First interview: Anita Tótha is the director of The Arts House Trust, the new owners of the art collection started by convicted sex offender James Wallace. Kim Knight meets her ahead of a major new exhibition at Pah Homestead and asks about moving forward from a tainted past.
After James Wallace’s sex convictions: What next for Pah Homestead and $50 million art collection?
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She answers her own question: “A word . . . a word that comes to mind is empathy. Empathy in leadership.”
This is the trickiest of interviews.
Downstairs, preparations for a blockbuster exhibition of 1980s New Zealand art.
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Upstairs, a desk that used to be occupied by Wallace, the “prominent businessman” whose identity remained secret for five years while he was charged, convicted and jailed for indecently assaulting three men and attempting to pervert the course of justice.
Today, Tótha sits at that desk. She is the first director of the new entity that now legally owns the James Wallace Arts Trust collection - 10,000 artworks by 2500 artists, worth an estimated $50m.
In Hillsborough, Auckland, up the long driveway to the historic home-turned-gallery, new signage records the change in ownership: The TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre is now The Arts House Trust at Pah Homestead.
In a press release announcing Tótha’s appointment, the trust described its collection as “home to works by many of NZ’s most significant and prominent artists . . . a short list includes Peter Stichbury, Pat Hanly, Gil Hanly, John Reynolds, Gretchen Albrecht, Toss Woollaston, Dick Frizzell, Frances Hodgkins, Marti Friedlander, Colin McCahon, Karl Maughan, Michael Parekōwhai and Rita Angus . . .”.
How did James Wallace, whose art purchases also filled Rannoch - his grand residence in Epsom - lose a stake in this collection?
In brief: The new trust got the art; the old trust kept the house.
The longer version of this explanation begins in 1992, when Wallace founds the James Wallace Arts Trust (JWAT) and gifts it the collection he began in the 1960s.
In 2021, a month ahead of his sentencing, Wallace resigns from the eponymously-named trust.
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Meanwhile, Andrew Green (a JWAT trustee since 2017), Graham Shortland and Perpetual Trust Ltd (a trustee and co-trustee of JWAT since July and August, 2021, respectively), form the Independent Arts Trust (IAT) and begin the process of transferring JWAT assets to the new entity which, in March 2023, changes its name to The Arts House Trust.
Businessdesk reports Wallace “strenuously” opposes this restructure but, according to a statement from The Arts House Trust (TAHT) supplied this week: “The Trustees confirm that, following a hearing in September 2022, the High Court made directions, by consent, that it was proper and lawful for the Trustees to transfer the assets (excluding Rannoch House) to The Arts House Trust”.
Having completed that transfer, Green and Shortland have indicated their intention to resign from the JWAT, following the appointment of incoming trustees “in due course . . . and what will ultimately happen to the trust will be a question for those future trustees”.
When Wallace lost his name suppression in June, 2023, it was described by some as the art world’s worst kept secret. But it also marked the moment when the people and organisations that had received money from the businessman had to publicly grapple with the taint of his funding legacies.
From film and theatre, to dance, music and visual arts, Wallace’s philanthropic reach into a cash-strapped cultural sector had been huge.
Media reported at least one artist asked for the return of an art work she had given the collector.
The Arts House Trust confirms it received calls from “a small number of artists” and, around the same time, a “handful” of organisations displaying loan art from the collection had expressed concern.
However, “any issues expressed have since been resolved . . . any artist wishing for their work to be returned, regardless of where it is stored or displayed, can work with The Arts House Trust on a plan for this”.
At her desk on the second floor of the Pah Homestead, Tótha considers questions of guilt and pain and the acknowledgment of history. Does she have an active role in helping the arts sector navigate those questions? Or does a new trust with a new name and a new director simply start from scratch?
“I’ll be part of this timeline,” she says. “But, again, it’s that empathy question. Recognising the past and the present. Moving forward, I think, takes an incredible amount of vision and empathy. I’ve used that word a few times, but that’s just what keeps coming up.
“To understand how it affected people - but then making sure that, moving forward, we’re doing everything we can to support and contribute to a positive impact.”
Tótha is an archetypal gallerist. Black dress, sweeping bob, jacket architecturally balanced on her shoulders.
