The Paul Wells Show - Beyond the Group of Seven: How women painted a different side of Canada

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Judging from the Group of Seven’s paintings, you would think post-war Canada was nothing but empty wilderness. But the women artists of the period showed a different vision of the country, filled with cities, people and industry.   Sarah Milroy is the Chief Curator for the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, which houses a vast collection of the Group of Seven’s work. She talks about how they have been working to expand the idea of Canadian art, to invite in the women and the Indigenous artists who are often overlooked.   This episode was recorded live at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.   Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment will open on March 3rd at the National Gallery of Canada.  

Most of us grew up with the Group of Seven, but of course there were other artists working at the time. What does Canada look like when we invite them in too? Their interests were almost diametrically opposed to those of the group. They were interested in cities, people, portraiture, resource extraction in the north. They were in fact painting everything that the men were not. This week, a bigger vision for art in Canada. My guest is Sarah Milroy, the chief curator of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. Wells. Welcome to the Paul Wells Show. In Ontario, where I grew up, a lot of people have been to the McMichael Gallery, once. It's this gorgeous building made to look like an oversized cabin

in the woods of Kleinburg, just outside Toronto. A good distance for a school bus to take a classroom full of school kids. And for a lot of people, that one school excursion was their only experience with McMichael. For much of its history, it was kind of a shrine to the Group of Seven. Still today, it has the world's best collection of the Group of Seven's art, all those big majestic landscapes. Maybe in some ways it also used to be a bit creepy. I mean, most of the members of the Group of Seven are buried up there on the gallery's grounds. And for decades, the gallery's founder, Robert McMichael, had a contract with the Government of Ontario stating that only the Group of Seven and a few others, Emily Carr,

Norval Morisot, could be shown there. But that agreement no longer holds, and lately the management at McMichael has blown the doors off the old restrictive definitions of what constitutes Canadian art. There's lots more work by women, by new Canadians from around the world, and of course far more work by Indigenous artists. A big driver of all this change is Sarah Milroy, who used to be the lead art critic for the Globe and Mail, and is now McMichael's chief curator. When I interviewed her at the Munk School in Toronto, we mostly talked about the gallery's blockbuster exhibition, Uninvited, which is going to be the National Gallery of Canada's big summer show this year, starting in March. It gathers a huge selection of work by women who were painting at the same time as the Group of Seven. Artists like

Anne Savage and Lillias Torrance Newton andton and Florence Weil, artists who probably should be household names in Canada but haven't been until now. It's a stunning show. It changes what you thought you always knew about Canadian art. Sarah Milroy is the best person to explain all of this, but our conversation began with everything she's learned about an even older story, the story of the land just outside the McMichael Gallery's windows. Now, we began with a land acknowledgement. You are working on something that's in the nature of a land acknowledgement at McMichael, and it strikes me as a good place to begin discussing in concrete terms what you're up to. What is this project that you're doing?

It's a great place to begin. It's where I began when I came to McMichael almost five years ago. I realized that sort of the foundational myth of the McMichael was that, you know, in the beginning, there was a cottage that was built by Robert and Signe McMichael in 1955. And I thought, well, surely, you know, that is a partial view of history. So I started looking around and trying to learn about the indigenous peoples that had been on the lands that the McMichael is on and in the adjacent areas.

And what I found out was that there had been a community of more than 3,000 Wendat people living right beside where Rutherford Road crosses the 400. And I've walked those plateaus and valleys where that village was. And you still scuff your foot on the ground and you kick up pottery shards and arrowheads and the detritus of that community. So this is only 500 years ago. So I have a 100-year-old friend.

It's five times Jeannie Parkin. And there you are. You're in that, you're in that Wendat village. And the Wendat ended up being pushed out of this area. And they're now residing in Quebec. But Bonnie Devine, who's an Anishinaabe artist that we work with a lot. She's an artist and scholar and editor and doing all sorts of wonderful things with us at McMichael. and doing all sorts of wonderful things with us at McMichael. But she worked with some of the archaeological findings that had come off what was called the Seed Barker site,

which was the farmers that owned that land, and made a selection of clay pipes that were being held in various university collections and at the ROM. And she staged them in an installation at the McMichael that you literally cannot miss. If you walk into our galleries to come and see our exhibitions, you will walk through and past Bonnie's installation, you will see these pipes. And I thought, you know, it was just so important that settler people who arrive at the museum have that initial humbling experience. And what's lovely about it, of course,

