Jean-François Bélisle

New director of the National Gallery of Canada will face big challenges.

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When the chatty, boyish-looking Jean-François Bélisle arrived in 2016 to lead Quebec’s Musée d’art de Joliette, he was dismayed to find staff meetings were held only once a month.

He quickly instituted one-hour weekly meetings with the heads of all departments and another round of meetings every three weeks with the No. 2 in each department so those employees could raise issues important to them away from their immediate bosses. Improved in-house communication was deemed necessary to make the art museum work better.

“At least here in Joliette, it has been very healthy and has led to a level of trust and confidence and team spirit that I’ve not seen anywhere else,” a confident Bélisle said in an interview with Galleries West.

Bélisle’s skills as a communicator – he speaks English, French and Italian – will certainly be tested July 17 when he starts his five-year term as director of the National Gallery of Canada, where staff morale plummeted in recent years under what some describe as an autocratic reign by Sasha Suda and her interim replacement, Angela Cassie.

Suda and Cassie, using high-priced outside consultants, attempted to make the gallery, its collections and its exhibitions more welcoming to Indigenous people and racialized minorities. Employees say they were never informed or consulted about how to implement what most considered to be laudable goals. 

They watched in shock as old hands were pushed out, the exhibition calendar dwindled and the shows that were staged were vetted and sometimes retooled by Indigenous bureaucrats. Meanwhile, gallery donors threatened to reduce their contributions and staff grumbling and resentment leaked out to journalists, along with internal memos from management. 

The gallery’s board of directors, headed by Françoise Lyon, a Montreal executive in the financial services industry, steadfastly supported Suda, and then Cassie, despite exclamations from the office of Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez that developments were “concerning.” Rodriguez never explicitly voiced what he saw as the problem, perhaps wary of potential political backlash should he been seen as interfering with the operations of a Crown corporation.

Still, Rodriguez and his staff were concerned enough to take a lead role in Bélisle’s hiring. “The interview process was, in great parts, with the minister’s office,” says Bélisle. There were no specific instructions as to what the government wanted from him, he said, although he thinks the board may make suggestions in coming days.

News of Bélisle’s appointment leaked out Wednesday morning on Radio-Canada, the CBC’s French-language arm. The leak put the gallery in a dilemma because it had planned to announce that day the short list for the annual Sobey Art Award. That news would have been buried by the bigger story of Bélisle’s appointment. The gallery hurriedly postponed the Sobey announcement for a few days.

Bélisle has signalled that Suda’s campaign of “decolonization” and “Indigenization” will continue, but not under those titles and in ways that staff and the public will better understand.

“I’m not necessarily a big believer in big words that scare people or sound more opaque than it needs to be,” he says.

Society is demanding that museums and galleries become more inclusive and sensitive to minorities, Bélisle acknowledges. “It’s going to keep on happening, and that is a good thing, but everything is in how it’s being done.”

Bélisle, who is popular with colleagues in the art world, likes to create exhibitions that, despite taking years to craft, open to the public when conditions are appropriate. This means identifying trends that will remain topical in coming years.

The Joliette museum, located an hour’s drive northeast of Montreal, crafted exhibitions about abused women that appeared when the #MeToo movement emerged. They also prepared exhibitions on racism that appeared during the public scandal over the 2020 death of Joyce Echaquan, an Atikamekw woman who was treated shamefully in a Joliette hospital.

“Saying I want to do a Rembrandt exhibition in 2027 at the National Gallery wouldn’t make any sense,” says Bélisle. “It would be devoid of context. It’s not about twisting things to make them meaningful for the context. It’s about finding the right exhibition for the context.”

Oh, yes, Rembrandt. The National Gallery showed the world what its decolonization and Indigenization policies were all about in a Rembrandt exhibition in 2021. Text panels throughout the show repeatedly decried, like a Greek chorus, the so-called Dutch Golden Age as a time of racism and slavery. Rembrandt was portrayed as complicit for selling his art to unethical entrepreneurs.

Bélisle has two decades of experience working for various arts organizations in Canada and Europe, including Canada’s Contemporary Art Galleries Association and the Canadian art foundation Arsenal, which he cofounded, as well as UNESCO in Paris and various NGOs, universities and art publications in eight countries. He has organized more than 100 exhibitions in Canada and abroad. He is the go-to guy to hire for a quick dose of energy.

But Bélisle lacks that big-gallery background that is usually a prerequisite for directors of the National Gallery. Suda was pulled from the curatorial ranks of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and her three predecessors headed big museums in Montreal. Bélisle has a master’s degree in art history from Concordia University in Montreal but, unlike some of his predecessors, no PhD.

Before my interview with Bélisle, a National Gallery curator suggested asking him how he would “stabilize the gallery and motivate the staff to believe in senior management.”

The question was posed. Bélisle replied it was the most interesting query he had faced during a day of media interviews.

“That’s a big question. That has everything to do with dialogue. Everything comes back to connecting with the guy or the girl in the next office. For there to be trust, there must be respect. For there to be respect, there needs to be a healthy working relationship. That means increased communication.”

Expectations are high among gallery employees that better days are coming. Does Bélisle find those high expectations daunting? 

“Not really,” he replies. “I’m a very transparent and honest person and I think people appreciate that, which is wonderful.”

Bélisle will step into the fire from the day he arrives. In mid-July, Montreal-based Deanna Bowen, an interdisciplinary artist who received a 2020 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, is to mount a giant banner on an exterior wall of the gallery. The banner reportedly links the Group of Seven with white supremacy. Staff fear public outrage over this treatment of Canada’s most beloved artists. Is Bowen’s assertion truth, artistic freedom, flawed research or heresy? How Bélisle handles this situation will tell the world where the National Gallery is headed. ■

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