As tax breaks drive art donations, Canada’s public galleries overflow with more works than they could ever show – Canadian Reviews
August 28, 2024
The print and drawing centre at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto houses more than 100,000 items in a two-storey, climate-controlled vault. With a bit of reorganizing of the shelves and boxes, there would be room for more – just. “It’s a Tetris game,” says chief curator Julian Cox, who also oversees the 12,000 paintings and sculptures stored in the sub-basement vaults below.
Only about 2 per cent of these treasures are on public display, but the AGO acquires new art aggressively. It subsumed the Thomson family’s 2,000-piece collection of Canadian and European art in 2008, arranged the purchase of 522 photographs by Diane Arbus in 2016, and in 2019 acquired a 3,500-piece collection of Caribbean photography. (The Globe and Mail is owned by Woodbridge, the investment arm of the Thomson family.)
To show more modern art, it is now building a 3,700-square-metre extension at the back of its Dundas Street headquarters, a space that will be almost entirely devoted to exhibition galleries. This will be the third AGO expansion in three decades.
An art museum’s role is to preserve the art of the past and collect the art of the present. It’s not doing its job if it’s not regularly acquiring both historical and contemporary art, not only to display but also for research purposes.