the McMichael being the McMichael, is you look out to the land. While you're seeing the pipes, you're also seeing the trees, and you're seeing the Humber River Valley, which drops right below where the McMichael stands. And that was a trading route that was the most important trading route between Georgian Bay and the Lake Ontario region. And then it picked up on the other side of Lake Ontario and went all the way down eventually to the Mississippi

and down to the south coast of the U.S. And the name of the trading route was? The Carrying Place Trail. Extraordinary evocative. Beautifully evocative title. And literally, you look down the hill, and that's where it ran. It was right underneath our bluff. And the other thing I found out more recently is that the largest reburial site of indigenous

remains in North America is in Glasgow Park, also just down the hill from the McMichael. There were thousands of indigenous remains of the Wendat people that were gathered from various university collections and repatriated some years ago in that unmarked site. So there are, the cultures of the past are very, we're really trying to keep them alive at the McMichael. And what's been amazing has been to watch Bonnie welcome the Wendat back at the McMichael. And what's been amazing has been to watch Bonnie welcome the Wendat back to the McMichael and use the museum as a platform for them to come and touch base with their ancestral homelands and give consent over the use of the pipes and develop protocols for being able to display the pipes with elements of soil and red ochre

and other ceremonial, you know, processes that went into place, like the little plexi boxes, if you come up and see us at McMichael, that the clay pipes are presented in, have little air holes in the side of them because they're viewed as living, ongoing beings, and they must be able to breathe. So, you know, we all learned a tremendous amount, but for most of that diplomatic aspect of the project, which I think is going to continue through this spring and summer with other Indigenous peoples from this region, as staff at the McMichael, we were not present. We just turned over the facility, turned off the smoke alarm so everyone could burn sweet grass, and left the room. And really

wonderful things happened. So our hope is that, you know, rather than being a treasure house, that actually the McMichael can be a platform for this kind of real social change that is so important. So, whereas many years ago, that past might have been ignored and then denied, and then mentioned or acknowledged, now you're moving towards embracing and celebrating. What, after all, is the neighborhood? I mean, I think one of the things that's so interesting about Canada is the way it deploys Indigenous culture in its brand. Most notoriously in 1927, if I could digress for a minute, when there was a show in Ottawa called West Coast Art Native and Modern,

which was a group of paintings by the Group of Seven and Emily Carr, but also masks and rattles and all sorts of regalia from the northwest coast that was brought to Ottawa and displayed all together. And this display was actually a display of goods that had been confiscated in the potlatch bands. were being stolen off the coast by the Canadian government and then presented as the wonderful, you know, mystical art of our country's Indigenous people, along with our, you know, our favorite white settler artists in Ottawa, as a way of kind of branding Canada as having all this, all this, and it's all us. But in fact, you know, there was deep violence going on at that time. So, you know, branding Canada with Indigenous art goes on today without often real deeper attempts at reconciliation and respect for self-governance for Indigenous people. I feel like already at this point, I should probably insert this sort of needle drop sound effect and say, you might be wondering how we got here, because there's a lot

of people who, if they have a consciousness of the McMichael Collection, think of it as... A.Y. Jackson in an armchair, half asleep. It's the cottage where we keep the group of seven. Well, it's the cottage where we keep the group of seven, which is something I want to talk about. Themselves, exactly. It's like the Fort Knox of high 20th century Canadiana. Yes, exactly.

What happened? Well, you know what's interesting? Begin with that story. Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is, of course know robert mcmichael was an expert collector and devoted collector of the group of seven as well as emily carr and david milne thank goodness and tom thompson but one of the things that people don't really kind of know as they should about robert mcmichael may he rest um is that he actually was very passionate about Indigenous art, even though he's the ultimate sort of mighty whitey.

You know, he met Bill Reed in 1957. Bill Reed took him out to, of course, the Great Hide at Carver. Bill took him out to lunch, and then they went back to UBC, and they went down in the basement of one of the administrative buildings where the collection of Northwest Coast materials were held in their then Department of Anthropology. And he was a convert. He was just amazed. And he went on to become a really important collector of Northwest Coast, historical and contemporary art, as well as, of course, famously, his alliance with Norval Morisot and his sort of extolling of the Woodland School of Art.

