalled on the 20th anniversary of Northart. “To see good art and innovative exhibitions back then, you had to go into the CBD. I determined to turn that around.”
Turn it around she did. Starting without permanent premises, Wendy has carved a reputation for Northart as innovative, committed to contemporary fine art.
Wendy was not originally from the North Shore, though now, like Northart, she is very much part of it. She was born and raised on a farm at Hahei on the Coromandel Peninsula, “back in the days when Hahei was just farmland and beach,” she recalls. She studied anthropology at Auckland University and worked as a curator at the Otago Museum for ten years before returning to Auckland. She then had “another stint at Auckland University studying Art History and eventually arrived at Northart”.
By that stage she lived locally, but knew nothing of the Westshore Community Arts Council. She did however, read the local paper, and it was there that she found the ad for a director of a (then-non-existent) gallery. Once on board she set about finding premises for the fledgling gallery. As luck would have it, three shops in the North Shore City Council-owned Norman King Building in Northcote became available. “Tony Holman, then a North Shore City councillor, was incredibly supportive and helpful in Northart obtaining a lease on the building from the council,” Wendy recalls. “The late Don Wood, an architect, designed the renovations to the first galleries developed in 2000 and a decade or so later, architects Tom Dixon and Bruce Wild designed the renovation to galleries 4 and 5.”
Wendy says the initial attraction in working for the Westshore Arts Council was simply to “develop a space where North Shore people who had an interest in contemporary art, could access it on this side of the bridge. There was a huge gap between what was available here and what was available in Auckland City. I wanted to close that gap a little.”
But there were – and are – other attractions too. “I am married to an artist [Ross Ritchie], and while he was reasonably well established as an artist when I first met him, I know first-hand how difficult it can be for artists to sustain their practice. Particularly if they also have a ‘day job’. I enjoy encouraging artists and providing them with opportunities to develop their professional practice through putting together a body of work for an exhibition – and to keep going and overcome the disappointment if people don’t understand their work or don’t purchase it.
“Being an artist is a lonely occupation and I wanted to establish a meeting place where like-minded people could get together, and learn from each other – both artists and art lovers.”
In that aim, Wendy has certainly succeeded. Hundreds of North Shore artists can testify to the importance, personally and professionally, of having their work exhibited at Northart. Exhibitions Wendy has curated range from solo shows to small-group exhibitions, showing the latest works by well-known professional artists; from student shows to important retrospectives honouring some of our best artists; shows that focus on painting, or photography, or ceramics, or weaving; members’ exhibitions; and school/student exhibitions. You name it, Wendy will have featured it in some way.
Wendy has also been mindful of the changing demographics of the North Shore and alongside the regular ‘Stations of the Cross’ window exhibition for Easter, Northart has featured art by Māori, Korean, Pasifika, and Chinese artists, to name just a few. Two years ago, she apppinted a Chinese liaison coordinator. In 2019 alone Northart has hosted exhibitions by members of the New Zealand Institute of Chinese Fine Arts and by young contemporary Asian artists, as well as exhibitions curated by Wendy of Chinese New Zealand artists Lu Bo and Bangzhen Deng. Shows in recent years that featured Pasifika artists have included Tongan mixed media artist Tevita Latu, who also conducted youth workshops in the gallery’s Studio space; tapa artists Tui Emma Gillies and Suileti Fieme’a Burrows; photographer Emily Malifel’o and filmmaker Vea Mafile’o.
Looking ahead to 2020, Wendy has envisioned an exhibition for March that will feature Muslim artists and acknowledge the 15th March tragedy in Christchurch.
“Our policy is to encourage all people to enjoy and use the gallery,” she says.
Artist Sharon Vickers, one of many artists who have exhibited regularly at Northart over the years, has done so since she entered a Birkenhead Licencing Trust competition at Northart in 2002. She says Wendy “has been a force to be reckoned with her vision, energy and professionalism. She has been a supportive mentor to me and many other emerging artists over the 17 years I have been exhibiting, and I have seen the gallery grow not only in size but in its sense of artist community and friendship. Wendy has developed a wonderful family of artists and supporters. We are hugely grateful to her and she will be much missed.”
Another key aim when Wendy started at Northart was to “raise the quality of the art as well as the standards of exhibition installation on the Shore”, and aim which she thinks, and the art world agrees, she has achieved in spades.
