Annual Report 2008-2009 - National Gallery of Canada

“More than 800 works of art tour vast geographical terrain”
Sending the Collection
on the Road
Touring exhibitions reveal
the fruits of collaboration
Great art is meant to be seen; it ought not be tucked away
perpetually in vaults. That’s why 904 works of art from the
Gallery’s collection were loaned this year to institutions across
Canada through the National Gallery of Canada’s extensive On
TOUR travelling exhibitions program. Through thoughtful and
compelling exhibition designed by Gallery curators – often in
partnership with expert colleagues at sister institutions – the
best of the Gallery’s and CMCP’s contemporary, modern
Canadian, and historical collections have travelled to museum
visitors, students, scholars, artists and art historians across
the country, including those in small communities in remote
locations. This vital program is supported generously in part by
the Distinguished Patrons of the National Gallery of Canada
Foundation On Tour Endowment Fund.
The Drawings and Paintings of Daphne Odjig: A Retrospective Exhibition, co-organized with the Art Gallery of Sudbury, was
one of several popular tours in the Gallery’s 2008–09 travelling exhibitions program that were set in motion through fruitful
collaborations. The first major survey since 1985 of works by this eminent and groundbreaking First Nations artist, Daphne Odjig
has toured to the Kamloops Art Gallery in British Columbia and to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario,
and in summer 2009 will travel south to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico before closing its tour at
the Gallery in fall 2009. Joe Fafard, a sweeping retrospective of sculptural works by this iconic Saskatchewan artist, was organized
by the Gallery and the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina. After debuting in Ottawa, the exhibition travelled across Canada in
2008–09, to museums in Kleinburg, Halifax, Calgary and Winnipeg.
A dynamic exhibition of contemporary photographic work on tour in 2008–09, Nicolas Baier: Pareidolias, exemplifies the
most collaborative of projects, with curatorial expertise provided by the Musée régional de Rimouski and co-organized by the
Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
These major touring exhibitions alone encompass the broad range of artistic genres, styles and periods with innovative
Canadian sculpture, landmark Indigenous painting and drawing and monumental contemporary photography by some of
today’s finest Canadian artists. The diversity and the vast geographical terrain that these exhibitions cover on tour exemplifies
the raison d’être of the On TOUR program, which aims to share the Gallery’s collections with as
many Canadians as possible and to foster and strengthen relationships between cultural institutions
while deepening understanding of our dynamic artistic culture.
Two other notable – and fully booked – travelling exhibitions include The Prints of Albrecht
Dürer: Selections from the National Gallery of Canada, and The Painter as Printmaker:
Impressionist Prints from the National Gallery of Canada, which draws from the trove of
European prints and drawings in the Gallery’s permanent collection. Between them, these two
historical art exhibitions toured provinces in eastern, central and western Canada.
Daphne Odjig,
Genocide No. 1 (detail), 1971.
NGC
20 Highlights and Achievements