The world is an uncertain place right now. But if Head of Art at Te Papa, Charlotte Davy, has anything to do with it, art will be at its heart on the other side.
An interview with Te Papa has been a long time coming on The Residents. That’s why I was thrilled when I got the chance to meet their Head of Art, Charlotte Davy, and a chance to talk with her about the year’s programme at our beloved national museum earlier in 2020 (“Our Place”). Charlotte and I met at the start of March 2020 to chat about Te Papa’s planned ‘Dali and the Surrealists Exhibition’ planned for December 2020. At that time the year was looking bright. However, in the last month, since we’ve moved to Level 4 Lockdown in New Zealand things have, of course, become less certain (a global pandemic will tend to do that to you).
I hesitated about whether to publish this interview because everything remains a bit-up-in-the-air but I believe that at this time of confusion, we need art - and the stories of our local residents of Wellington - more than ever. I very much hope that Dali and his compatriots still make the trip from the Netherlands to New Zealand in time for December 2020 because if there’s something the world needs right now, it’s the playful and subversive ideas. I feel comforted knowing that as long as Charlotte Davy has anything to do with it, we have the best chance possible of seeing such works.
Living in Te Aro, Charlotte feels like a Wellingtonian through and through. “I usually get to nip down to Moore Wison’s and buy the veg and nip around to Poquito on Tory Street and have a coffee on the way to work. I love living in the city and consider it my home. We' are so lucky. I’ve traveled all over the world and I keep coming back to how fabulously compact it is” she says while sipping Earl Grey tea. A self-described ‘rover’ around the various movements of Art History, Charlotte admits that she does gravitate towards mid-century New Zealand art. “I tend to be a generalist and go broad, rather than narrow” Charlotte explains.
Charlotte was born in Geraldine, South Canterbury. “I went to school in Timaru. When I was 16 I wanted to move somewhere exciting so I moved to Wellington” she says. While the curator doesn’t come from a family of artists, she crucially saw an exhibition of Colin McCahon’s work when she was young at the Aigantighe Art Gallery. “My father is an Anglican Minister. I saw the exhibition and I needed him to interpret it for me so I brought him along. ‘I can tell you about that passage in the Bible’ he said ‘But I can’t tell you what Colin McCahon was saying!’” she laughs. That moment sparked in Charlotte a curiosity to understand what artists were trying to say. She received encouragement from her art teacher who pushed her into studying art and art history when many were trying to get girls into the sciences. “She could see my great passion was art and art history. For my generation, there’s that real formative experience, and for me, it was McCahon at the Aigantighe Art Gallery” she says.
Charlotte arrived in 1989 to Wellington when it was a vibrant 'big’ seeming city. “Sitting in an Art History lecture was my idea of heaven,” says Charlotte remembering her early days in the capital. “I’ve lived half of my life here and now I come back here as my ‘home’ more than the South Island. In Wellington, people pride themselves on learning” she says. “In the ’90s, it was me learning who I was and it was very formative in terms of my career.”
Between 1997-1999 Charlotte had her first stint at Te Papa. “After I left university, I decided to find out what it was like to be an artist - I wasn’t one,” Charlotte says. “I went to the old Polytech, which is now Massey, and studied design. To support myself during that period, I began selling tickets at the old National Museum on Buckle Street - the forerunner to Te Papa.”
Working in this job led to Charlotte discovering the world of art curating. ”I discovered this whole ‘behind-the-scenes’ thing. I asked someone if I could help pack up the collections and I ended up moving them down to the new Te Papa in 1997. That was my first experience of working in a Museum.” In the final week of her Massey degree, Charlotte had an offer from a design firm for a graduate job. At the same time, Te Papa offered her a job to manage art loans. “I had to decide whether it was design or museums: I chose Museums.”
After a couple of years working at the Dowse with Tim Walker, Charlotte worked at Te Papa again from 2001-2002. She then moved to Australia and worked at the Gallery of New South Wales. “It has such a vibrant exhibitions programme. I became their head of programmes and had a creative facilitation role. I loved Sydney but after 14 years I began to worry that my connection with New Zealand was becoming too thin. I wanted to come back. The logical place was Wellington. The quality of life here is amazing.” Fearing she would never re-connect, Charlotte came home.
Returning to New Zeland felt like the right move and it meant that Charlotte could be closer to her family. There were also new opportunities in the newly created Head of Art role she came into at Te Papa, returning to her roots. “I’m most proud of opening the new Toi Art Gallery when I came back in 2016,” she says. “It was an amazing moment in my life. We wanted to build a space where the national art collection could be properly showcased. I now love seeing our audiences engage with our art, and I really enjoy that we’re bringing art in which takes risks and shows us a new direction.”
Despite the current uncertain climate at this time, Te Papa is still hoping to bring ‘Dali and the Surrealists’ to New Zealand in December. “We haven’t done a surrealism exhibition since 1972. It’s such a pivotal art movement. New Zealanders have got to see it” Charlotte says. “Although you can think ‘Oh it’s so European, it creeps into everyday life. For example, the Toffee Pop ad where there is a couch made of lips and the person falls into it? That couch only exists because of Dali and his imagination. Rita Angus looks at surrealism - in one painting she has a hanging ‘E’ in the sky - and you can see it in how she makes strange juxtapositions. We can see their influence on so many things.”
There are also reasons for us to look at our art history to understand our present strange circumstances. Surrealism sprang from the Dada movement and disillusionment about the world order after the First World War. “The interesting thing with surrealism is that it has real relevance for our time because like the surrealist we have big questions about the world order” Charlotte observes. “It’s a hundred years ago and yet it feels more relevant than ever. We’re able to see the climate crisis, for example, posing serious questions.”
Dali was, of course, the original self-promoter who would have loved Instagram during our times. “His quote: I don’t do drugs. I am drugs. His mustache is iconic!” Charlotte smiles. “I was reading the other day about a woman who claimed paternity from him and got a Spanish court to have him exhumed from the ground - mustache intact. She ACTUALLY wasn’t his daughter (she was a fortune-teller - obviously she couldn’t tell her own fortune). I couldn’t help but think that even in death he’s still raising eyebrows!” she laughs. “He was - first and foremost- a proficient painter.”
Charlotte hopes that seeing these artists will allow people’s mind to roam and ask questions about the nature of reality. “I also love the sense of the absurd the surrealist artists had,” she says. “It’s playful. You don’t need to feel like you don’t understand it. You just need to let yourself go into a place of curiosity and let your mind go.”
However, it is Magritte who Charlotte would most like to see. “Magritte is a Belgium artist who was right in the middle of those crazy exhibitions. Leonora Carrington will also be amazing because there aren’t many of her works. I also want people to see Man Ray’s work - the iron with a needle sticking out of it? I’m really excited to see him. We have high-quality paintings, film, photography, works on paper - its an interdisciplinary look. There are lots and if you’re into a particular art form the chance is that you’ll find it in the show.”
Fingers and toes crossed!
I will still be dreaming of the Dali exhibition, and can’t wait to experience their strange images to help us through these VERY strange times.