KEY POINTS:
Auckland philanthropist Jenny Gibbs last night received $20,000 in the annual Arts Foundation of New Zealand Award for Patronage - and promptly doubled the money and gave it all away again.
She split it equally between Auckland artist Gretchen Albrecht, the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, the NZ Opera School in Hawkes Bay and the publicly funded Artspace Gallery in Karangahape Rd.
Ms Gibbs, who has been collecting art since the early 60s, has been actively involved for many years in numerous arts organisations internationally and at home, including funding Auckland's New Gallery. She said she had seen an encouraging growth in support for the arts in recent years. "New Zealand companies and individuals have traditionally supported sport and, quite rightly, things like Starship and so on, all of which I support. But the arts languished for a long time and we didn't have the great tradition of patronage that, say, the United States has.
"So one of the reasons I did the New Gallery not anonymously was to encourage other people to support the arts which are as much a part of who we are as everything else."
Writers Festival board chairman Michael Moynahan said with the festival just two weeks away the timing of the $10,000 gift "is just perfect".
"The money is always useful but it is also about the profile it provides. Jenny has always been extremely supportive of the festival and this is a real slap on the back.
"The value of the money is significant in terms of what can be done with it." Gretchen Albrecht said that at this stage of her 40-year career, "it's as much of a struggle now for me as a late-middle-aged Pakeha female painter as it was at the beginning. So it's an extraordinary gesture."
Artspace director Brian Butler, a Californian, said arts patronage was historically more common in his home state because of a lack of state funding for the arts, plenty of big-ticket sponsorship by companies like IBM, and because patronage was built into the tax system.
"But the saying is that the tax may be the reason you give the first time, but feeling good is the reason you give the second time, and the third and the fourth," he said.
"Jenny sees patronage as a means to an end, that people get to try to do great things. Every last little penny is needed. We always need capital resources and patronage is fantastic. A patron like Jenny Gibbs comes along and says, 'We love you, keep going, push harder'."
This is the second Arts Foundation Patronage Award. Denis and Verna Adam of Wellington were last year's recipients.
