Te Papa


The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is New Zealand's national museum and is located in Wellington. Usually known as Te Papa, it opened in 1998 after the merging of the National Museum of New Zealand and the National Art Gallery. An average of more than 1.1 million people visit every year, making it the 58th-most-visited art gallery in the world in 2023. Te Papa operates under a bicultural philosophy, and emphasises the living stories behind its cultural treasures.

History

Colonial Museum

The first predecessor to Te Papa was the Colonial Museum, founded in 1865, with Sir James Hector as founding director. The museum was built on Museum Street, roughly in the location of the present day Defence House Office Building. The museum prioritised scientific collections but also acquired a range of other items, often by donation, including prints and paintings, ethnographic curiosities, and items of antiquity. In 1907, the Colonial Museum was renamed the Dominion Museum and took on a broader focus. The idea of developing a public art gallery in Wellington was gathering support, and the Science and Art Act of 1913 paved the way for a national art gallery in the same building.

Te Papa

Te Papa was established in 1992 by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Act 1992. Part of the remit for Te Papa was to explore the national identity of New Zealand. Te Papa Tongarewa translates literally to 'container of treasures' or in full 'container of treasured things and people that spring from mother Earth here in New Zealand'. The official opening took place on 14 February 1998, in a ceremony led by Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, Sir Peter Blake, and two children. Māori traditional instrumentalist Richard Nunns co-led the musicians at a dawn ceremony on opening day. The museum had one million visitors in the first five months of operation, and between 1 and 1.3 million visits have been made in each subsequent year. In 2004, more space was devoted to exhibiting works from the New Zealand art collection in a long-term exhibition called Toi Te Papa: Art of the Nation. Filmmakers Gaylene Preston and Anna Cottrell documented the development of Te Papa in their film Getting to Our Place.

Current building

The main Te Papa building is built on reclaimed land on Cable Street which formerly belonged to the Wellington Harbour Board. The site was previously occupied by a modern five-storey hotel. Over a five-month period in 1993, the hotel was jacked off its foundations onto numerous rail bogies and transported down and across the road to a new site, where it is now the Museum Hotel. Once the site was clear, the soft reclaimed land was compacted to a depth of 16 metres by dropping weights of up to 30 tonnes from a height of up to 30 metres in a criss-cross pattern on the site. Over 50,000 weights were dropped, causing noise and vibration problems for those in surrounding buildings.
Te Papa was designed by Jasmax Architects and built by Fletcher Construction. The building had cost NZ$300 million by its opening in 1998. Earthquake strengthening of the Cable Street building was achieved through the New Zealand-developed technology of base isolation. The building contains six floors of exhibitions, cafés and gift shops dedicated to New Zealand's culture, history and environment. When it opened in 1998, the museum had a fine-dining restaurant called Icon, but this later closed. The museum also incorporates outdoor areas with artificial caves, native bushes and wetlands. A second building on Tory Street is a scientific research facility and storage area, and is not open to the public.
The design process of the building followed bicultural principles based on the Treaty of Waitangi. This process was led by Cliff Whiting working alongside Cheryll Sotheran and Ken Gorbey.

Governance and leadership

The museum is run by a board appointed by the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage. Board members have included: Wira Gardiner, Fiona Campbell, Sue Piper, Judith Tizard, John Judge, Miria Pomare, Michael Bassett, Christopher Parkin, Sandra Lee, Ngātata Love, Ron Trotter, Glenys Coughlan, Judith Binney, Philip Carter, Wendy Lai and Api Mahuika.
Directors of the museum include:
CEOs of Te Papa include:
The History Collection includes many dresses and textiles, the oldest of which date back to the sixteenth century. The History Collection also includes the New Zealand Post Archive with around 20,000 stamps and related objects, and the Pacific Collection with about 13,000 historic and contemporary items from the Pacific Islands.
The history of Te Papa’s foreign ethnology collections mirrors, in broad terms, the developmental patterns seen in New Zealand’s other major metropolitan museums—Otago Museum, Canterbury Museum, and Auckland Museum. However, each institution has followed a distinct historical trajectory. Due to its early policies and collecting practices, Te Papa holds smaller and more fragmented foreign ethnology collections than the other three. Unlike them, Te Papa acquired most of its material through passive means rather than proactive collection efforts.
There are significant collections of fossils and archaeozoology; a herbarium of about 250,000 dried specimens ; a collection of about 70,000 specimen of New Zealand birds; significant amphibians, reptiles and mammals.
Molluscan holotypes, neotypes, lectotypes and syntypes are held by the Museum of New Zealand.
The museum has the world's largest specimen of the rare colossal squid. It weighs and is long. The squid arrived at the museum in March 2007 after being captured by New Zealand fishers in the Ross Sea off Antarctica. The cultural collections include collections on photography, Māori taonga, and Pacific cultures.
The Museum of New Zealand is also home to the Elgar Collection, a valuable collection of English and French furniture and paintings, the oldest of which date back to the seventeenth century. In 1946 the Dominion Museum received a bequest of some of Fernside Homestead's finest antiques from Ella Elgar's will. Until 1992 these antiques were displayed in period rooms at the Dominion Museum, and objects from the Elgar Collection are currently exhibited throughout Te Papa.

