With Chris Saines off back to the Queensland Art Gallery, the search is on for a new Auckland Art Gallery
Director. Apparently Saines scored Queensland out of a field of 30 and a short
list of six so presumably some of them will be possibilities for the Auckland
job. Let's hope the decision making will be faster than Queensland’s
appointment process that dragged on for about 10 months.
In its 60 year history the Auckland Art
Gallery has had nine directors (although one of them, Grant Kirby, was acting
in the role for a couple of years while the Gallery mustered up the courage to
appoint its first and only New Zealand-born director Rodney Wilson who left the
post 34 years ago).
The first two directors, Eric Westbrook and
Peter Tomory, came from the UK, Richard Teller Hirsch came from the United
States, and the rest were Australians: Gil Docking, Ernest Smith, Christopher
Johnstone (via the UK) and Saines.
Johnstone was in his early 40s when he took
up the job, Chris Saines was 40 and Rodney Wilson was 36 so maybe we can expect
someone in that age zone to be a contender.
Some numbers:
0 the number of women who have directed the
Auckland Art Gallery
1.3
the population of Auckland in millions
1.5
the number in millions of visitors to Chris Saines’s new institution
QAGOMA (that’s what they call it) last year
2.1
the population of Brisbane in millions
8.2
the average number of years served by Auckland Art Gallery Directors
17
the number of years Chris Saines has been director of the Auckland Art
Gallery
25 the percentage of Auckland Art Gallery directors with
doctorates
39
the average age on appointment of the last three directors
50
the annual budget of QAGOMA in millions of dollars
100 the number of people on the Auckland
Art Gallery staff
270
the number of people on the
QAGOMA staff
667
the number in thousands of visits to the Auckland Art Gallery last year