So I think I'm right in saying that McMichael was the first museum in Canada, even though it has this conservative sort of tartan and shortbread reputation, it was actually the first museum in Canada to have Indigenous and settler art shown side by side. The problem was that Robert McMichael had a very specific idea of what he meant by Indigenous art and a very specific idea about what he meant by Canadian art. And it was a set list of artists in the case of the painters. And it was very isolated pockets of indigenous art and culture that he happened to prefer. And this approved list was the text of a formal agreement with the Ontario, you've got it. I have it right here.

Okay. The Cultural Heritage of Canada. This is an agreement with the Ontario government, which he sought to enforce in court. Yes, and which he succeeded in enforcing in court until all hell broke loose in 2011. Artworks and objects and related documentary materials created by or about Tom Thompson, Emily Carr,

David Milne, A.Y. Jackson, Lauren Harris, A.J. Casson, Frederick Varley, J.H. MacDonald, and Franklin Carmichael, and other artists who have been designated by the Art Advisory Committee, of which the founders were members in perpetuity, with a deciding vote, for their contributions to the development of Canadian art. So in 2000, MacMichael goes to the development of Canadian art. So in 2000, McMichael goes to the, to, uh, sues the province for breach of contract and said, I didn't give my collection to the people of Ontario for it to be, you know, to be mucked with by these pesky curators. You know, I, this is my list. This is Canadian art. And I mean, it's interesting that there's no real reference here to Indigenous art, which he himself had collected. So extremely reactionary move on his part.

And the battle went on for 11 years to get for the curators to once again have the right to buy contemporary art and Indigenous art and to really try and reckon with what Canada really was all about. Now, by the time you come along, this battle is largely won and lost. You're a globe journalist. How did you become a curator at an art museum? It's like putting me in charge of a podcast. Yeah, exactly. Same kind of thing. Well, I mean, the thing is, I often am very glad and grateful I was a journalist before I was a curator because journalists know if you've ever had the harrowing experience of watching someone in a cafe reading one of your pieces and going like this halfway through you learn that the humbling lesson that they don't have to pay attention to you because they should you know you have to have a reason to engage their attention

people are busy so there has to be some kind of this is a really good artist that's not a good reason for people to pay attention it's like this is a really good artist that's not a good reason for people to pay attention it's like this is really a good artist and this artist tells us about the world we live in and you need to understand the world through the eyes of this unique individual and gifted individual now i'm getting interested so you know i feel like the work we do at mcmichael is really trying to frame artists in that in that bigger picture but i i got involved with curating really quite by accident i had some early experiences helping Dennis Reid at the Archive Ontario the very great Canadian curator who asked me to work with him on

a Greg Kernow show and then quite by chance I met Ian Desjardins who is our executive director at McMichael who was then the executive director at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London and we had a sort of chance conversation about Emily Carr. He had just finished putting up on the wall in England, Painting Canada, Tom Thompson and the Group of Seven, which was an absolutely beautiful exhibition. I'd never met him before, and I went to the study day at London. And I remember it was kind of a a cool fall afternoon and we were drinking weak

English coffee out in the morning sun. And I said, what are you going to do next? And he said, Emily Carr. And I said, well, be careful about that. Not thinking at all about that I was presenting myself in this way, but I said, be careful about that because the paintings that are the most famous are the ones that are actually the least accomplished Which are the big oil paintings that are so famous of totem poles and big raven and so on and I Actually believe that those totem those totem pole paintings are made in a moment of kind of shock and discombobulation on car's part that she's suddenly famous And she starts painting kind of into this market in eastern canada And I actually think she fumbles the past to a she starts painting kind of into this market in Eastern Canada.

And I actually think she fumbles the past to a degree that is kind of hilarious at times in that 1927 to 1930 period. And then Lauren Harris really helps her to see that she needs to paint her own experience. And she goes back to the forest. And that's when her sort of colossal accomplishment, I think, really kicks in. But he kind of looked at me while I was saying this.

And he said, I've been thinking the same thing about those awful paintings, and everyone's been telling me I have to borrow them. And I said, don't. Don't. You're right. Do your own thing. And then about, I don't know, three weeks later, I got a call from Matthew Teitelbaum at the AGO, who was going to be co-hosting the exhibition, and asked me if I would do it. And it was perfect timing because I'd just left the Globe. So I had a little free time would do it. And it was perfect timing, because I just left the globe. So I had a little free time on my hands. So it was quickly to work on that. And I've never looked back. I've never had so much fun in my life. Is it hard to decide what to put on which walls? You have to have good eyes and ears, because you have to really see what the paintings are saying to each other. We used to work with little models and bits of paper.

