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Naming and defining the current issues for collections in Canadian public galleries
by Liz Wylie
Date: 17 July 2005
Event: Banff
Liz Wylie
Liz Wylie, University of Toronto art curator since 1996, has worked as an independent curator and writer on art since receiving her MFA in Canadian art history from Concordia University in Montreal in 1980. Her MFA thesis was on the work of Winnipeg artist Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald. Her freelance curatorial projects include a retrospective exhibition on the Toronto painter Richard Gorman for the Ottawa Art Gallery in 1996, and In the Wilds: Canoeing and Canadian Art, a large group exhibition for the McMichael in 1998. She was director/curator of the gallery at the University’s Scarborough Campus, a position she held from 1994 to 1996. She has also taught courses in the history of art at the Ontario College of Art and Design, the Universities of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Brock University, and York University. Her main areas of interest and expertise are modern and contemporary art, and Canadian art. She has published reviews and articles, mostly on Canadian historical and contemporary art, for over twenty years in various magazines and journals, such as NOW, Canadian Art, the Journal of Canadian Art History, Queen’s Quarterly and the University of Toronto Quarterly.
Abstract
The overall title for this curatorial roundtable project of OAAG/ARCCO is Unspoken Assumptions. I believe that there are a cluster of unspoken assumptions around the area and activity of the permanent collections of Canadian art galleries that are seriously negatively affecting not only the content of these collections, but their future validity and health. Any individual who is hired as an art museum/gallery curator will have to face the situation of his/her collection. Perhaps as early as the first day on one's new job questions might come to mind: what is in the collection? What should be in it? Has it been cared for? Is there room to add to it?
As an institutional curator, part of your role as defined in your job description or hiring contract may be to organize exhibitions at your institution, drawn from the holdings of your permanent collection. The specific nature of your collection will determine whether you will be able to do so in a way that is intelligent and meaningful, both to you as a committed professional, and to your gallery's publics.
This paper will examine the current status of the art collections held in Canada's public art galleries, from the point of view of questioning and critique - not official statistics. Based on responses to my questions being received from my colleagues who are curators in various public galleries across the country, I will present my informal findings by topic and theme. These will include:
Do our institutional collections truly reflect the huge range of activity and exploration in media present in contemporary art practice?
To what degree are institutional curators hampered in their enthusiasms for less marketable art by the notion of fair-market-value appraisals in order to issue charitable tax receipts to donors?
Are curators able and empowered to shape the collections in their care as they would like? With the scope they would like? Are they comfortable ideologically, practically, philosophically about their institution's collecting and collection(s)?
Ultimately curators need to be able to bring to their roles and relationships with their institutional collections the same level of critique and engagement they do to their writing and organizing of temporary exhibitions (in the gallery context or elsewhere). Is there an unspoken assumption that this is an impossible dream? How can we address this issue?