Museums and Museum Studies in New Zealand: A Survey of Historical Developments

Abstract

What relationship has the university subject of museum studies had with the museum sector? It is often claimed that there is an oversupply of graduates in museum studies ill‐equipped to work in museums, an issue that reveals tensions between understandings of academic study and practical experience. This article addresses these tensions between museums and museum studies through a survey of the historical development of museums and the closely related development of training, professional development and university degrees. The generalist role of the museum worker in the embryonic museums of colonial New Zealand did not require formal academic training. The 1930s witnessed a turning point with grants for professional development from the Carnegie Corporation. The Second World War disrupted the museum sector but from the 1950s museums experienced rapid growth in type and number, developments requiring larger numbers of specialised staff. At the same time the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and the museum branch of UNESCO were formed, along with a national professional body The Art gallery and Museums Association of New Zealand (AGMANZ), which provided an international and local voice and focus for the museum sector. Finally, in the 1960s, only 100 years after the first museum was opened, we see the birth of museum‐centred training programmes first administered by the museum sector and in the late 1980s by the university. The article concludes that the increasingly complex and specialised museum profession and the increasingly sophisticated academic analysis of museums emerged at the same time and are inevitably and necessarily intertwined.

"[W]hat Beauty in Oriental Art Means"

“…1935r). This engagement reflected contemporary emphasis in museum studies on education and art's social purpose (McCarthy and Cobley 2009). As well, the particular example of Moore highlights the role of women and exhibitions in New Zealand, a new research avenue pioneered by Bronwyn Labrum (2018).…”

“…3 As Rebecca Rice (2012: 4) showed, new institutions like the National Art Gallery both reflected and fed into this growing nationalist sentiment through their selection of particular kinds of exhibitions and narratives. "Objects in New Zealand's new national institutions, " she noted, "were to be embedded in a story or narrative that would provide an evolutionary history of the nation" (see also McCarthy and Cobley 2009).…”

“…Historicizing museum practice in New Zealand with a focus on Asia, this article argues, can help break scholarship out of its overwhelmingly bicultural focus. Until the work of McCarthy and Amiria Henare, New Zealand scholarship has largely focused on a progressive narrative of museums as settler institutions, either ignoring or writing out Māori entirely (Henare 2005;McCarthy 2009;McCarthy and Cobley 2009). A focus on Asia extends this new critical museology in New Zealand by asking local scholars to reorient their work to take account of significant collectors and collections of Asian arts in Aotearoa New Zealand (Beattie and Bullen 2014;Beattie and Bullen 2016;Beattie and Murray 2011;Bell 2014;Bullen 2014).…”

Decolonising the Curriculum

“…Museum and Heritage Studies is taught at postgraduate level at three NZ universities, the oldest at Massey University was established in the 1980s and was for a time part of the School of Māori Studies (Cobley and McCarthy, 2009). All these programmes have substantial Māori content, but are aimed at a broad audience, though one Māori art history paper at Auckland University is aimed at Māori students and has a reading list made up solely of publications by indigenous writers (Ellis, 2018).…”

Whatua Mai te Aho: The Role of Museums in the Maintenance of Māori Weaving As a Living Cultural Practice

“…It will be grounded in Kaupapa Māori theory, research principles and processes, with a clear objective to highlight the self-determination of Māori in general and in particular-in this study-weavers themselves. The research will also employ autoethnography, including critical museum ethnography (Ames 1992;Clifford 1997;Kreps 2003aKreps , 2020Lonetree 2012;Shelton 2013), and critical museology (Ames 1992;McCarthy 2015;Phillips 2011;Shelton 2006, Silverman 2015, as reflexive tools to look for patterns of meaning that are associated with political power and control (Pfohl and Gordon 1986) so as to give agency to the subjugated by raising awareness to generate knowledge to make changes (Thomas 1993).…”