Now we work with a program called SketchUp, where we can swish things around on the walls and, you know, see what they look like and feel like and get down on the floor and walk through. My colleague, she, who's sitting back there with the black mask on, is a wizard at this. So we can kind of feel the shows before we do them now. But, you know, things are together for a reason, to have conversations with each other. You don't want to be overbearing about how you're directing people to experience the art,

but you want to have them feel like they are making a voyage of discovery. You've kind of helped by kind of moving the right things close to each other so people will go, wait a minute. But you don't want to overdirect. Otherwise, people don't have any of the fun feeling of discovering something. And they also are not at liberty to have a different idea. So it's that, you know, it's that, it's that, it's like writing art criticism is not that dissimilar. You don't want to just say, you know, a 10, 10 from the Russian judge. You want to kind of explore your doubt and say, you know,

I think this, but I also think that the And the implicit thing is, what do you think? So yeah, trying to get people to ask questions when they're looking. So then you'd go from doing one show to more or less soon after that being the chief curator. Yeah, it was about, I guess it was about four years later. Yeah. We did Vanessa Bell in London, who was Virginia Woolf's sister. And that was just so much fun. And then we did David Milne in London. And it was when that show was up in London that Ian asked me to join him at the

McMichael because the wonderful Sarah Stanners had resigned, and so there was a hole at the top. Are you in conversation with people's idea, people's old idea of what the McMichael collection is, or do you just... You know, someone said that to me, you know, someone asked me that the other day, you know, are you getting a lot of protest from McMichael traditionalists? But the thing is that we still show the group of seven. It's just that we'll have a painting by Lauren Harris, marvelous, you know, Mount Robson painting of a mountain peak, all austere and glacial, up beside a painting by Lawrence Paul Yux-Wallupton, who's a Coast Salish artist from BC who paints a kind of technicolor landscape

of mountains that are kind of drenched in psychedelic ovoid forms. And, you know, his way of looking at the landscape, not as empty, but as replete with cultural meanings and human presence, you know, so you just put those up side by side. And, you know, it's pretty clear that something's going to happen for people when they look at that and start thinking about that. But it's not about deep sixing the group of seven at all, like we're doing a major Tom Thompson show this summer, but we'll be doing it in a way to try and revive the freshness of those remarkable works. So they're not like, oh, National Treasure, I know that. Because that's what happens to the, whether it's the Group of

Seven, or it's Mary Pratt, or it's Emily Carr, is that people think that they know it, even if they adore it, and they, you know, they feel so strongly about Emily Carr and her monkey, and, you know, they have all these emotional feelings about her. But the fact is, that creates a kind of carapace over Carr that obscures the fact, in her case, to use her just as an example, that she was one of the most prescient, brilliant diagnosticians of what was wrong with our country in her day. I mean, Emily Carr said, we are the barbarians, speaking of colonial culture. She wrote about the residential school system. She wrote about the dead children

of her friend, Sophie Frank. She also, you know, she's a complex historical figure. She also wrote in infantilizing ways about indigenous people. She also, you know, kind of, there's something cloying about a kind of sense that they were sort of her Indians, quote unquote. It's kind of, you know, you feel that when you read her writing. I mean, people are wild about Emily Carr's writing. I'm not so much. You know, I mean, I think it's fascinating, but I think it's a historical document of the limitations

of her actual understanding of the moment she was in. But, you know, she was miles ahead of everyone else. A kooky lady in a hairnet with a monkey is not the point about Emily Carr. And that was kind of what we were at pains to try and underscore, both for the British public and for the Canadian. After the break, Sarah Milroy will talk about how the Spanish flu had a major influence

on the Group of Seven's art and the women artists who painted a different vision of the country. I want to take a minute to thank everyone who supports this show. Our partners at the National Arts Centre and the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, who hosted this conversation. Our founding sponsor, TELUS. Our title sponsor, Compass Rose.

