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One of Canada’s fiercest fights last year took place not on a hockey rink, but inside the majestic facades of its national art museum.
directors of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa they have come and gone. The main curators have been fired. Sponsors have stopped donating. Public clashes have broken out.
Museums across the West are going through an identity crisis, struggling with their roles in society and their colonial heritage. But as Canada has begun to reckon intensely in recent years with the ugly chapters of its history with indigenous peoples, its museums have gone further than most to transform themselves: dismantling galleries, rethinking their exhibitions, reshaping the stories they tell and who has the power to do it. tell them, in a process called “decolonization.”
This transformation has generated criticism that culture is becoming politicized and has turned several museums into sources of tension. The tensions might have been limited to the rarefied world of museums if they had not reached the country’s most prominent: the National Gallery, almost as old as Canada itself, whose identity and national narrative it has helped shape.
“We’ve taken a big step forward and a step back, and we’ve learned a lot,” he said. Jean-François Bélisle, recently named the new director of the National Gallery by the Canadian government. “We are one of the few countries that has gone this far in that thought process.”
In an interview at the museum, Bélisle tended to avoid the word “decolonization,” a term he described as “very loaded,” but said it was necessary to confront the roots of museums.
“To some extent, all museums are colonial constructions, and some people have argued that true decolonization would require closing each and every museum because they were born out of a colonial approach to others,” Bélisle added. She argues, instead, that change can come from questioning assumptions, acknowledging biases, and engaging in true dialogue.
Not everyone agrees with the direction of the National Gallery.
“Too many museums in Canada have changed their mandate and are no longer responsible for transmitting culture and caring for collections,” said Marc Mayer, former director of the National Gallery. “Their job is not to decolonize or make Canada a less racist place.”
Mr. Mayer and others critics pointed out a current exhibition prepared before Mr. Bélisle’s arrival, “Black Canadians (after Cooke)”, as an example of the politicization of the National Gallery. The exhibition, by artist Deanna Bowen, juxtaposes a drawing by Lawren Harris, a famous 20th-century Canadian painter, with 17 giant panels depicting anti-Black racism. The panels are placed on the south façade of the museum in one of the largest installations ever completed.
Harris was a leader of the Group of Seven, a group of 20th-century Canadian landscape painters credited with developing a national artistic identity. The current exhibition, Mayer said, unfairly attempts to link the Group of Seven, all of whom were white men, to the racism of the time and devalue an important part of Canada’s artistic heritage.
Steven Loftvice-president of the Department of Indigenous Customs and Decolonization at the National Gallery, established last year as part of a five-year strategic plandismissed the criticism and noted that the National Gallery has and preserves the largest collection of works from the Group of Seven in the world.
“These changes are happening everywhere, not just us,” Loft said of decolonization. “And yes, there is a backlash. There are people who simply refuse to give up that power.”
Much of the museum world has been debating how to reform institutions closely tied to Western colonialism.
“Now all the values of museums are being questioned,” he said. Yves Bergeronmuseum expert from the University of Quebec in Montreal.
In Europe, the decolonization of museums has mainly meant beginning to repatriate works of art looted from former colonies. But in Canada, whose colonial history involved taking land from indigenous people and suppressing their cultures, museums are changing from within, Bergeron said.
In the 19th century, Canadian authorities discovered that museums could play a nation-building role in turning former British colonies into an independent nation, Bergeron said. Science museums were first established to help stimulate economic development. Then art museums (including the National Gallery, created in 1880, about a dozen years after the country was formed in 1867) told people who they could be.
“The National Gallery served to create a national identity by showing that there were Canadian artists and that Canadian art existed,” Bergeron said.
The problem was that the national identity it fostered had one glaring omission: it excluded the indigenous inhabitants whom successive Canadian governments attempted to marginalize from both the land and history. For most of its history, the National Gallery, the only museum whose mandate is to show the best of Canadian art to the country and the world: exhibited works by Anglo-Canadian, French-Canadian and European artists, but not by indigenous artists.
Until a couple of decades ago, indigenous art was not considered fine art but rather ethnography and was relegated to the immediate sphere. Canadian Museum of History.
Then, a series of crises triggered the beginning of Canada’s adaptation to its colonial past, a process that spread to the art world.
“In Canada, the decolonization of museums took off with the growing awareness around First Nations,” he said Michelle Rivetvice-president of the board of directors of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights.
The National Gallery’s Indigenous art collection two decades ago was “intentionally inadequate,” said Michael Audain, a prominent Vancouver-based homebuilder and one of Canada’s largest art collectors, whose foundation stopped donating to the Gallery. National due to unrest.
“You get the impression that the history of Canadian art began with the primarily religious art of the ancien regime of Quebec,” Audain said, referring to a period spanning the 17th and 18th centuries. “I believe that to fairly represent the history of art creation in Canada you have to start with the original people of the land.”
With Mr Audain’s backing, the National Gallery created the position of curator of indigenous art in 2007 and began building a significant collection of traditional and contemporary indigenous art. In 2017, she merged works by indigenous and Canadian artists in the same gallery.
“The idea was to make it official and permanent so that we could always tell the story of art-making in Canada in a way that consistently included Indigenous art,” said Mayer, who was the museum’s director at the time.
Other museums are remaking galleries focused on indigenous culture, including the Royal Ontario Museumand the Royal British Columbia Museumwhere several wings were closed last summer with a sign explaining that conversations were “being held with communities across British Columbia about what the future of the museum could look like.”
Tensions arose in several institutions, including the Royal British Columbia Museumhe Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, over who would ultimately have the power to make changes. At the National Gallery, four senior officials were sacked last year after what opposing sides described as disagreements about how transform the museum; the director then, Angela Cassiedid not respond to interview requests.
The inclusion of Indigenous art at the heart of the National Gallery was an important step, Loft said. But Indigenous individuals must make decisions at the National Gallery and other museums to complete the decolonization process, he said.
“Now reconciliation and decolonization have to be at the center of fundamental, foundational change,” said Loft, of Mohawk Jewish descent.
Bélisle, the new director of the National Gallery, earned a reputation for skillfully handling difficult works of art in the Joliette Art Museumnear Montreal, where he had been director for the past seven years.
In 2020, the Joliette museum struggled with how to display 27 highly prized century-old bronze statues donated by a major collector with the condition that they are exhibited within a certain period.
Bélisle said some had “very problematic depictions of indigenous people,” including a sculpture heroically showing a French colonial soldier standing next to a half-naked indigenous warrior. Mr. Bélisle’s alternative solution was “Looks in dialogue” – The pieces were accompanied by video commentary from three indigenous leaders and displayed in a plywood house created by a contemporary artist.
“There was no point in simply celebrating aesthetic qualities,” Bélisle said. “We had to come up with some kind of mechanism to further contextualize and make viewers think about the fact that what they’re seeing is a sociological construct that made sense back then, but today we’re in a different society.”