From the Editor - November 29, 2022 Issue

November 28, 2022

9:30 PM

Western Canada's art magazine since 2002

Portia Priegert

From the Editor

With its recent purge of four senior staff, you might think the National Gallery of Canada is borrowing a page from Elon Musk’s management manual – minus the kitchen sink.

News spread after Greg Hill, senior Indigenous curator, posted about his forced departure 11 days ago on Instagram. Kate Taylor, the visual arts writer at the Globe and Mail, broke the story that day, fuelling gossip and speculation. Why would a caretaker director, interim Angela Cassie, who joined the Ottawa institution only last year, cut loose both Hill, and deputy director Kitty Scott, the gallery’s respected chief curator, the first woman to hold the post on a permanent basis, even as the gallery works to build inclusivity? The optics are terrible, as are the potential impacts on programming.

As I worked to match the Globe’s story, Paul Gessell, our regular Ottawa writer, began seeking reaction. The gallery, thus far, has not commented publicly, citing a need for confidentiality, although board chair Françoise Lyon has expressed confidence in Cassie and her team. Paul reported on the first expression of concern from the office of Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, followed the next day with a story that centred the observations of artist AA Bronson, who had worked closely with the gallery on the recent General Idea retrospective. Then came my quick update that the director’s job had been posted. Last Friday, Paul wrote about Mohawk artist Shelley Niro’s worries about her upcoming show. Late that same day, I heard from seven former senior employees – some of Canada’s leading art guardians – who took the unusual step of raising other concerns in a joint letter to Rodriguez. Finally, Paul wrote an opinion piece over the weekend that includes initial revelations from a cache of internal gallery documents leaked to Galleries West.

These stories have been shared thousands of times, and we’ve had many notes of thanks for our sustained coverage in the face of tepid interest from mainstream news outlets. While Paul and I, as former reporters for the Ottawa bureau of Canadian Press, are glad to put our skills to use to help people understand what is happening, it is challenging for a small magazine like Galleries West to report on a developing story in a sustained way. News is expensive to cover because it takes time – many interviews and other research is required to expose important information. And our editorial operations are dependent on part-time freelancers with bills to pay, like everyone else.

We know there are other important angles to explore as this story develops. For one thing, we’ve been studying leaked documents that shed light on the cost of private contractors in senior management positions. But we need to verify this information – no small task – and understand its implications, before we publish it.

Given the lack of sustained coverage of cultural news in the mainstream media and the void in specialized visual arts coverage following the implosion of Canadian Art magazine, it would be wonderful if those who care about the visual arts in this country – and have the means – could step up to create some sort of fund that independent arts journalists could access to support meaningful reporting and investigations. Articles produced through such a fund could help build public awareness about important aspects of the visual arts ecosystem. But enough on that for now. For the time being, any contributions through our online donations system will be directed to covering this story.

However you feel about recent developments at the National Gallery, I encourage you to consider exercising your democratic right to express your views in a letter to the chair of the board that oversees the gallery, as well as the heritage minister, who operates at arm’s length from the gallery, a Crown corporation. Let’s hope a new director with strong leadership skills can be hired soon to stabilize the situation and empower an important and engaging curatorial program, while moving forward on inclusivity initiatives.

Now, on to the rest of this issue of Galleries West. I hope you enjoy our story about an impressive show at the Ottawa Art Gallery by Frances-Anne Johnston, unjustly relegated to historical obscurity by a male-dominated art world. We also look at a little-known Vancouver musicologist who fled the Nazis and then helped preserve Indigenous songs on the Northwest Coast. You can also read reviews of shows by Stanley Wany, Tobias Wong, Julie Tremble and four important artists of Japanese ancestry.

Looking ahead, we are working on our annual art books issue for early December, and then our last issue of the year, which includes a variety of longer features and year-end pieces for holiday reading. And one last bit of in-house news: We’re pleased to welcome a new intern, Calgary-based Joe Paris, a bilingual journalism-school graduate with an interest in art and culture. We are grateful to the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association for partially funding this position.

Until next time,