Just one testament to the extent of her achievement is the numbers of people, from the Shore and beyond, who attend the Sunday afternoon exhibition opening each month. It’s not unusual for not just the main gallery, but all three gallery spaces to be crammed with art lovers, from the Shore and beyond, all examining what’s on offer in the latest Northart exhibition, animatedly discussing the merits of the various works, and catching up with art-loving friends.
But ask Wendy about highlights from the last 20+ years, or about her own achievements, and she’s stumped. Of the latter, she simply says, “Lasting 20 years! Seriously? Time will tell.”
And exhibition highlights? “After 20 years? That is impossible! We have had so many wonderful exhibitions and events. Of the last few years, [I could name] the exhibitions ‘Singing to the Dead’ held recently; the Malcolm Harrison retrospective in early 2018; and ‘Arrested Practice’ – a show of works that artists had abandoned for various reasons.”
To that, this writer would add the exhibitions marking the 20th anniversary: two carefully curated assemblages that honoured many of the gallery’s regular and best-known artists: ‘Twenty’ (which featured one artist who exhibited in each of Northart’s 20 years), and ‘First Five’, an exhibition of works past and present by the five North Shore artists who featured in Northart’s first-ever exhibition. These were both exciting exhibitions, and reminders of the great visual heritage that Wendy and Northart have generated on the Shore.
During her tenure, Wendy has not only been curator and manager at Northart, but also chief grants applicant. Balancing the books now, as over the last 22 years, has relied on grants from Auckland Council, Kaipatiki Local Board, ASB Community Trust, Lion Foundation, Pub Charities, Birkenhead Licensing Trust, and Creative New Zealand’s Creative Communities scheme.
Whatever the difficulties, Wendy believes that “obstacles are also challenges”. That’s an approach she took back at the beginning when there was no gallery at all, and one she’s carried through to today, as the gallery faces a similar uncertainty – the prospect of no or a different home under the current Northcote Redevelopment programme. “Not knowing the form, i.e. the place and space, that the gallery will take and when that will be, is the key [issue] for the future,” she says.
And while Wendy has had sole responsibility for Northart, its exhibitions and its financial survival, she says it’s been far from sole charge. “I have had an incredibly supportive husband, who has always shared my vision for Northart; there is a very small but very loyal and dedicated staff (not quite but almost a full time equivalent in addition to myself), and there is a wonderful team of volunteers (including a supportive Board) and a fantastic group of artists. I am always sounding out ideas with other people – some of my best I can’t take ownership of!”
At the beginning, Wendy worked with a “small but keen group of people whose experience of the arts was mostly at an amateur level. But they were willing and keen to back me and my vision. Their support was incredible."
“I think today,” she adds in what might be best regarded as masterly understatement, “that we are reasonably well established as a gallery on the Auckland art scene, but that we have not lost the accessible, friendly and community ethos we set out to develop.”
As she plans for a move south to spend more time with family, including grandchildren, Wendy is positive about Northart’s future, as a community-based and led gallery as well as one that discovers, seeks out and honours professional artists. But she also looks back on opportunities perhaps missed by the wider North Shore community and its politicians.
Northart is only partially funded by Auckland Council, and relies on other funding and its own resources to continue to offer the exhibitions it does. “With more secure funding and support from Council, Northart would be able to provide more specialised services and opportunities for people and groups to be involved.”
An “unrealised ambition” is to have opened a dealer gallery in Takapuna – surely a community with the style, sensibility and wherewithal to sustain one.
And, she says, “I have never understood why the North Shore does not have its own public art gallery. We are a well-educated and affluent area, two things which generally lend themselves to support for the arts. Having a significant public gallery on the Shore would be a wonderful thing and would certainly encourage a more active and creative city, for residents and visitors. As would having a tertiary art school. Currently those interested in art, architecture and design, indeed all creative industries, leave the Shore to study in the city, and their whole focus shifts. And most don’t come back!”
Her hope for the future, as she bids the Shore farewell, is that one day she will return, to visit, perhaps even to celebrate the opening of, a Shore-based public art gallery. In the meantime, we at Channel join with the Shore arts community in thanking Wendy for her decades of dedication to Northart, and to making the North Shore a richer place to live from its presence.
