Chantal Pontbriand, former CEO and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, at the new MoCA building, on March 29 2016.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
It was a rested-looking Chantal Pontbriand, wearing a stylish, sleeveless summery frock, who strolled into a Toronto museum restaurant the other day for what was likely her first on-the-record conversation since leaving the Museum of Contemporary Art as its CEO in late June.
The departure shook the local and national art world, coming as it did less than three months after Pontbriand, 64, had presented an ambitious, enthusiastically received plan to recast MoCA, formerly the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, as a "new museum for the 21st century."
It was a shock, too, because few arts mavens are as heavily credentialed as the Quebec-born Pontbriand. She'd curated Canada's contribution to the 1990 Venice Biennale, co-founded Parachute magazine in 1975 and the Festival international de nouvelle danse seven years later, worked at the Tate Modern in London and the Sorbonne in Paris and three years ago received a Governor-General's Award for excellence in visual and media arts. She's also a curator, critic and author: at our meeting, she handed me a copy of one of her most recent books, 2013's The Contemporary, The Common: Art in a Globalizing World, in which she'd inserted Post-its for two essays she thought I should read. One was titled The Tectonic Plates of the Art World, the other Magna Carta: Mapping Moments in 2007.
When, in late October last year, MoCCA, as it was still named, announced Pontbriand as its first-ever CEO, the news was positively received. True, Pontbriand didn't have a deep connection to Toronto; nor did MoCCA, which had become a semi-autonomous charity only in August 2012, have the rich history (and deep-pocketed patronage) of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Nevertheless, the marriage was one of great expectations, a triumph of the imagination and hailed for its boldness.
You'd think then that the divorce announced last month would have soured Pontbriand on Toronto and sent her packing back to Montreal where she and her artist husband Raymond Gervais, 70, have a large condominium. But, in fact, she's staying put here, in the High Park apartment she first occupied in January, and given the landlord no leave-date.
"I'm at the stage of an investigation," she remarked between sips of a cappuccino. "I'm starting to understand a lot better how things work in Toronto, how this province works, how the new [Justin Trudeau] government works, so there's a lot to investigate."
To her eyes, "Toronto now is a bit like London was in 2000, just at the start of Tate Modern which, for the international art world, made it an international city. London in the 1980s and '90s certainly was not the city we know today."
She said she's keen to "hunker down [in Toronto]" but doesn't "know how yet. I've just gotten to the point now that I know I want to do things here. I've been encouraged by many to do so. And because of that support, I feel confident that something will happen. I just needed these last few weeks to gain some energy."
Of course, Pontbriand didn't spill the beans on her departure from MoCA, a non-disclosure agreement with the museum board being part of her severance package. She did allow that the resignation was "not a surprise. It was a situation that developed over several months and intensified itself toward the end of May, the beginning of June, and it came to a critical point where, well, all I can say is, I really tried… I believed what I'd presented [at the March 29 media conference attended by Toronto Mayor John Tory] was realistic and important."
When I outlined to Pontbriand one of the scenarios I'd heard explaining the split between herself and the board, she offered a mild demurral: "It was not as simple as that. It's quite a complex situation … and that's all I can say."
One MoCA situation that does remain somewhat up in the air is the institution's inaugural program/exhibition, Odyssey 2040. On Mar. 29 Pontbriand said she would oversee its implementation and installation in MoCA's new home in a renovated century-old former factory which, at that time at least, was scheduled to open May 2017. Today, there's still chatter that Odyssey 2040 (2040 being the year the Greater Toronto Area is projected to have a population of 10 million) remains "on the books" and that Pontbriand can have some involvement with it.
At the time of our interview, Pontbriand acknowledged she had yet to meet with Terry Nicholson to discuss the situation. He's the retired city arts bureaucrat, 65, who was named MoCA interim CEO July 6. "In my mind, it's not happening," she said. Not happening at the present time, she was asked. Or it may not happen at all? "Well, does it make sense?" she replied. "Frankly, I don't know how to answer that question."
One situation that has been resolved or at least punted into the future is Demo-graphics. The large, multidisciplinary biennale-style event was scheduled to debut next spring, with Pontbriand serving as curator and adviser to its organizer, Mississauga-based Canadian Community Arts Initiative. However, CCAI artistic director Asma Mahmood said she's downsizing the Demo-graphics idea in the short term in favour of a "more localized event" for the Peel and Halton regions west of Toronto. Called Zeitgeist, it's planned to run from late May through the end of July 2017. Pontbriand doesn't believe Demo-graphics is dead. In fact, for her, it's "totally necessary and possible" in establishing the GTA and environs as an international arts hub, even if it may take a few years for that to happen.
Despite the setbacks, Pontbriand explained she's keen to remain in the Ontario capital because "it's special." When she was publishing and editing Parachute (it ceased publication in 2007), she would dedicate one issue each year to a particular "city of emergence" – defined as a metropolis "we'd never thought could become a centre of international attention with regard to the development of contemporary art." Shanghai, Dubai, Mexico City, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Havana all got the treatment. And now Pontbriand is convinced Toronto, too, is "becoming a city of emergence," not least because "it is coinciding with all the world issues of the day – globalism, migration, the cross-feeding of cultures. With something like 220 languages being spoken here … it's the meeting place of the world."
It's also an international economic powerhouse "that can't be ignored any more," chockful of savvy art collectors, strong artists, brainy curators, "agents of change." "Toronto is moving and moving a lot faster than it thinks it's moving," she said. And "my hope at this time is to really contribute to the city and work on the planes I've explored in my life – making connections with the larger world, trying to understand the way the specificity of a local situation can speak to the larger world and maybe enhancing how the larger world can speak to us."
In other words, Pontbriand is looking for work. And that could take any number of forms, from shaping, say, a 10-year plan to transform the GTA into an international centre of culture, to being hired by a particular gallery or museum or serving as a high-level liaison among a panoply of cultural institutions.
"All the experience I gained, all the knowledge and know-how should be used in this city somehow. I'd be delighted for something to work out," she said. "It's not many people in Canada who can call up any museum director or important artists – I know so many by now – and make things happen quite fast. That's why I thought I was a good fit with MoCA because I was obliged to deliver, almost instantaneously, a museum in one year, more or less."