You can come home again
For Anne Whitelaw, appointed last May as associate professor of Canadian art history, returning to Concordia proves you can go home again. She laughs as she describes what it’s like to move back temporarily into her parents’ Beaconsfield home. Whitelaw will spend the summer writing in Edmonton, and return to Montreal for the fall term.
Whitelaw received her undergraduate degree in art history at Concordia in 1987, did her MA in the same field (University of Essex, 1989), and came back to Concordia to complete a PhD in Communication (1996). There was a “foment and ferment” to art history in the 1980s, but Whitelaw “wasn’t interested in studying person Y or painting X.” Instead, she wanted to consider museums and their role in the formation of nationhood.
Whitelaw is grateful her desire to write a dissertation on these “cultural institutions as frames through which we come to know the works of art” was understood and accepted by her Concordia supervisors. It was a way of looking at art history then very much outside the mainstream.
The peripatetic life of an academic continued with a stint as associate professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta. There she taught the history of visual culture in Canada, theories of museums and exhibitions, and the history of advertising. But she kept returning to Montreal, layering each new achievement like fine oils on canvas.
“Quebec has always funded culture quite actively, but other provinces haven’t always viewed culture in the same light,” she says; she was intrigued by these differences. The book she will tackle this summer is about the relationship between western Canadian art galleries and Ottawa-based institutions such as the Canada Council for the Arts and the National Gallery of Canada. In the 1920s, the National Gallery established a practice of sending circulating exhibitions on loan to the West. “But at a certain point,” Whitelaw explains, “Western institutions became annoyed about others exerting control over what they would get to see. They responded by creating their own institutions. Western Canada is its own kind of political beast.”
It was while working on the history of the Art Gallery of Alberta (formerly the Edmonton Art Gallery) that Whitelaw discovered another major research interest: the role of volunteer women’s committees at art museums. Whitelaw realized a large chunk of EAG purchases were financed by the Women’s Society; this labour needs to be understood and studied, she says. The women’s groups didn’t choose the works of art themselves. Instead, they “simply gave the money they raised to curators.” The sole exception was the Art Gallery of Ontario where “very powerful, well-connected women were buying contemporary Canadian, American, and British art.” In homage to their contribution to the development of Canadian culture, Whitelaw has a black and white photo of 1960s Toronto art mavens Jeanne Parkin, Ayala Zacks and Marie Fleming, outside her office door.
The recently released definitive survey book on Canadian visual art has a strong connection to Concordia. Not surprising since the university houses the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.
One of the book’s editors, Sandra Paikowsky, retired from Concordia’s art history department in 2010, but continues to maintain offices as publisher of the Journal of Canadian Art History. Brian Foss was a professor in the department and Associate Dean, Academic and Student Affairs, before leaving Concordia to take a position at Carleton University in 2009 and Anne Whitelaw has recently joined Concordia’s Faculty.
Whitelaw is extraordinarily proud of the volume’s 20 essays newly commissioned from the country’s leading art history scholars. Among them were three others with Concordia connections. Both Johanne Sloan and Martha Langford teach art history, while François-Marc Gagnon heads the Jarislowsky Institute.
Most histories of Canadian art focus primarily on painting, Whitelaw explains, but this book also considers many other media, including sculpture, conceptual, performance and installation art, video, design and photography. Art by women creators is also featured, “but not as being exceptional. Women are simply included, just as they should be.” Chapters on Inuit and First Nations art also add to the book’s “incredible breadth.” The art historians included were approached for the diversity of their styles and perspectives.
The opening chapter on art institutions, written by Whitelaw herself, introduces the founding art galleries, societies and artist-run centres in Canada’s major cities, institutions that were established the country’s visual arts culture. Whitelaw describes the founding of the National Gallery of Canada and Royal Canadian Academy in 1880, followed several decades later by civic art galleries in Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Vancouver. The exhibition and collecting policies of these institutions and the culture of artist-run centres, art magazines and cultural policy, played a central role in “defining and re-defining what can be described as ‘Canadian art’,” writes Whitelaw.
Whitelaw considers this book especially useful for teaching, in order to expose students to myriad ways of thinking about art history that she calls essential. The 185 colour illustrations include household names like Alex Colville along with lesser known but equally significant artists such as Victoria Mamnguqsualuk. With its extensive index and a 12-page appendix listing museums, galleries, artistrun centres and related institutions country-wide, The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century is on-track to becoming the definitive resource for Canadian art of its era.
Related links:
• Concordia's Department of Art History
• Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art
• Journal of Canadian Art History