And our publishing partners, the Toronto Star and iPolitics. I spent half a day up at the gallery you showed me around, and one of the things you said is, as you're juxtaposing pieces from various moments in Canada's history, from various corners of our discourse, you say you try not to hand out too many black hats and white hats, that you're trying to discuss these people in their complexity with their glories and their failings. Yeah, I mean, I was just, I'm writing a piece,

we're doing a book for a touring show called Early Days Indigenous Art at the McMichael that's going to tour to Albuquerque and it's going to Norfolk, Virginia, and it's going to Phoenix, Arizona and Quebec City. And we're making a great big huge book and I'm just in the middle of writing the introduction which is proving to be really challenging because I'm writing about a mask, the first indigenous made object that came into the collection of the McMichael. It's a Tsimshian mask, the first indigenous made object that came into the collection of the McMichael. It's a Simshian mask from the Skeena Valley region that he bought in 26 when he was working on this,

on his paintings for the show in Ottawa that I mentioned, and he bought this or acquired somehow this mask. And the front of it has these beautiful patterns and the back of it, you know, you can see the kind of rigging and that it was obviously something that was ceremonial that he was able to take and to take back to eastern canada but you know on the one hand you know jackson is trying in collecting this object but also in writing about his experiences on the skeena river which he did in mclean's magazine in 1927 everybody once wrote everyone once wrote for mclean's exactly Everyone once wrote for McLean's, exactly, all the best people. But he's trying to be a champion of indigenous culture. He's talking about the totems of the Skeena. And then he goes on to say how wonderful it is that they're all being chainsawed down

and kept safe or that they're being put on concrete posts along the main street of this town where they can be preserved properly. Completely oblivious to the fact that what the pole is for the family and the crest and the, you know, its relationship to time and decay. And we can't judge him by, you know, the standards of our own time, but we can use him and his writings as a way to measure how far we've come. So that's the difference in the approach is rather than it being an exercise in excoriation on my part to write about Jackson's article in Maclean's, it's like, wow, and he was one of the good guys. He was really trying to say that this was important material and that it needed to be cherished and taken care of. And, you know, how great it would be if the Skeena Valley became a center for the study of indigenous people.

And that probably sounded very progressive in that time. And maybe to some people it still does. But the fact is, it's presuming that the people of the Skeena are extinct and require study by white. The whole orientation is for the white consumer to study indigenous people rather than the fact that those were living cultures that at that point were being threatened by residential schools and other arguably you know,

arguably genocidal policies. So, you know, it's fascinating to look at the past and to look at these works of art as historical objects that we can, they're evidence of ways of thinking that we can mine and we can still enjoy them as beautiful works of art. You tour your shows a lot. We do. Is it partly because it can be hard to coax people to come visit them in situ? Well, I realized when I came that the business model was really a tough one because Michael was supposed to be making, you know, a robust display of the very best of Canadian art and

art history, but it was doing so, you know, in a location where it was very hard to get big numbers. So how do you justify building a show and expending, you know, really robust resources for an exhibition that's going to be seen only in Kleinberg? And even if you luck into something, and a lot of people from Toronto come, it's still going to be a very low attendance that really cannot justify that kind of an investment to to do a big show to to really get the loans you need to do i mean our pledge is to do the best we can for the artist kind of no matter what the expense because then we then have an argument to go to our funders and say we could not do this to our best of our ability but it's just like it's not going to happen again.

We're doing a Bertram Brooker show in a year from now, and it was a fascinating contemporary of the Group of Seven. Who would invest in a Brooker show? But we must, because our job is to be leading the discussion on Canadian art, and we have to make the best case we can for these artists. So if we tour, thanks to the wonderful work of my colleague, Jennifer Withrow, who's here tonight,

if we tour to multiple venues, we recuperate some of the sometimes quite daunting costs of some of the projects we do, such as Uninvited, which was a recent behemoth that is going to be showing up at the National Gallery in a little while. This is a real case of, it's starting March 1st at the National Gallery. March 3rd. March 3rd.

And it is an exhibition that you yourself have described as thunderous. It was. Tell us about Uninvited. As I read the catalog, I'm starting to think you might have something there and I'm looking forward to seeing it on walls. Tell me about it.

Well, it was a wonderful adventure. Before I came to McMichael, there was a discussion led by our director ian um that there should be something that happened on the centenary of the group of seven in 2020 that would mark the occasion so we were going to do a big uh display of the group of seven holdings of the mcmichael which are exquisite but that we should also do a show at the same time about the women who were their contemporaries. And that was kind of as far as the discussion had gotten.

