Guilt by Association, or, by Complicity?

Dear Charlie,

I am writing further to your letter that was circulated widely and is making its way through the national press – from Galleries West to the National Post.

You have a rich and illustrious history as a curator at the National Gallery, where you worked for fourty-seven years and achieved one of the most exceptional authorial positions to hold in the Canadian art world and to shape Canadian art history. There, you continued the work of your predecessors to build a place for Canadian art at a time when great art was believed to be only made in Europe and the USA, but not here. You have also thrown your critical weight behind the Group of Seven and their associates, including women artists, through many exhibitions both temporary and of the permanent collection. You have significantly added to the scholarship around their work, further building their historical standing by which they have reached the highest echelons of symbolic and monetary value in this country. You have enshrined their legacy and supported them through your life’s work, with your heart and mind and intellect, and this is part of your undisputed contribution.

But, today, I am writing to question the ‘facts’ that you feel you must defend, and the supposed ‘historical inaccuracies’ that you see in Deanna’s visual argument about white supremacy.

You defend as ‘little’ the sin of one of the ardent supporters of the Group of Seven, and you make out as ‘not guilty’ the other, because the association with Cooke’s reprehensible, racist essay was, as you suggest, accidental. But, how ‘not guilty’ were they really? Did Harris – who held truly uncommon social power, wealth and privilege in this country – object to his illustration appearing beside Cooke’s reprehensible words? If, with his standing, Harris had felt any concerns about his work being associated with such, would he not have expressed his disapproval? Did the members of the Group and their supporters ever make a place at the table for a person of colour or an Indigenous artist, other than to entertain Blackface or Redface at the Arts and Letters Club? Did Fairley ever retract his signature from the petition or declare he was wrong about that? Do you believe that he – whose pale portrait paintings pretty much demonstrate where his priorities were -- in his work at UofT taught anything other than a white history and canon when coursing on about Goethe? And what about the NGC, and all the other institutions that were creating Canadian art at that time? How long of a record is there of historical exclusion until the first artist of Black background was included in the collection and in an exhibition, or ever had a solo exhibition at the National Gallery? Would you be able to show that the NGC’s institutional priorities, historically, and for most of your tenure as well, were not solidly aligned with the white side of history when it comes to Black artists and artists of colour?

So, when you make a case against Deanna’s work on account of facts by minimizing the racially hierarchical disposition of Fairley, Harris and the other members of the canons, do you mean for us to forget the all around  bigger facts, the proverbial elephant in the room, the structurally consistent defense and heralding of a cohort of artists, staff, visitors, communities who were not Black, or artists of colour; artists who are the equivalent of the Rocky Mountains of history in the bowels and on view at institutions such as the NGC, that you also helped to cement?

Your essay and those who are now using it to glee-fully rally against the woke crowd, are trying to hide what is in plain sight: the monumental historical facts of exclusion, as well as the facts not of accidental association but of a very real historical complicity as they persisted in the cultural sector: the facts, if I am to put it kindly, of the unconscious bias of the work of the National Gallery, and of the National Gallery over most of its history; and hey, don’t let me get started, but of pretty much all of the cultural institutions borne out of and supporting the national interest over the course of the last century and still into the present?

Do we not all know this? What is the argument? Minimize as ‘little’ the sins of two elephantine Great Northern White Idols – whose works are in the private and public collections everywhere in the country -- by the hundreds; and, if you include those of the Group of Seven, by the thousands; and, if you add all their defences and celebrations mounted even as we speak – from buildings to exhibitions, from schoolbooks to scarves, from mugs to postage stamps and what-ever-else-not -- I have the feeling we’re talking hundreds of thousands, if not millions!? What needs defending: the white mountains that’ve been undisputedly built? And now is the time to draw the pen in defense of this – when the first work by a Black artist is out there, on the façade, front and centre at the NGC, looking at the NGC and its national history, outside in, so to speak?

Many of us directors and curators of cultural institutions, as well as artists in this country, share the excitement that Deanna Bowen is being shown by the NGC – and many other galleries and museums across the country! And that there is a place for an artist of Black background to be presented in a solo exhibition/project at the National Gallery! And that the NGC is a place to speak up about matters of race and its art history in the country!

Where some see the destruction of national icons, others are excited and proud of the creation of new ones (such as you had set out to do as well). I believe I share the opinion of many that our institutions, and the NGC as well, are on their way to addressing historical exclusion by including past, present, and new generations of artists, writers, curators and directors who are moving forward, telling stories of what the world looks like growing up on the other side of white fences, working on the front lines of artistic support structures such as galleries, museums, art schools, art magazines, art clubs, history books, exhibitions and collections – to build new histories otherwise -- as Deanna does.

And, as a venerated colleague, really, and as someone who stood on the right side of history when you fought against homophobia as the first President of the UofT Homophile Association, might you not also agree that racial bias, including that of the unconscious kind, is just not an option for running a national (or any other) institution today in a country such as Canada is, and has always been, i.e. diverse and fighting for equity on many essential fronts?

Sincerely,

Barbara Fischer

Director

Art Museum at UofT