Ahead of its much anticipated re-opening on 29th March 2012, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney is attracting a steady stream of opposition to the $53 million redevelopment. The task of responding to MCA’s most outspoken critics, falls to it’s Director, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE, the British-trained curator hired in 1999 to reverse the museum’s dwindling fortunes.
When Elizabeth Ann Macgregor took over the running of the MCA, she was told that Sydney-siders would never embrace a contemporary art museum. Undeterred, she introduced innovate education programs and engaging exhibitions, which helped to persuade the NSW Government to commit to long-term funding. Elizabeth was also able attract new corporate sponsors to help fund the redevelopment of the historical site.
She proved them wrong once before, but can she do it again in the face of mounting opposition?
What’s on the inside of the museum will remain a closely guarded secret until the MCA re-opens it’s doors on March 29th. But this hasn’t stopped criticism of the MCA from appearing in the Fairfax press. Unable to criticise the interior (including the art), Fairfax media in Sydney has been running a campaign unfairly criticising the exterior of the building at Circular Quay.
On 4th March, The Sun Herald ran a story criticising the building’s architecture, which is currently hidden behind scaffolding. In response, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor told the newspaper: “For architects to be commenting at this point is quite unfair because they haven’t even seen how it works.”
On 17th March, it was the historians turn to weigh in with an article by Debra Jopson from The Sydney Morning Herald, which appeared on the front page of the weekend edition. Historians are angry about what they see as MCA’s insensitive handling of the nation’s oldest dockyard, which is buried beneath the museum. Although the MCA had nothing to do with it being buried in the first place, historians want the museum to rip up the concrete and expose the dockyard.
If this is the type of criticism being leveled at the museum now, heaven help Elizabeth Macgregor when MCA open it’s doors to the public on the 29th March.
But Elizabeth Ann Macgregor does have her supporters. Her enthusiasm and passion for contemporary art and engaging with the artists, made a believer of this Sydney-sider when I interviewed her for Australian Women Online last year.
When I met Elizabeth Ann Macgregor at the 2011 NSW Telstra Business Women’s Awards in September, she was preparing to board a plane to London to collect her OBE (Order of the British Empire) for services to art.
She grew up in the Orkney Islands in the North of Scotland and admits that she was “hopeless at art at school”.
“My interest in art actually came by accident when I went to university,” Elizabeth told Australian Women Online.
“I originally went to university to study languages and only did art history as an extra subject. But then I completely fell in love with it and switched my major to art history.”
Her introduction to contemporary art came shortly after graduation when she landed her first job in Scotland as a curator/driver of a travelling gallery.
“I was very interested in working in a gallery or working in a museum. But I spent the first few weeks of my career preparing to sit for my heavy vehicles licence, so I could drive this converted bus to communities which didn’t usually get access to art. That became the driving passion of my career – engaging audiences with art and with artists,” she said.
“Sometimes I took artists [in the bus] with me and I think this is another thing that has become a hallmark of the way I work. I put artists at the centre of the museum, breaking down people’s preconceptions about what contemporary artists do. Sometimes people think they’re doing all this weird stuff but they’re just normal people, doing something that really fires their passion.”
When Elizabeth arrived at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1999, the museum was underfunded and uninspiring. Seen by the community as elitist, visitor numbers to the MCA were dwindling and the future of the museum looked bleak.
“It was a big challenge. I remember somebody asking me what dangerous sport I’d ever done and I said well it’s not a sport, but crossing the world to run a bankrupt museum is pretty close to being a dangerous sport,” said Elizabeth.
“It was very challenging but I knew the potential was there. I had confidence that Sydney-siders would and could embrace a contemporary art museum. People were telling me that they wouldn’t because it was a pleasure loving city and people were too busy going to the beach. [I was told] that they would never embrace a museum that is essentially about ideas and about the future, rather than about the past.”
“I can understand why people find contemporary art confronting. When I was studying art history I had rather a disdain for contemporary art. It was all this sort of stuff that didn’t look like it required any skill and there was no body of knowledge around it, so you had to make up your own mind and really respond to it on a very immediate level. That’s quite a challenge for most people.”
“The challenge for us is to make people realise that you can come in and have an opinion, like it or dislike it. Some things you will respond to, other things you won’t. But there’s this huge, extraordinary diversity of talent, particularly in this country, which is worth engaging with.”
For more information about the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) visit the website: http://www.mca.com.au/