Her accent is New Jersey via Hungary. Tótha’s father went on a class trip to Slovenia and never returned to his homeland (”all he had was, I think, pencils in his pocket and maybe a few coins”); her mother’s family left Hungary after World War II, spent time in displaced person’s camps in Germany and “they somehow all got out to New York . . . refugees go where their friends and people are”.
She’s been thinking about this lately, because she has just attended her NZ citizenship ceremony. Number 489 to the stage, she witnessed just how proud so many participants were, and it made her reflect - “how often we take it for granted how good we have it here”.
A photographer and graduate of New York’s School of Visual Arts whose internship at Yossi Milo Gallery turned into a five-year job, Tótha came to Auckland 12 years ago (love, etc).
Her Aotearoa art world credentials include running Sanderson Contemporary Art and a stint at Whitecliff College of Arts & Design but she also co-founded the Sandringham Food and Spice tour (conceived when she ran the suburb’s community centre) and, if pressed, will happily list her top five Auckland restaurant recommendations - hidden gem: Mt Roskill’s Tapsi.
When The Arts House Trust position came up last October, the recruitment company listing called for someone with strong leadership and business acumen, but also “resilience” and “optimism”.
Tótha: “People thought I was crazy. But what I saw was not only a challenge, which I’m up for, but an opportunity . . . I just think about humanity today.
“How do you make a well-rounded individual? Hard skills, soft skills, critical thinking? I think there is an intrinsic link between art and wellbeing.”
At Sanderson, she recalls, clients would buy art and proclaim: “I could never do this. I don’t have a creative bone in my body”.
“And I find that fascinating, because we all do. It’s just, how do you nurture that, in a capitalistic society where you have to make money, and especially in NZ, where it’s so expensive to live here and be here?”
There are no current plans to remove any works from the collection and, says Tótha, there is a continuing commitment to new acquisitions.
Recent purchases include works by Julia Morison, Pusi Urale, Karen Crisp and Helen Calder, “to name a few”.
But the collection has also been bolstered by work from Māpura Studios and the trust’s Secondary School Art Awards.
The latter continued to run throughout Wallace’s protracted legal fight.
But the main Wallace Art Awards - first held in 1992 and often referred to as the country’s richest annual art prize - were cancelled in 2021. The year prior, 634 entries had vied for the $52,000 paramount prize.
Over the years, winners have included some of the contemporary art world’s biggest names, including the late Bill Hammond in 1994 and Venice Biennale representative Judy Millar in 2002.
On the future of those awards: “We’re looking at the strategic plan,” says Tótha.
“It could be a phased in approach. We’re not sure yet.”
The Arts House Foundation, a separate entity formed at the same time as TAHT, is listed on the Charities Register as an “umbrella/resource body” and includes grants, funding, awards and scholarships among its possible activities.
Tótha says she has a “soft spot” for the emerging artist, but is equally committed to supporting the mid-career and established.
Curatorially, it’s about considering a work and asking: “What will make a difference? What is the artist thinking about? What is it saying now, in the present, but what will it mean in the future?”.
A key aim of the new trust is to, simply, show its art.
Right now, about 15 per cent of the collection is on loan around the country.
Tótha wants that figure to increase. Lovers & Castaways, curated by Aleks Petrovic and on show until June 9, takes up all of the Pah Homestead’s ground floor galleries, and includes some pieces that their makers have not seen for decades.
The show is drawn entirely from the trust’s collection of art made in the tumultuous 1980s: Nationhood, identity, values and NZ’s relationship with the wider world, from (alphabetically speaking) Gretchen Albrecht and Philippa Blair to Mervyn Williams and Brent Wong.
“It’s pretty amazing,” says Tótha. “And it highlights the breadth of the collection.”
The most recent annual visitor numbers to the Pah Homestead are not yet available, but in the period to June, 2023, some 81,000 people went through the gallery - about 14,000 more than the year before.
“People just love to come here in general,” says Tótha. “Some people may come just for the arts. Some people may come just for the experience and the surroundings and that’s ok.
“If you can change that person’s life or perspective for those five minutes or half an hour - if it creates, even for a split second, a different perspective where they learnt something new, or they liked how they felt . . . you don’t know whose life you can change by just that one art piece, and I love that.”
Lovers & Castaways, Pah Homestead, Auckland, until June 9 (open Easter Saturday, but closed public holidays and Mondays).
Kim Knight is a senior lifestyle reporter, with an interest in arts, culture and food reporting, who has worked at the New Zealand Herald since 2016.
