Chantal Pontbriand has big plans to turn MOCCA into a new institution

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Asked the other morning if it was always her ambition to head an honest-to-gosh bricks-and-mortar art museum, Chantal Pontbriand replied without a pause, her brown eyes growing large. "Yes," she said, then let out one of those captivating yawp-like laughs that are as much a Pontbriand trademark as the straight jet-black hair and all-black clothing she seems to favour.

Pontbriand offered the affirmation during an interview in the airy Toronto rental apartment she's occupied since early January. Located on Bloor Street West near Keele, the spanking new condo, pristine in presentation, minimalist in decor, has expansive views of the northern half of soon-to-be-leafy High Park and, to the south-east, the skyscrapers of downtown.

Perhaps, you think, the place was chosen because its park view reminds Pontbriand of Mount Royal in Montreal, the city of her birth.

Or maybe there's an association with Paris: after all, Pontbriand lived there, on and off, from about 2005 onwards, the last stint starting in 2012 as an associate professor of curatorial studies at the Sorbonne.

Then again maybe High Park made her think of the greenery of London where she spent 2010-11 heading exhibition research and development at Tate Modern.

But no … the reason turns out to be more mundane.

"Someone found it for me," she said – that someone working on behalf of the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art which, in late October last year, announced it was hiring Pontbriand as its first-ever chief executive officer. Pontbriand arrived in Toronto barely three weeks after the announcement and has been squeezing out sparks ever since. Indeed, less than two weeks after attending a meet-and-greet of members of Toronto's art scene, she was presenting the MOCCA board with a five-year plan. Working at that tempo, you haven't the time for apartment shopping.

As even the most cursory observer of the Canadian art scene knows, big things are afoot (and quickly so) for the museum which began 23 years ago as the Art Gallery of North York, then adopted the MOCCA moniker in 2000 upon its southward move to Toronto's achingly hip West Queen West neighbourhood. Last spring, faced with the demolition of its Queen quarters, MOCCA announced another move, this time as the leaseholder of space in the Tower Automotive Building, a "charismatic" (Pontbriand's term) but decidedly run-down century-old structure in the city's funky west end. Vacant since 2006, the 10-storey semi-skyscraper has been on tap for a major renovation as the centrepiece of a new mixed-use gentrification project overseen by Castlepoint Numa developers. Fittingly, since it's only about two kilometres away, the building, currently in the throes of an interior gutting, is eminently viewable from Pontbriand's apartment balcony.

Earlier this week, at a highly anticipated, well-attended media conference held just north of Tower Automotive, Pontbriand outlined a jaw-droppingly ambitious, multi-faceted program for the new museum, now called the Museum of Contemporary Art_Toronto_Canada, or the Museum for short. Five of Tower's 10 storeys would be dedicated to the museum, she announced, and they would be ready for visitors May 2, 2017. (Another, brand-new building, across the street from Tower, is scheduled to be built to the museum's specifications before the end of 2020.)

Pontbriand, though, doesn't like the term "visitors," at least not for what she calls "this new museum of the 21st century." To her, a visitor suggests "you show up and get out an hour later." That won't be the case with this "laboratory," this "factory of ideas." Here there will be as much to do as to see, "where our activity will be as much on the Web as on the site."

If this all sounds rather like a Starbucks outlet conceived by some Conceptualist-minded installation artist, well, that's sorta the point. "People need in-between spaces … a living room for everyone … a convivial, animated space … a place for being," she declared at various points in our conversation. "This is really a new institution. It is not the old MOCCA moving."

Pontbriand, who turns 65 later this year, speaks of her appointment as CEO (and director) as "like a destiny." Certainly it seems to bring together the many strands – curatorial, administrative, scholarly, connoisseurial, critical – of her 40-plus years in the vanguard of contemporary art. For instance, when she says "there will be a lot of performance and dance in this museum; it's part of our core mandate, part of our substance," you can't help but think of the Festival international de nouvelle danse (FIND), which Pontbriand co-founded in Montreal in 1982 and oversaw as a live biennial until lack of funding forced its lamented closing in 2003. Similarly, her intention to have the museum publish a bilingual journal, titled The Idea of North, clearly echoes Pontbriand's co-creation, in 1975, of Parachute magazine. Though shuttered in 2007, Parachute was celebrated internationally during its lifetime for championing such once-nascent idioms as video, installation, multi-media art, performance and photo-based art, its text printed in English and French.