Archives

The archives are located in a separate building on 169 Tory Street and are open for researchers by appointment. There are two categories of archive collections: the Museum Archive and the Collected Archives.
The Museum Archive goes back to the founding of the Colonial Museum in 1865 and comprises the archives of James Hector. The archives of the National Art Gallery of New Zealand are also part of these archives. The Collected Archives fall into two groups:
  1. Art-related records and other archival papers in specialist areas; for instance the archives of Toss Woollaston, Lois White and Leonard Mitchell
  2. A wide variety of archival material, that includes the diary of Felton Mathew, Surveyor General at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, and battle plans and correspondences related to World War I; for instance the Gallipoli diary of Captain E.P. Cox.

    Exhibitions

Te Papa's exhibits range from long-term exhibitions on New Zealand's natural environment and social history, to cultural spaces and touring/temporary exhibitions. Most are hands-on and interactive. The long term exhibitions of cultural objects focus on New Zealand history, Māori culture and New Zealand's natural world. The hands-on and interactive exhibitions focus on engaging young visitors and include out-door areas built and planted for Te Papa. The key cultural space is the Rongomaraeroa marae with unusual whakairo in its wharenui, Te Hono ki Hawaiki.
Te Papa charges an entrance fee of $35 for international visitors however it remains free entry for all New Zealanders. Some temporary exhibitions are ticketed, but may have occasional free days.
In 2018, the Mountains to Sea and Awesome Forces exhibits were closed, with Te Taiao Nature taking their place. This new exhibit opened on 11 May 2019, with a 1,400 square-metre exhibition focusing on New Zealand's natural environment. The exhibition retains several features of the old exhibits, such as an earthquake house simulation and a 495 kilogram Colossal squid.
In 2022, the Manu Rere Moana exhibition was renewed to reflect the developments in traditional navigation since its initial installation.
A full list of exhibitions can be found .

Library

Te Aka Matua Research Library, previously a publicly accessible library, is now open by appointment between 10am-5pm, Monday-Friday. The library is a major research and reference resource, with particular strengths in New Zealand, Māori, natural history, art, photography and museum studies. It is located on the fourth floor of the main building.

Mahuki Innovation Accelerator

Mahuki was Te Papa's innovation accelerator. It was an in-residence programme in which 10 teams developed solutions to challenges facing cultural institutions.

Controversies

The museum has sometimes been the centre of controversy. The siting of significant collections at the water's edge on reclaimed land next to one of the world's most active faults has resulted in concern by some people. There has been criticism of the "sideshow" nature of some exhibits, primarily the Time Warp section, which has closed. There has also been criticism that some exhibits were not given due reverence. For example, a major work by Colin McCahon was at one stage juxtaposed with a 1950s refrigerator in a New Zealand culture exhibition.
The Māori name of the museum has caused controversy. In 1989 the Māori iwi Te Āti Awa, located near Wellington, requested that the Ngāti Whakaue iwi grant a name to the museum, which resulted in the Ngāti Whakaue bestowing the name Kuru Tongarerewa, an ancient ceremonial name important to the iwi evoking spiritual, historical, and cultural importance. However, the name eventually adopted by the museum caused offense by being a modification in the form of Te Papa Tongarewa. Meetings between the museum's board and the Ngāti Whakaue led to promises that the name would be changed to Te Papa Kuru Tongererewa, but the change did not occur.
New Zealand art commentator Hamish Keith, a member of the board that set up the Museum of New Zealand and a member of its interim board, has been a consistent critic of Te Papa at different times referring to it as a "theme park", the "cultural equivalent to a fast-food outlet" and "not even a de facto national gallery", but seemed to moderate his opinion later when making a case for exhibition space on the Auckland waterfront.
Staff restructuring at Te Papa since 2012 has generated significant controversy. In October 2018, Te Papa management promised to review restructuring plans, indicating that plans would be scaled back. In February 2019, the Collection Manager of Fishes Andrew Stewart and the Collection Manager of Molluscs Bruce Marshall were made redundant. Numerous museum experts and scientists in New Zealand and worldwide criticised the move, with researchers including Steve O'Shea advocating a boycott. In March 2019, the redundancies were delayed. In April 2019, the museum reversed the decision for Andrew Stewart, offering him an alternative job. Between April and May 2019, Te Papa advertised a research position for a molluscan curator and awarded the job to an alternative candidate to Bruce Marshall. The advertisement and decision to not offer the job to Bruce Marshall was criticised harshly by outside experts, prompting moa expert Trevor Worthy to end his 30-year research association with the museum in protest.