But when I came into the team, he said, would you be willing to take this on? And it was like, we thought we had a year and a half to do it. And it was like going to be one of the largest projects the gallery had ever undertaken. But we said, you know, of course, hell yes. And so we got to work and we, as it turned out, because of COVID, we ended up getting an extra year or year and a half of time to work on it. So we made, you know, a large book with, with, I think, more than 40 contributors. It was 36 artists of every persuasion, they were

artists of every persuasion. They were Waspie Montreal ladies. There was Emily Carr. There was bead workers in Arviat. There was basket making from Northern Ontario. There was photography from a brilliant runaway Hamiltonian who ended up in New York and finally in Glasgow, Margaret Watkins. So there were all these women who were working at the same time at the Group of Seven, but their interests were almost diametrically opposed to those of the group. They were interested in cities, people, portraiture, resource extraction in the North, clear cutting. And really touchingly to me, they wanted to make records of indigenous communities, particularly, you know, and paint portraits of indigenous women and children. They were, in fact, painting everything that the men were not. And so when you put the Group of Seven together with these incredible

women, and also, I mean, many of the women were recent immigrants to Canada too, which is another, you know, part of that story in that period, massive influx of immigration. So there was a way in which we all at the gallery came to understand that the Group of Seven had really come together. We always think of this post-war moment and nation building. That's true. The Group of Seven came to be a kind of branding opportunity for a young country. But another thing was happening is that society had

been deeply traumatized by modernity itself. The women go to it, the men go from it. And of course, a number of them were seeing act of service and were over there and, you know, after the war or had been a war artist, which gave you a front row seat to the horror of horrors. So they were really retreating to nature, you know, as a way of sort of healing. And the country was, you know, really hungry for that sort of restorative, regenerative imagery that they afforded.

The other thing that we forget about the formation of the Group of Seven, it happened in the aftermath of the Spanish flu. So this idea of being anti-urban, going into nature, replenishing yourself, and this fascination with Thoreau and American transcendentalism. It was a social distancing club. In a way. Yeah.

And very bromantic as well. And like super Hemingway-esque kind of. Very. As the gents were packing up their brushes and their oils to go off and worship mountains yes the ladies were downtown in kensington market painting the fruit stands salone de refuse of people who didn't get a wristband we're noticing what was going on yeah exactly but when i started working on undivided i kind of thought the men were like oblivious or it was some sort of branding thing related to the commercial illustration careers but i've now come

to have a more full and charitable view of what it was which was that this was this was a you know a nation of people who were deeply shocked and they were just the ticket that they needed to feel better about the country in the future who painted the plow was that ann savage was that no yeah a y jackson writes to her and says oh the plow is fine. You need this little bit of blue up in the corner. It's like, did we ask you? But again, let's not forget that in their time, he was welcoming her as a colleague. He was arranging exhibition opportunities for her and for other women like Prudence Heward and indeed Emily Carr and other women that are in that show.

So they were allies. It's just that because the Group of Seven thing took off the way it did, and because there were never any women involved in that, it kind of cast this shadow, the sort of masculinist notion of an artist, you know, is out camping in the woods. And, you know, there's a record of them doing things like running up a hill with rocks and then in their backpacks and climbing trees at the end of the day. I'm like, you know, it was like kooky hyper-masculinity. Yeah. And, you know, I don't know what to say about that, except that the women were absolutely digging into the fabric of society, people, human issues, social change, urban poverty, the human psyche, you know, painting these self-portraits where these women just turn themselves inside out in

front of their own canvas. And there's something invigorating and touching about how much of a full court press this show is. This is... Yeah. Well, that's, again, I have to thank our director, and I have to thank the board, because I kind of said, people have been half-assing it on this stuff. There've been generations of female scholars who have not been empowered by their directors to make big books. They've done very important research, but they've never been able to have, like, the Prudence Herod book. It's excellent. The scholarship there is excellent. But it has, like, it's 60 pages long. You know, it should be 400 pages long. But it's sort of like these women get sort of done, you know, making air quotes once.

