KEY POINTS:
The incoming director of the Auckland War Memorial Museum may be only half the size of her predecessor, but with respect to Dr Rodney Wilson, her brain is probably as big.
At 58, Dr Vanda Vitali has travelled the world, mostly working in museums. A Canadian, she speaks French as well as she speaks English. She graduated top student in maths and chemistry in US high schools in her year (from the military American school in Morocco). And when her father, an artist, asked her what she wanted to do with her life (fully expecting her to answer "a PhD at Harvard") the 18-year told him the truth: "To make calvados in New Zealand".
She didn't make it. Her shocked parents brushed off the teenager's remark as a joke, and Vitali went on to a PhD from the University of Toronto. But the dream of living and working in New Zealand never died.
Even by international standards this is a big job. As Vitali says, the Auckland Museum is now part of "a couple of dozen" museums that sit in the top echelon of museums world-wide. And she is one of the elite few who travel the world directing them.
Last Friday week Wilson, who took Auckland Museum to this new level, was led into his farewell dinner for around 300 by strapping Maori to the call of the conch shell. The day before he had received his Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit and dined at Government House.
The speeches were long and flattering. Wilson's achievements have been spectacular.Over the past four years museum attendance has grown from 400,500 to 600,000 a year. As the Museum board's Bruce Anderson noted, Wilson, who conceived and achieved the museum's new suspended atrium which increased its floor space by 60 per cent, is at heart, a frustrated architect and engineer. He also raised the $113 million for it.
One of Vitali's strengths at heart is people - and getting them engaged in working for and visiting, museums. There is little of the flash and dash of Wilson with his bow ties and motor cycles. Instead she stands there, small and stylish in her muted pants suit, listening and talking to people who remember her later as warm, intuitive and powerful.
So why this fascination with New Zealand? "New Zealand occupies a wonderful place in the imagination of people from other parts of the world," she says. "There's the natural beauty, the cultural attractiveness of having indigenous and more modern cultures working together, there are the environmental aspects. Also from the perspective of women, to come to a place that has a woman Prime Minister and other socially progressive aspects."
"When my friends learned I was going to NZ - not one said "'Oh, My God, why are you going there?" They all said 'Oh we envy you. This is going to be a wonderful experience!"'
Between four and 40 of these friends, possibly including her adopted daughter, may join her in Auckland.
Given that the infrastructure side of the Auckland Museum is so mature, Vitali will probably concentrate on masterplanning exhibitions and public programmes - and use her passion for bringing contemporary perspectives to the old. As she says, "There's no question that public programmes and lectures, performance art and art events [linked to exhibitions] are the trend in museums.
"Most people are attracted to things that give their lives relevance. It's that experiential part that makes museums unique. If we make the experience the centre of exhibitions we'll inspire people - and not just their minds but their hearts and imaginations too."
Back in Los Angeles and Canada before that, Vitali is famous for her "Friday nights at the museum", designed to entice 18 to 20-year-olds into museum culture. In Toronto, especially, young people needed places to go on Friday nights. The Royal Ontario Museum, with its central heating plus a cash bar, and musical and theatre performers, all attached to exhibitions, was just dandy. And no, the kids didn't get out of control and steal or break up exhibitions. "At first our security people had nightmares but there was never any damage."
Once she had them there Vitali began what she hoped would be a long-term love affair between young people and museums. As she explains, widening the museum's appeal triggers people's imagination, allows us to dream and being able to dream is very important.
The idea attracted the thinking youth of Toronto in their hundreds - to the point where, says Vitali, "we almost developed a sophisticated singles club".
When she moved to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in 2002, Vitali modified the programme to suit the entertainment-saturated youngsters of the tough, multicultural area south of downtown LA. This time she called it First Fridays. Each month entertainment was linked to a temporary exhibition and she added extras like fashion parades and debates to the mix. "We'd get 1500 to 1600 young people every night," says Vitali. Again, people did not just roll up for the entertainment. The entire programme was carefully crafted, "allowing people to think and talk about the future and experience the past".
As Vitali points out, today's young people are so overfed with one-way, spectator entertainment, many are searching for more meaningful pursuits and intellectual stimulation. "The Guardian in England recently ran an article saying that the lectures are the new rock 'n roll."
Another high point in a career studded with triumphs, was Collapse? - an exhibition she directed at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, based on Jared Diamond's book which looks at environmental practices of contemporary society across the globe and across time.
"We decided to fit the space out as a 21st century newsroom with people reporting on environmental issues throughout the city while mayors and university professors commented on environmental practices and the future of California," she explains. This way museums become relevant, "essential institutions for the future. They are there to remind us of the knowledge we can draw from the past and help us craft the way to the future".
VITALI'S father and mother, a diplomat with Unesco, whirled their only child from one part of the world to another. "I was lucky to experience many cultures, many places. I consider myself to be a nomad in certain ways." Her education straddled the United States, Canada, where she did her PhD in nuclear physics, and Paris, where she completed post-doctoral studies in the interpretation of science in archaeology.
Between 1983 and 1996, she was a consultant on heritage-based policies and practices in America, Greece, Cyprus, Syria, Tunisia, France, Morocco, Gabon and Madagascar.
She also worked as designer, director and leader of international projects in Aix-en-Provence and field director at the Museum of Carthage, Tunisia. Her eyes blaze with excitement recalling her time in Carthage, when as a young graduate, "we conserved and reviewed 11,000 objects that had not been seen since the White Fathers excavated them at the end of the 1880s. It was an incredible travel through time. Just me and my little team and these thousands of objects. I worked there over 10 summers and non-stop for three years. My love for archaeology, for past and present cultures, and multiculturalism was very much grounded in those days.
"Indiana Jones eat your heart out!"
Another idea that makes her eyes glisten was the Deserts project, researched and developed over three years of slogging through sand and snow in the 1990s. A collaboration between France, Canada and Australia, her role as developer of the exhibition included a trip through the Sahara, stints in the Arctic, Iran and Australia. "Unfortunately the project was cancelled a couple of months before it was due to open. The French exploded a bomb in the Pacific.
"I'm actually a pacifist," she continues. "Nuclear armaments are a very difficult thing to understand when we know what they can bring."
Now she uses her skills to show how the lessons of the past can impact on our future. "Museums are there to remind us of the knowledge of the past - knowledge we can draw on to help us craft the way to the future."
She flew back to LA last Monday to pack her things and polish up her leadership skills with a week at the Getty Leadership Institute before returning next Friday to take over.
In Auckland she is wary of making decisions before she learns the ground rules. "I obviously have skills, but which of these skills one uses usually depends on one's environment. I'm still learning about Maori culture."
Refreshingly self-effacing, she reminds me time and again, that this is not about her and her personal career, but about what she can do for the museum.
"I don't want to be famous, I want the museum to be famous. I have never accomplished anything that wasn't built on teamwork. ... I hope, with the staff - and we have marvellous staff here - we come up with ways of taking the museum a step further."
