Sir James Wallace is widely recognised as one of New Zealand’s most philanthropic arts patrons.
His love of the arts began when he was a teenager at Auckland’s King’s College, specifically while on a scholarship to Boston. Since then he’s gone on to support artists throughout the country in a host of different ways, most notably via the Wallace Art Awards and the Wallace Foundation. Over the course of decades he has given over $10 million to creative projects, with his philanthropy seeing him knighted for his services to the arts in 2011.
Last year’s edition of the annual Wallace Arts Awards was presented by Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy, and saw the distribution of over $275,000 worth of prizes. Those prizes included residencies at New York’s International Studio and Curatorial Program, and Switzerland’s Altes Spital. The awards were handed out at the Wallace Arts Trust’s headquarters in stately Pah Homestead in Auckland’s Monte Cecilia Park. The awards are the longest-running arts awards in Australasia.
The trust owns nearly 9000 works of art across a variety of mediums, and its extensive collection contains works from many of New Zealand’s best-known artists, including Colin McCahon and Dick Frizzell. Many are early works.
Sir James is also the founding patron of the Auckland Theatre Company, NZ Opera and the Royal NZ Ballet. He’s been heavily involved in the New Zealand film industry, having backed a variety of films including Hunt for the Wilderpeople. He recently served as executive producer on The Breaker Upperers, starring James Rolleston, which was picked up by US streaming giant Netflix earlier this year.
Sir James has a variety of business interests, though it is his meat processing plant at Waitoa that is probably most widely known. In 1996 he established Wallace Corporation, grouping both family businesses and his own under one name; it stayed that way until 2017 when it merged with the Spence Family’s Farm Brand Ltd to become Wallace Group Ltd Partnership.
The group has exceptional reach, distributing to countries including the US, Canada, Russia and China. It creates animal products, primarily skins, protein meals, hides and tallow.
Closer to home, it also operates a composting operation at Waitoa, and last July it extended its operations in Southland by adding a Mataura processing site.
Sir James lives in Rannoch, a four-storey mansion in the Auckland suburb of Epsom. Built in the early years of the 20th century, Rannoch houses part of the trust’s large collection in several galleries.
2018: $165 million