Remembering Luit: a Visionary Who Made Things Happen
Remembering Luit: a Visionary Who Made Things Happen
Essay remembering Luit Bieringa by Peter Ireland for EyeContact – 5 August, 2022
Luit Bieringa 1942-2022
Peter Black, Salvation Army Rally, Wellington Town Hall, 1981, gelatin silver print, 159 x 235 mm. Collection of Te Papa (O.003043). Purchased 1983 with New Zealand Lottery Board funds. (Jan Bieringa suggested we position one of Luit's purchases here.)
PhotoForum Online editor’s note: this image was the cover photo on the catalogue of the exhibition Peter Black- 50 Photographs, toured by the National Art Gallery in 1982, with a catalogue co-published with PhotoForum.
In the early days of the Te Papa project a document described the National Art Gallery and Museum as “fuddy duddy”, in exactly the way medieval art had been described as “gothic” and one group of artists early in the 20th century as “fauves”: wild men—for the same reasons. Well, in Luit's decade there were, for example, more national and international photography shows staged than in the quarter century of Te Papa's operation to date.
EyeContact Essay #45
The intriguing name of one Luit Bieringa started surfacing in the NZ art world in the early 1970s—clearly a name not of Anglo-Saxon origin, a rarity in the small, closeted world of art administration in those days. He fetched up in Palmerston North in 1971, following the director of the then Manawatu Art Gallery, Ian North. Along with Bill Milbank at Whanganui’s Sarjeant and Ron O’Reilly at the Govett-Brewster, Bieringa saw a flourishing series of touring shows that challenged the inertia of the main centres. O’Reilly, perhaps being an older man, was not greatly interested in the emerging medium of photography but Milbank and Bieringa were early and consistent promoters, the latter being one of the generators of the seminal Active Eye show of 1975.
About this time I had some contact with Luit, but did not actually meet him until 1978 when I went to Palmy with Jeffrey Harris to see the latter’s first Luit-organised survey (also seen later at the Sarjeant and the Dowse). After that Luit and I had further contact, mostly to do with photographic matters. The following year he moved to Wellington to become director of the then pretty moribund National Art Gallery. As one example of the situation he found, the annual fund allocated by the Department of Internal Affairs available for purchase of art works was a mere $6,000, and—strictly legally—it was tagged for the repatriation of works from overseas.
Before long Luit started shaking things up, hiring professional staff and organising funds from the Lottery Board to greatly expand activities and boost acquisitions, as well as hiring additional staff on short-term (but often rolled-over) contracts. This ability to circumvent stodgy bureaucracy earned him few friends within it, but even his awareness in no way curbed his energy, creativity and ambitions.
Continue reading the full essay on EyeContact
Other tributes to Luit Bieringa:
Mark Amery for Stuff
Athol McCredie for Te Papa Blog
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