To Build a Home Worthy of Our Collections & Exhibitions
A Message from the Mayor
For over eighty years, the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery has been a home for New Zealand social history, where every aspect of our culture has been collected, expressed and shared.
The beautiful, the practical, the eclectic, the romantic - the objects and icons of our everyday selves alongside the treasures and triumphs of us at our very best.
Families from Hawke's Bay, but also from further away, have gifted to HBMAG items they've loved, lived with, owned, used and enjoyed. And so our collections are full of personal memories and familial nostalgia, and for that reason many of our visitors claim a very real ownership over this place.
Yet as much as we love HBMAG our collections have outgrown the available space: our need for more room has become great.
We see in our vision for the revitalisation of HBMAG a new wing bringing in light, a cluster of rooms to house permanent collections and visiting exhibitions, storage rooms and work spaces for our team of museum curators, archivists and educators. Architecturally-designed and sympathetic to the original building, the restoration will equally fit within the Napier city-scape and lift HBMAG onto the international museum map.
There is much to see within the walls of the Hawke's Bay Museum and Art Gallery. But we still have so much left to show you.
Please support this project generously because today our history and our heritage need us all to make sure they are celebrated for generations to come.
Barbara Arnott
Mayor of Napier City
