Annual Report 2008-2009 - National Gallery of Canada

Key Expected Results
The Gallery’s highest-priority activities are its Collection and National
Outreach activities. It also recognizes the imperative of maintaining and
increasing self-generated revenues, effectively managing its human and
financial resources and cost-containment.
The following describes the results by Program Activity, based on the
key performance measures and operational priorities.
Program Activity 1:
collection
Acquisitions, Preservation and Research
Acquisitions
Priority: Acquire works of art of outstanding quality.
All acquisitions (100%) – both purchases and gifts – were made
in accordance with the Gallery’s Acquisitions Policy. Gallery
curators, supported by conservators, documented the quality
and historical importance of all works proposed for acquisition,
and detailed the contribution of those works to strengthening
the Gallery’s collection. External advisors to the Board’s
Acquisitions Committee confirmed the quality importance of
all acquisitions valued at $50,000 and over. Private contributions
from the NGC Foundation increased the Gallery’s acquisitions
budget.
As at 31 March 2009, 277 acquisitions were approved for
both the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) and the Canadian
Museum of Contemporary Photography (CMCP): 232 for the
Gallery (88 gifts and 144 purchases) and 45 for CMCP (3 gifts and
42 purchases).
The Gallery’s focus on strengthening its collection is primarily,
but not exclusively, on Canadian art. Unlike most
national art galleries, the NGC emphasizes collecting the work
of contemporary artists. The CMCP concentrates exclusively on
contemporary Canadian photographers.
In 2008–09, Gallery acquisitions highlights included:
Remarkable sets of watercolours by two British military members:
James Pattison Cockburn’s Views of the American and
English or Horse Shoe Falls of Niagara, an album containing 61
watercolours featuring a wide array of tonally rich viewpoints
of Niagara Falls, which was the artist’s gift to Lady Dalhousie in
1828; and John Elliott Woolford’s Sketches in Canada (1821),
which constitutes 97 exquisite watercolours recording a journey
the artist made that year with Governor General Lord
Dalhousie from Quebec City to Lake Superior. Other works
include Geoffrey Farmer’s Theatre of Cruelty, purchased with
funds from the Audain Endowment for Contemporary Canadian
Art; three works by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, purchased with
the support of the Mark McCain and Caro MacDonald
Photography Fund; Design for an Altar by Jacopo Zucchi, purchased
with support from the Marjorie and Gerald Bronfman
Drawing Acquisition Endowment and which will be featured in
the upcoming exhibition From Raphael to Carracci: The Art of
Papal Rome; and, Running Horses by Saskatchewan artist Joe
Fafard, purchased with the support of the Distinguished
Patrons of the National Gallery of Canada Foundation.
Purchases of two other important pieces of Early Canadian
Art, Robert Field’s 1810 portrait of prominent Haligonian
Rebecca Byles Almon, one of the British-born artist’s finest oil
portraits; and the highly accomplished watercolour, Valley of
the Don, Toronto (1857), by Lady Georgiana Eyre, a significant
addition to the Gallery’s slim holdings of works by women artists
in the 19th-century.
Another purchase adds a valuable early work of one of the
most important female artists in Canadian history, Emily Carr.
A Bicycle Trip Along the Cowichan (1895), a drawing book containing
22 drawings in pen and black ink accompanied by a
rhyming tale composed by Carr.
Our contemporary West Coast holdings were also augmented
with purchases of recent works by two eminent
Vancouver artists: Gathie Falk’s papier mâché sculpture
Dreaming of Flying, Canoe, and Geoffrey Farmer’s elaborate,
multi-layered installation Theatre of Cruelty. Its purchase was
made possible through the NGC Foundation’s Audain
Endowment for Contemporary Canadian Art.
The Indigenous collection acquired Carl Beam’s mixed media
work Sauvage, Shelley Niro’s photographic installation Passing
Through, and Kent Monkman’s unforgettable Boudoir de Berdashe.
Notable acquisitions for CMCP included the purchase of
photographs by Vancouver-born photographer, Greg Girard,
who lives and works in China, and by Aboriginal artist Kent
Monkman from St. Mary’s, Ontario. Winnipeg artist Sarah Anne
Johnson donated her sculptural work In Awe to accompany her
previously acquired installation, The Galapagos Project. Other
purchases include Brant’s Crossing by Shelley Niro, Saarland,
Germany by Robert Bourdeau, Vanitas by Nicolas Baier, Ischia
Island (off Naples, Italy) by Michael Semak, and Quality Photo
Lab, 1300 Cahuenga Blvd., Los Angeles by Scott McFarland.
40 Key Expected Results