page_title: Peter McLeavey
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Peter McLeavey / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Image of the front of the building housing the Peter McLeavey Gallery on Cuba Street, Wellington with a black mourning banner for the passing of Peter McLeavey.
context_page_description: Peter Joseph John McLeavey ONZM was a New Zealand art dealer and advocate based in Wellington.
context_section_description: Jeremy Diggle, Professor of Fine Arts at Massey University, called McLeavey "the most important commercial gallerist New Zealand has ever had, effectively the pre-eminent publisher of modern New Zealand art in the past 50 years". His eponymous gallery is the longest-lived in New Zealand.
  McLeavey started his art dealing career in 1966, showing art in the bedroom of his apartment on central Wellington street The Terrace. His first sale was a Toss Woollaston landscape. In a 2009 documentary about his life, The Man in the Hat, McLeavey stated that he set up the gallery to "feed the culture, and to expose the culture to people who didn't know about it".
  In 1968 he opened a gallery in two rooms on the first floor of 147 Cuba Street in Wellington. Alongside other early emerging dealer galleries, such as Barry Lett Galleries in Auckland, Peter McLeavey Gallery played an important role in encouraging collectors to support contemporary New Zealand artists. Among his major sales were Colin McCahon's Northland Panels to the then National Art Gallery (now the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) in 1978. This is now seen as one of McCahon's most important works. 
  The gallery continues to operate at that location, and more than 500 exhibitions have been mounted there. McLeavey's daughter, Olivia McLeavey, took over the running of the gallery in 2011, when his health declined.
  The Peter McLeavey Gallery currently represents some of New Zealand's best-known modern and contemporary artists, including Laurence Aberhart, Bill Hammond, Richard Killeen, Colin McCahon, Yvonne Todd, Robin White, Toss Woollaston, and Jeffrey Harris.
  McLeavey died in Wellington on 12 November 2015 at the age of 79.
  In September 2018 his archive was acquired by the Alexander Turnbull Library. It will be available by request in late 2019 or 2020.
caption: Peter McLeavey Gallery in mourning
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