Also, there's even what might be called a throwback to Pontbriand's childhood in her involvement in the repurposing of the Tower building. Her father, Henri Pontbriand (1894-1969), was not only a trained operatic tenor and music teacher, he also had a keen interest in architecture, urban planning and housing development – an interest he subsequently indulged when he moved to Rawdon, Que., a town 60 kilometres north of Montreal, to create a kind of "garden city" that eventually included 40 houses, a hotel and golf course, among other facilities. "So, you see," Pontbriand laughed, " I was brought up on construction sites, literally. It's a very natural thing for me, y'know."

Pontbriand claims she wasn't really looking to relocate to Toronto when she gave up her Paris apartment last spring to return to Montreal where her husband, the performance and installation artist Raymond Gervais, 70, and their son, Antoine, a singer, 38, had continued to live and work during her European decade. (Both Pontbriand and Gervais are winners of the Governor-General Award for visual and media arts, hers received in 2013, his in 2014.) Pontbriand returned, she said, "not knowing what would happen to me," nor did anyone in Canada "know I was coming back." The immediate goal was to move into a large condominium she and Gervais had bought from plans in 2013 and that now had been built.

However, no one as connected to the art world as Pontbriand stays "unloved" for very long. Shortly after her return, organizers for Toronto's Nuit Blanche 2015 sent her an e-mail, wondering if she might be interested in curating something for the event's 10th anniversary that October. She was. A week later there was another e-mail, this one from Mississauga-based Canadian Community Arts Initiative (CCAI), asking if she would like to "do" a major biennale in the Greater Toronto Area in mid-2017.

Pontbriand, who curated Canada's participation in the 1990 Venice Biennale, answered that something should be done. Not, however, a biennial. It's one of her pet theses that Canada was happening in the contemporary international art scene in the 1970s and 80s – "a champion of post-modernist art" – only to lose its mojo in the early nineties. In a world already grid-locked with 200-plus biennials, doing another one "was not going to put Canada on the map and we need to be put back on the map."

In short order, though, she was helping the CCAI organize a one-day "think-tank" on the viability of hosting "a major international art event" around and in Toronto for Canada's sesquicentennial. Held in early July last year, the think tank was highlighted by a detailed presentation (with footnotes, including references to Jacques Derrida and John Dewey) from Pontbriand, who now describes herself as the curator and adviser for the event, which goes by the title Demo-Graphics.

All this activity had the effect of bringing Pontbriand to the attention of the search firm that MOCCA had hired to locate a new CEO/director. For some, courting Pontbriand for a permanent job in Toronto might have seemed odd, at least on first inspection. After all, by Pontbriand's own admission, she had not spent any significant time in the Ontario capital for many years. Moreover, in 1989, she'd declared Toronto's art scene "not very interesting right now" (whereas Montreal's was "fabulous," Vancouver's "wonderful"). Ten years later, she deemed Toronto as not being "very lively in terms of creative dance."

Today, though, fired especially by the findings of the research she did for the Demo-Graphics proposal, Pontbriand is very enthusiastic about the city and environs. "It's a global metropolis, which you couldn't say in the eighties," blessed with a diverse population that will number 10 million by 2040 and "fantastic international art collectors."

"We're not totally there yet but … it's becoming a very important city from the perspective of international art. I think within 10 years it will really be recognized as an art capital like New York or Paris or London."

With respect to Demo-Graphics, "how we will do it and when we will do it is an unknown," Pontbriand said. Last year there was talk of kicking it off in May, 2017, and running whatever will constitute that "it" through the end of July. These days, though, Pontbriand, fierce multi-tasker that she is, is sounding somewhat cautious.

"The [museum] we have to deliver for May, 2017, is right now at the front of my mind," she said, "whereas Demo-Graphics is at the back of my mind. But I have enough experience to say: 'In life, you never know what will come up,' and it's possible that Demo-Graphics happens sooner rather than later. Or," she laughed, "later than sooner."

Asma Mahmood, a Mississauga, Ont., artist, gallery owner and former CCAI chair, isn't worried. Yes, Demo-Graphics organizers are "in the middle of many [planning] considerations," she acknowledged this week. But the intention remains to announce a plan for Demo-Graphics next month and to hold to hosting the event in spring 2017. Chantal Pontbriand "is a brilliant woman," Mahmood said, "and I feel this project is in very good hands."