Great article in the Globe this weekend on the search for a new head of the Royal Ontario Museum. Written by Chris Nuttall-Smith, who was honoured at the National Magazine Awards last year for his Toronto Life feature about the ROM's problems, most of of the article focuses on ideas of what exhibitions should be, or how they should be designed. But there was some mention of access issues, to wit:
Dr. Colin Saldanha, a ROM trustee, said he doesn't care which field the winning candidate comes from. He wants his board colleagues to “think outside the box,” he said. “Nobody should be excluded. We want to see people presenting a vision, whoever you are. If your vision fits in with the vision of the board's strategic plan, then that's the kind of person that we need to hire.”
Saldanha, who runs a family practice clinic in Mississauga, said that many of the patients he sees – new immigrants who live outside the city core – haven't even heard of the ROM, much less visited it. He wants a new director who will make the museum, which charges $22 for adult admission, more affordable, and will reach out to ethnic and religious groups around the region. His hope: “A redefining of the term and concept of the museum,” he said. “It should be a centre for innovation, information, technology, all combined together within the grasp of the common man, the average Ontarian,” he said.
I do hope Dr. Saldanha finds some friends on the board who share his views.
Image of outgoing ROM head William Thorsell from the Globe and Mail
Monday, January 25, 2010
Recommended Read: Chris Nuttall-Smith in the Globe on hunt for a new head of the ROM
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Shows for the Holidays: Blockbuster ifs and buts
My biweekly gallery column for the National Post focuses today on a few shows to see over the holidays--mainly last-chance-to-view blockbusters at some of our major museums. I enjoyed these shows, a few worthy "if, buts" notwithstanding. Here's an excerpt:
Vanity Fair Portraits at the Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queen's Park
Many museums were created to house ancient artifacts. So given the multiple title closures and mass layoffs at magazine megacorp Conde Nast this year, one wonders if this museum show focused on Vanity Fair -- one of its centrepiece titles -- merely seals the company's status as analog-media dinosaur. Indeed, brand booster-ism throughout the show, both in text and image, produces warranted skepticism of the exhibition's artistic merit. Nevertheless, there's a lot of lovely photographs here, ones that are all the more appealing for the famed-yet-familiar faces they detail. Films of glamour-photogs Edward Steichen and Annie Leibovitz at work are also worthwhile, showing it takes a village to raise a Young Hollywood issue. Ultimately, what resounds is the way that different photographers make celebrities their own. Nan Goldin's commissioned photograph of a young Rob Lowe, for instance, is almost indistinguishable from Goldin's famed art pics of lithe, party-friendly pals, while Helmut Newton's severe black-and-whites hone in on fetishes of sex and power no matter who his sitter is. To Jan. 3. (Closed Dec. 25.)
Image of the Vanity Fair show at the ROM from Seems Artless
Monday, August 3, 2009
The Royal Ontario Museum and Caribana: A Lost Opportunity?
Caribana was the toast of Toronto this week, and I was pleased to see Eye run an article on the Caribana art exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. Critical discussion of this exhibition is long overdue—even if Eye ultimately shies away from the toughest issues it presents.
Basically, I went to last year's Caribana exhibit at the ROM and found it a bit of a troubling experience.
What this exhibit felt like to me—despite my fervent desire to see more artists of colour in our cultural institutions—was a cheap-and-dirty way for the ROM to draw a bit of Caribana's considerable audience, as well as to argue something along the lines of "Look! We are actually reflecting the diversity of Ontario."
To my mind, if the ROM was serious about honoring and including the traditions of Caribana and its communities, they would do an exhibition on the most stunning, virtuosic and culturally entrenched of Caribana's art forms—costume design, dance and music. The museum wouldn't focus on an cultural form—drawing and painting—that, despite the related virtuosity many artists of colour possess, has merely a marginal presence in Caribana and its communities. (This is particularly arguable in light of the fact that the ROM is a general historical and cultural museum, not an art gallery.)
