Roger Blackley (1953–2019)

Abstract

‘Do we choose our fields of research or do they choose us?’ The question is the first sentence in the Preface to Roger Blackley’s most important book, 2018’s Galleries of Maoriland. He follows it with a memory of being taken to the Dominion Museum as a schoolboy and marvelling at the artefacts in the Maori Hall. He would spend his career as a curator and art historian forging an historical conversation between this world and his own, in the process transforming the shape of New Zealand’s art history. Born and raised in small towns in New Zealand, Blackley was introduced to art by an inspiring teacher at Tararua College in Pahiatua. Attracted to a life of the mind, he eventually found himself studying towards an Arts degree at the University of Auckland. However, as he ruefully later remembered, when he was a student in the Art History department, no classes were offered about the art of his own country. But, in 1973, Blackley saw an exhibition of the watercolours of nineteenth-century artist Alfred Sharpe at the Auckland Art Gallery. Struck by both the paintings and the artist’s unusual biography (Sharpe was deaf and mute), Blackley searched the newspapers of Sharpe’s time to find out more about him. This kind of deep primary research, using newspapers to capture both a social context and the character of the times (‘anecdotage’ was the joke he made at his own expense), became characteristic of all his work. By 1978 he had written a Masters thesis about Sharpe. After he had been appointed the curator of historical New Zealand art at Auckland City Art Gallery, this thesis became the basis for a catalogue and exhibition on Sharpe he curated in 1992. The choice was a telling one. Throughout his working life, Blackley gravitated to the margins, to those media or figures that were forgotten or considered not quite respectable by other art historians. As Christina Barton put it in 2008, ‘a distinctive quality of Blackley’s scholarly work is to examine those areas that seem beyond the pale, either because they address genres that do not conform to the conventions of high art, or because their reception took place in non-art contexts’. Blackley’s writing broke with other kinds of conventions too. In 1995, for example, he wrote an essay for Art New Zealand that questioned the ‘slim basis’ on which a