Megan Dunn: City Gallery Wellington Archive Project
Channel: NDF - National Digital Forum
Date: 2018-11-30

Tuesday November 20th, 2:00pm-2:25pm @ Rangimarie 2 - Breakout Room

City Gallery Wellington is a contemporary-art museum without a collection. We’ve been making exhibitions for almost forty years, with major national and international artists. In the process, we have made a big dent on the art discussion. However, our exhibitions come and go. Once out of sight, they are out of mind; audiences are quick to forget them.  

Between 2016 and 2018 we undertook a project to digitise 100 important exhibitions from our archive, researching key shows dating back to the Gallery’s opening in 1980 and putting the information and resources online. This project has brought our exhibition history back into the picture—for our audience and for ourselves. The visibility of our archival shows signals that we know and value our own history, and it makes that history ‘live’. 

This project was unprecedented for City Gallery Wellington. Going in, we knew we would have to solve the problems of developing a new website that could answer the wider remit of the gallery’s needs and also support a larger exhibitions section. In the process we had to figure out how to best display the archive to the end user. Our old website was marketing-driven, attracting audiences to current shows and events. As old entries were superseded, they were retired into archive sections. Like many other galleries, our site largely consisted of accumulated retired comms material, not designed with future users in mind.  

This presentation will cover what we've done, what we've learned and what's now online. It came from the archive...

Megan Dunn , City Gallery Wellington, Archival Researcher