OPINION: Has the National Gallery of Canada Lost Sight of the Art?
Colin Bailey, a former deputy director and chief curator of the National Gallery of Canada, organized the federal institution’s most visited exhibition ever. Almost 340,000 people saw great art selected by a great curator in Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age in 1997.
Bailey summarized his approach to running art museums in 2013 as he became the director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: “I want to just allow curatorial excellence to run free.”
The ability to run free seems lacking at the National Gallery these days as several talented curators who would ordinarily be acquiring art and staging exhibitions have quit, been fired or moved into other positions. Art no longer seems to be the gallery’s main concern.
Instead, the top priority now appears to be a new layer of top-level bureaucrats hired by former gallery director Sasha Suda. This means there are more managers to interfere with curatorial operations, which seems to have been a cause of the recent forced departure of the gallery’s chief curator of Indigenous art, Greg Hill.
As interim gallery director and chief executive officer Angela Cassie told staff last week: “Individuals or departments may not have complete autonomy as they may have in the past.”
The departments of contemporary art, Indigenous art and European art all lack the senior curators who lead them. Other branches of those departments are also missing specialists, including historical Canadian art and Canadian prints and drawings.
Suda has since decamped to head the Philadelphia Museum of Art but remaining are the new senior managers tasked with anti-racism, decolonization and Indigenization. These managers rank higher and earn more than the curatorial staff, even above the deputy director and chief curator and a relatively new position that duplicates many duties of the chief curator, the director of curatorial initiatives.
Documents obtained by Galleries West outlining the requirements and duties of some of these new managers state that those hired must have backgrounds in social sciences or Indigenous studies. Education in art history or experience in the art world are not stated as requirements, yet these managers are expected to help shape decisions made by the curators creating exhibitions. Even though knowledge of art was not a requirement, both Steven Loft, vice-president of Indigenous ways and decolonization, and Michelle LaVallee, director of Indigenous ways and decolonization, have experience in curating exhibitions and in arts administration.
Steven Loft
The “job purpose” of Loft’s position includes providing “strategic direction and leadership in the gallery to ensure the collections, exhibitions, education and programs are accessible to Indigenous communities and are influenced by Indigenous knowledge and practice.”
The documents also show that LaVallee, similarily, must ensure “the collections, exhibitions, education and programs are accessible to Indigenous communities and are influenced by Indigenous knowledge and practice.”
Seven former senior gallery staff, including such respected curators as Diana Nemiroff (contemporary art), Charles Hill (Canadian art) and Rosmarie Tovell (prints and drawings), sent a letter Friday to Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez decrying current gallery management and practices.
“The message conveyed to Canadian and international audiences in recent years has been sadly devoid of celebrating art, the gallery’s collections and its artists, without which there is no National Gallery of Canada,” the letter says.
Rodriguez has made it known he believes the gallery’s board of directors, not the government, should take any action deemed necessary to fix gallery problems. But Françoise Lyon, the board’s chair, has told the Globe and Mail she has “full confidence” in Cassie and her management team.
Hill’s dismissal occurred the same day that Kitty Scott, deputy director and chief curator was released, along with Denise Siele, head of communications. It was difficult to miss the irony of an institution supposedly prioritizing anti-racism and Indigenization cutting loose Hill, the sole Indigenous person to head a curatorial department, and Siele, the sole Black manager aside from Cassie.
Indications of the gallery’s future path began almost the moment Suda came to Ottawa in 2020 from the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, where she had worked as curator of European art. One of her first acts was to cancel an exhibition, planned years before for the summer of 2020 of artworks previously or currently owned by the Prince of Liechtenstein. (The gallery owns 12 such paintings.)
Sasha Suda (courtesy National Gallery of Canada)
Suda felt it was wrong to exhibit work owned by Liechtenstein’s princely house because Jewish slave labour had been used on farms owned by the late prince in Austria during the Second World War. Such accusations against the prince were widely known for decades and were the subject of a major international inquiry in 2005. The gallery, under former director Marc Mayer, would have known that when planning the exhibition.
If the same rules were applied to artworks from other royal houses, the gallery could not mount exhibitions from the art collection of our own king, Charles III, because some of his royal ancestors condoned African slavery and harmed Indigenous peoples.
Then, in 2021, Suda arranged a retooling of a Rembrandt exhibition planned before her arrival that saw the addition of text panels from Indigenous and Black historians decrying Dutch mistreatment of Indigenous people and Africans during Rembrandt’s time, the so-called Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century. Also, in 2021 the gallery released a strategic plan with five pillars, including strengthened community connections through “transformative” art experiences, “a diverse and collaborative team” and “operational resilience and sustainability.”
Increasingly, the golden age of the National Gallery looks to have been in the 1990s, when Bailey organized several successful exhibitions of European art, including Renoir’s portraits. That was also the era when Charles Hill, one of the signatories to the weekend letter, curated the memorable The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation, and Diana Nemiroff, another signatory, started organizing contemporary art biennials that brought us one of the gallery’s greatest permanent installations, Janet Cardiff’s sound sculpture Forty-Part Motet.
The letter by Nemiroff, Charles Hill and their former colleagues, could be summarized by transforming Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” into “It’s the art, stupid.”
Clinton won that election. Will art triumph at the gallery?
