CREATIVE LEGACIES: Private collectors are as crucial as ever to the survival of our public galleries
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"Portrait Mask"
Haida artist, "Portrait Mask," 1840 - 1860, wood, pigment. Collection of Michael Audain and Yoshiko Karasawa, from the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition Shore, Forest and Beyond: Art from the Audain Collection.
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Photography by Jessica Bushey Photographed by Jessica Bushey
"Vancouver / Vancouver"
Installation view, "Vancouver / Vancouver," from the Rick Erickson collection, at Gallery 1965
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Documentation by Jessica Bushey
"Vancouver / Vancouver"
The Vancouver Vancouver exhibition by On Main, at Gallery 1965.
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https://gallerieswest-admin.metropublisher.com/filecenter/addFile.html#
"Vancouver / Vancouver"
The Vancouver Vancouver exhibition by On Main, at Gallery 1965.
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"View of Shawnigan Lake"
Edward John Hughes, "View of Shawnigan Lake," 1959, oil on canvas. Collection of the Mendel Art Gallery. Gift of the Mendel family, 1965.
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Fred Mendel
Fred Mendel, c.1965, outside the Mendel Gallery’s Conservatory.
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"Untitled (mountains near Jasper)"
Lawren Stewart Harris, "Untitled (mountains near Jasper)," c.1934 – 1940, oil on canvas. Collection of the Mendel Art Gallery. Gift of the Mendel family, 1965.
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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Emily Carr, "War Canoes, Alert Bay," 1912
oil on canvas (Collection of Michael Audain and Yoshiko Karasawa; from the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition "Shore, Forest and Beyond: Art from the Audain Collection")
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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"Portrait Mask"
Haida artist, "Portrait Mask," 1840 - 1860, wood, pigment. Collection of Michael Audain and Yoshiko Karasawa, from the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition Shore, Forest and Beyond: Art from the Audain Collection.
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
From the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG).
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"View of Shawnigan Lake"
Edward John Hughes, "View of Shawnigan Lake," 1959, oil on canvas. Collection of the Mendel Art Gallery. Gift of the Mendel family, 1965.
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Fred Mendel
Fred Mendel, c.1965, outside the Mendel Gallery’s Conservatory.
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"Untitled (mountains near Jasper)"
Lawren Stewart Harris, "Untitled (mountains near Jasper)," c.1934 – 1940, oil on canvas. Collection of the Mendel Art Gallery. Gift of the Mendel family, 1965.
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Emily Carr, "War Canoes, Alert Bay," 1912
oil on canvas (Collection of Michael Audain and Yoshiko Karasawa; from the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition "Shore, Forest and Beyond: Art from the Audain Collection")
CREATIVE LEGACIES: Private collectors are as crucial as ever to the survival of our public galleries
By Beverly Cramp
“Public art galleries as we know them wouldn’t exist without private collectors,” says Ian Thom, senior curator of the Vancouver Art Gallery. It’s a bold statement, made during a recent lecture on the Gallery’s permanent collection.
Thom’s lecture, in support of the current exhibition An Autobiography of Our Collection organized to celebrate the VAG’s 80th anniversary and its more than 10,000 pieces of art, touched more often than not on works donated to the gallery by private collectors. People like J. Ron Longstaffe, Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft, and Alison and Alan Schwartz, to name a few, who spent a good part of their lives buying art and then bestowing the bulk of their collections to public institutions.
Another of the Gallery’s significant donors is Michael Audain, whose private art collection, only some of which he has given to the VAG, is the source of works for the headline show at the gallery, Shore, Forest and Beyond. It’s organized in four main sections — First Nations carvings (both historical and contemporary), modern British Columbia art, Mexican paintings, and a large selection of Emily Carr works.
Showing loaned and donated works, as in this case, is another way private collectors bolster public gallery offerings. “Michael has the largest private collection of Emily Carr works anywhere,” says Grant Arnold, co-curator of the show (he’s also the Audain curator, a special position funded by an endowment set up by Audain several years ago). “All of his Emily Carr paintings are in the show, except one that he and his wife Yoshiko look at every day. They wanted to keep that one in their home.”
Arnold adds that Audain’s First Nations collection began in earnest about 10 years ago. “Michael has made it clear he’s interested in repatriating historical First Nation work back to the coast — he’s said publicly that this material wouldn’t go back on the market and that the masks won’t leave the coast again. He’s motivated by his profound interest in the history of B.C., and it would be pretty hard to tell the history of this region without those items being in museum collections here.”
Arnold notes that the art market has “gone crazy in the past few years with prices spiralling upwards. A lot of those historical First Nations masks would be out of the reach of most institutions in this province.”
There are many ways private collectors make their collections available to the public. Vancouver condo marketing whiz Bob Rennie, who has amassed one of Canada’s largest collections of international and national contemporary art, opened his own private gallery, which has just entered into an exhibition partnership with the Royal British Columbia Museum.
Vancouver builder and collector Rick Erickson owns real estate throughout the city. He built Gallery 1965 in one of his commercial buildings, an elegant space carved out of the street-front section of video collective VIVO’s premises, which leases it from Erickson. This past fall, the inaugural Gallery 1965 exhibition was a selection of works from Erickson’s collection, its first public airing since he began collecting more than 30 years ago. It was shown in two parts in an exhibition called Vancouver / Vancouver. Many of the artists in the two shows went to school with Erickson in Vancouver’s working class East End.
Michael Turner, novelist, poet, arts writer, and newly-minted Emily Carr University instructor, curated the show. “While Audain’s collection is designed to offer a symbolic, and perhaps idealized, history of British Columbia, Erickson’s is assembled spontaneously, based as much on the event (often an art auction fundraiser) as the work itself,” says Turner. “If Audain’s collection is a novel rich in character and plot, Erickson’s is both a diary and a map.”
“When speaking of art collections, words like taste, thematic, coherence and market value often come to mind,” Turner wrote in his exhibition essay. “Unlike 17th century portrait painting, where the flattened subject appears surrounded by the subject’s equally flattened holdings, an art collection, once installed, takes the form of sculpture, perhaps suggesting those words I mentioned earlier, but also a record of activity, or a map, given the collector’s passage through the places where the work was purchased.”
Turner’s essay turns a razor-sharp eye on the effect of private collectors on the local art scene. In addition to supporting artists by buying their work, and helping public galleries and museums by donating all or large portions of their collections, private collectors build ties to public institutions and set up endowments to support new acquisitions. They may also contribute to the actual buildings that house public institutions.
Such was the case for Saskatoon’s Mendel Gallery. It was named for meat-packing magnate Frederick Mendel, who initiated the fundraising drive to build a modernist art gallery in Saskatoon that opened in 1964. Mendel also donated 13 Group of Seven paintings to the gallery, establishing the institution’s permanent collection, the largest in the province.
In 2009, the Mendel announced plans for a new location, with an estimated date of completion in 2014. Then on June 3, 2011 before a shovel of dirt had been lifted, philanthropist Ellen Remai donated $30 million to the new project — $15 million toward construction costs of the gallery and $500,000 annually for 30 years toward an exhibition program. The new gallery will take on a new name; the Mendel will become the Remai Art Gallery of Saskatchewan.
So the dance between public art institutions and private collectors continues, to the benefit of the public at large. “Collectors can go on this entrancing journey, following their passions. Then it’s up to us to weave the different threads together,” says Vincent Varga, director and CEO of the Mendel Art Gallery. “In the end, we create this intricate fabric of culture.”
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