Year-End Views: National

How far has the pendulum swung for women in Canadian galleries?

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Back in 1989, an anonymous group of feminist artists called the Guerilla Girls famously asked: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?”

The line, printed on the American group’s first colour poster, came after their so-called “weenie count” in response to the overwhelming number of female nudes on display at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

These days, there are still few historical exhibitions of women artists, but many more women are participating in contemporary shows. In the coming year, Canadian galleries will show artists as varied as Emily Carr, Shuvinai Ashoona and Divya Mehra. There's also Rebellious: Alberta Women Artists in the 1980s, a group show at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton until Feb. 17. 

But exhibitions are not the only route for women into Canada’s major art museums. Women are increasingly becoming directors of those museums. At some institutions, a majority of senior positions are held by women.

Think of the National Gallery of Canada, with director Sasha Suda and recently appointed chief curator Kitty Scott, or the Art Gallery of Alberta, where Catherine Crowston is both director and chief curator. Senior male curators on staff are becoming almost as rare as exhibitions by female Renaissance painters. 

Kathleen Bartels led the Vancouver Art Gallery for 18 years until her departure earlier this year; Daina Augaitis is now the interim director. At the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, where Gregory Burke stepped down earlier this year, Lynn McMaster is now interim director. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has been headed by Nathalie Bondil since 2007.

Even in galleries with male directors, curators are often mainly women. A 2017 study by Michael Maranda, assistant curator at the Art Gallery of York University in Greater Toronto, found that among galleries funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, plus the National Gallery, 70 per cent of directors and senior curators were women.

Is this a badly needed rebalancing of gender bias in Canadian cultural institutions? Or has the pendulum swung so far that male perspectives are disappearing?

I asked those questions of a dozen artists, curators and art academics. Many, even some normally chatty people, did not return emails. Others offered comments, but did not address the questions asked.

The Canadian art world never seems shy about saying we need more diversity, whether that be women, Indigenous voices or visible minorities. But what about gender balance and male voices? Is such a discussion taboo?

Michael Boss is an artist and art educator who has held senior positions at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in Brandon. Boss indicated discomfort with the questions and answered by commenting about his many years working happily in academia and galleries for female bosses. 

The gender of his various supervisors “made no difference to me.” People should be hired regardless of gender and only because they are “the best applicant” for the job, he said.

Ryan Rice is an Indigenous (Mohawk) curator who has worked at several galleries in the United States and Canada, including the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. He now is an associate dean at OCAD University in Toronto. For Rice, the issue is not gender but other forms of diversity.

“A white female director of a large institution is the equivalent of a white male leading a larger institution,” says Rice.

“The studies of imbalance in diversity are clearly researched in recent years, and this is reflected in their exhibitions, programs and investments.” Diversity in institutions is also hindered by the fact that donors “like people like them, male or female.” 

Diana Nemiroff is a former curator at the National Gallery. There, she was a trailblazer in treating Indigenous art as “fine art” rather than “ethnocultural art.” She is currently writing a book about the first three women to serve as directors of the National Gallery. The book was started long before Suda was appointed in 2019 as the fourth female director.

“When I was curator at the (National Gallery) from 1984 to 2005, there were several women in senior curatorial positions,” says Nemiroff. “Women in directors’ positions at major museums are still unusual, although the situation is slowly improving.”

Nemiroff does not see the rise of women directors and senior curators as a rebalancing: “It simply shows how many well-qualified, competent women are working in the profession.”

A recent study reveals that large galleries, even with overwhelmingly female curators, still tend to mount far more solo shows by living male artists than female ones. Smaller galleries tend to be friendlier to female artists.

The findings of the study by Anne Dymond, an art history professor at the University of Lethbridge, are contained in her 2019 book Diversity Counts: Gender, Race and Representation in Canadian Art Galleries.

Dymond found that the larger the art institution, the less likely they were to have gender equality in exhibitions. Such large, influential institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts had less than 30 per cent of solo shows by living female artists from 2000 to 2009.

“Simply having female curators will not, as is often assumed, solve the problems around representation,” writes Dymond.

Why is that? Dymond suggests some female curators lack the confidence to organize solo shows of female artists less famous than male ones, and that galleries mounting exhibitions from their own collections are drawing upon largely male works. And, as Ryan Rice suggested, galleries may play up to donors and political masters by having exhibitions of more assuredly bankable male artists.

Still, some notable exhibitions by female artists are planned for Western Canada next year.

The Art Gallery of Alberta has several exhibitions involving female artists, including The Ghosts of the Mink Make a Big Spirit by Métis artist Halie Finney, who is based in Edmonton. Kerrie Sanderson, marketing and publicity assistant, notes that “all AGA originated shows within the gallery are curated by females.” 

The Glenbow in Calgary will have a show by enigmatic Chicago street photographer Vivian Maier, In Her Own Hands, starting Feb. 8. Her work was discovered in 2007 at an auction house and led to a fascinating documentary film. The Glenbow is also mounting a solo show of fantasy drawings by Inuit artist Shuvinai Ashoona. Her exhibition, Mapping Worlds, will also appear next year at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Meanwhile, Contemporary Calgary has just announced it will host an exhibition by Yoko Ono next summer.

The Vancouver Art Gallery’s blockbuster photography show by American artist Cindy Sherman continues until March 8, and its recently opened Rapture, Rhythm and the Tree of Life: Emily Carr and Her Female Contemporaries is on view until June 28.

Regina's MacKenzie Art Gallery, headed by Anthony Kiendl, will host a show by Winnipeg’s Divya Mehra next year that will include her inflatable Taj Mahal. 

The Remai Modern will have several solo exhibitions by women next year, says communications manager Stephanie McKay. Among them is a solo show by Toronto video and performance artist Bridget Moser that opens March 17. Moser uses humour to explore themes of futility and failure, confusion and loneliness, as well as the general awkwardness of being alive.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery, headed Stephen Borys, has several exhibitions of women artists, curated by women, planned for the coming year, including the inaugural exhibition, INUA, at the gallery’s new Inuit Art Centre. This month new exhibitions developed by first-time female curators open in the satellite gallery, WAG@The Park. “Nearly all of the WAG’s curatorial staff is female,” says engagement officer Amber O’Reilly. ■

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