So here's where that cheapness comes in: To do an exhibition on these central cultural forms of Caribana (and, by extension, of Caribbean communities in Ontario) would take a lot of primary research (or research collaboration) to get right—in other words, lots of organizational and curatorial-spending dollars to consult with musicologists, textile historians, dance experts and community representatives. A show on costume, music and dance would also take a lot more installation-design investment in the form of vitrines, speakers, TVs, platforms, mannequins and so on.
The current Caribana exhibition formula, in contrast, calls on the ROM to pay just one curator—artist Joan Butterfield, whose intentions I suspect are actually quite fine ones—and install mainly paintings in a quick, low-cost, around-the-room-at-eye-level format.
What ends up being sad about this exhibition formula (both in principle and in practice) is that it does little to reflect the vibrancy and reality of Caribbean culture and community in Ontario—while purporting to do just that.
Lowering the bar further, as Eye notes, is confusion encouraged by this exhibit around the complexities of Caribbean culture. The exhibition is actually co-presented by, as Eye reports, "The Association of African-Canadian Artists, whose main goal is to “introduce [African-Canadian] art into the mainstream Canadian market.”" Whether this can thereby qualify as specifically Caribbean-related art is therefore quite debatable.
Where Eye falls down is identifying a problem that it is capable of responding to, but doesn't: "While the exhibit has received much positive press, there have yet to be any reviews." Though I sometimes quibble with Eye arts editor David Balzer's critical judgments, he is, overall, a pretty ace viz-art reviewer. The fact that he chose for Eye to cover this exhibition with a question-posing feature written by a general freelancer, Rea McNamara—rather than delve critically into it himself—is telling of the difficult morass of issues that the ROM and this exhibit disappoint on overall.
Of course, I feel no small degree of trepidation in broaching these issues (at Eye's prompting) myself. I hope I have been able to underline that while I'm very supportive of seeing more artists and communities of colour reflected our cultural institutions, the doublespeak, obfuscation and institutional laziness surrounding this exhibition is a really bad means by which to go about achieving that goal.
What do you think?
Image by Gadjo Sevilla from BlogTO
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Out Today: Finding Spirituality in.... Yorkville? Yep.
Earlier this week on Twitter, Toronto critic Marissa Neave alerted me to UK writer Robert Fisk's a dead-on critical review of the Royal Ontario Museum's much-vaunted Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition.
Fisk does well to pull apart the layers of marketing and politics around the show, as well as point out the timid Canadian sensibility that made it all possible. The article is most definitely worth a read. Having seen the show myself, I agree with him, especially on the lack of delivery on "how these artifacts bind together three religions." This theme, as he indicates, is confined to the final room.
In any case, the scrolls show—as well as an unexpected "Save Yorkville" poster campaign for architectural heritage activism—got me thinking about the things we hold sacred, whether it's a book, a building, or being Canuckly accomodating. So for this weekend's gallery column in the National Post, I sought out other shows in the Mink Mile area that might speak to spiritual concerns. Here's an excerpt:
“God is in the details” would seem to be the theme at Kinsman Robinson, with displays of hyper-realist painters Tom Forrestall and Michael French gracing gallery walls. Forrestall, based in Nova Scotia, has a 50-year track record for rendering exquisitely detailed still lifes and landscapes, often in the tricky medium of egg tempera. While earlier works, like 1971’s Burning Field, impress with a rural-Gothic feel, Forrestall’s more recent paintings use webs of twisting threads and isolated placements of striped, shooting arrows to more strongly suggest a process of spiritual searching and connection. For his part, Michael French, a renowned B.C.-born realist now based in Mexico, is represented largely by scenes of water. His oil-on-canvas depictions range from Alberta’s Bow Falls to San Miguel’s cobblestoned vistas. Through it all, French handles elements of light and nature with extreme delicacy. This art isn’t going to revolutionize the world, but it will remind one of the world’s finer aspects. Through summer.
Image of Tom Forrestall's The Entangled Obstacle 2008 from Kinsman Robinson