A magnificent Canadian institution is in trouble, and its facade can no longer contain the mess.
The National Gallery of Canada stands by the Ottawa River – a sparkling glass and granite cathedral-like edifice. The NGC has one of the world’s finest collections of Indigenous and Canadian art, as well as masterworks by superstars of European art – Picasso, Rembrandt, Van Gogh. Outside, a massive, protective bronze spider titled Maman by artist Louise Bourgeois welcomes visitors. Inside, ascending the ramp to the glassed-in Great Hall, they are greeted by two enormous banners that declare “Everything is connected.”
But behind the scenes, there are reports of chaos: high-profile staff dismissals, lists of vacant positions, a toxic environment, ankle-level staff morale, conflicts in personality, and huge uncertainty in the midst of a necessary disruptive drive at the institution to right historical wrongs and install work by Indigenous artists alongside their non-Indigenous peers.
The four recent dismissals include Kitty Scott, who was the NGC’s chief curator and deputy director; senior curator of Indigenous Art Greg A. Hill, who had been with the institution for 22 years; the director of conservation and research; and the communications manager.
Matters that are usually behind-the-scenes are on display for all to see. Former staffers have written to Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, warning of “a high degree of internal uncertainty and instability.” Philanthropists are changing donation plans.
The cracks are showing. Not just in media reports. But inside the gallery itself.
Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome) is a marquee three-channel video installation by Toronto-based artist Michèle Pearson Clarke that explores Black identity and the Black experience, particularly in Canada. It is a fascinating piece. But when I visited the NGC last weekend, only two of the three channels were working. With one-third of the artwork out of commission, it was impossible to experience it as the artist intended.
On wall panels elsewhere, I encountered several typos, including one in the main didactic of the artist Emily Carr. I can’t say that the improperly working technology and missing letters and punctuation are the direct result of the vacant positions, the unhappy staff, the toxic environment. But I can say that in a gallery of this calibre, it is highly unusual. And with all those people gone, one might already wonder: Who is keeping the lights on? Or the video installations working properly?
Everything is connected.
Things – important things – seem to be falling through the cracks.
One could dismiss these as minor quibbles. But the National Gallery is a vital and beloved institution. I remember going through its European galleries with children who until then had only seen photographs of work by Van Gogh and Monet, and witnessing their awe. Here were paintings they knew, right there – the actual canvases touched by the masters! In Canada. Wow.
I imagine the delight of a Haida child visiting and seeing the works of Charles Edenshaw there.
Back to Emily Carr, whose paintings documented Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast, and the rich nature of the place, vulnerable to man’s greed. Typo aside, I take great issue with the panel that introduces this great Canadian modernist to visitors. Ms. Carr was admired by the Group of Seven, won a Governor General’s Award for literature, and made paintings that provoke oohs-and-ahs nearly 100 years after she first exhibited at the National Gallery. And yet, this is how her description begins: “Emily Carr is perhaps more famous in the popular imagination as an eccentric loner than as one of Canada’s most soulful artists.”
Seriously? That may – may – have been true at one point, decades ago perhaps. But I do not believe when you mention Ms. Carr the first thing that comes to mind is that she never married, that she sketched in the woods alone in a caravan she called the “Elephant,” or that she had a pet monkey named Woo. All true – but hardly an appropriate introduction.
This is an art museum that is engaged in decolonization, and defending itself with a change-is-hard narrative when called on the carpet for the human resources mess going on there – the inference being that there is a resistance to necessary progress from certain elements of the old guard. The gallery touts its efforts as correcting wrongs against artists marginalized by the art-world establishment. Well, that had better include women. And the NGC needs to rethink how Canada’s most famous female artist is depicted.
Sounds like there is a lot of rethinking that needs to happen there. Period.
Marsha Lederman