And then it's considered that Prudence Herod, you know, we've ticked that box and it's over. Or, you know, the only one who that hasn't happened to is Emily Carr. And that's because she was smart enough to write her own books and create her own mystique and legacy. And so there's like a whole shelf of Emily Carr. You go to the AGO library and you burrow away, as I love to do, and then you get to the rest of the history of art made by women in Canada, and it's like the other shelf. It's really a huge gap. So what we hope is we kind of made,

what we did was we tried to look at each woman and think, what is their signal accomplishment? Like we didn't want to give a survey of their career. We want to decide what is the thing they did that no one else did, and then try to get the very best examples of that. So it's sort of like 35 mini shows. Now this exhibition is going to be the big summer show at the National Gallery of Canada, about which I and some of my colleagues have written critically recently because of some HR decisions that they've made. I hope my friends at the gallery notice that I'm marketing their big summer show quite enthusiastically. What was it like working with the gallery?

Well, it was really interesting. You know, we created this thing that's gone to the Glenbow, it's gone to the Vancouver Art Gallery. It's really drawn a lot of attendance. I'm very glad it's going to the National Gallery because they are having a tough time. And I am completely confident that it will be packed with people. People are fascinated by this show, thank God, because it cost a pretty penny to put together. And, you know, a lot of people have supported us by taking the show and they've been rewarded for it so that makes me very happy but we needed to do and i think you and i talked about this earlier we needed to do some more work for the national gallery they you showed them what you had in mind and they sent you back with a note yeah they sent me back with a note that was really interesting um which was you have works in here by indigenous people whose names we don't have and we're not super comfortable with that because you know all the names of the you know you have works in here by indigenous people whose names we don't have. And we're not super comfortable with that because you know all the names of the, you know, of the settler ladies,

but you don't have all the names of the indigenous people. And I was like, well, of course, you know, from my settler perspective, I said, well, of course, we don't know the names of the indigenous people because they weren't recorded because of colonialism, because no one thought that they were important, and so no one bothered to write down their names. And they just sort of said, well, try harder. And it was going to trigger an enormous amount more work that we needed to do. But in fact, we started to push on it a little, and we realized that was an area in which we actually could push a bit more. And we started talking to our colleagues again.

I worked with a wonderful young woman at the National Gallery called Kirsten Appleyard. And we started looking deeply in the collections of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in Vancouver, also the Museum of History. We worked with Caitlin McCormick there to find some things that were by named makers. And then we had to go digging deeper to find their stories, to try and find photographs of these women. And we did switch out some objects and put in the new ones. And I think it's a greatly improved exhibition for it.

There was a rigor that was asked for me there that I hadn't really like fully dug down into in the first iteration of the show. So, you know, even though it was at the time, it was like, oy vey, how in the hell am I going to get this done? At the end of the day, it's a much stronger show for it.

So, you know, I'm glad we did it. We've got a couple minutes left. What else are you thinking of for the next little stretch of time at the McMichael? Well, we're doing, as I mentioned, this early days show that's traveling in the US. That's a big deal for us. And we're making a book that is looking like it's now getting

really, really big. I think it's going to be over 420 pages long. And it's more than 70 essays by Indigenous authors from across the country about major pieces that are in our collection, both historical and contemporary. So the effort is to reunite those objects with the appropriate stakeholder writers. And these are writers that are artists, writers that are scholars, writers that are history keepers, writers that are novelists, like all sorts of different voices. But that book, I think there's maybe three settler writers in the book because they have a long, long history of deep expertise. But the project, which is under the editorial direction

of Bonnie Devine, who we started with, you know, almost the entire book is both led by an indigenous person and written by indigenous peoples. So that, everything's been re-photographed for the book. It's going to be a feast. That's a big project on the horizon. We're opening Meryl McMaster, who's a brilliant young Cree. She has both Cree and settler heritage. She's based in Ottawa. Now that show is opening on February 3rd at the McMichael and will be running, and she works in photography, that will be running through the spring. And in the summer, as I said, we're doing Tom Thompson. And with the Tom Thompson show, we're doing an exhibition called Uses of Enchantment about

global warming, which gathers together contemporary artists like Sherry Boyle, Hava Valmanumi, Bill Burns, and others who have been working for the last 20 or 30 years on themes of climate change, because we want to look at, we're going to see Tom Thompson 100 years ago in Algonquin Park, and we're going to look at the way we relate to nature and the ways we're thinking about nature 100 years later to put that landscape tradition that is so much a part of the McMichael brand, 100 years later to put that landscape tradition that is so much a part of the McMichael brand, to put it into the context of the now. And one of the artists in the gallery at that time will be Sandra Magues, who spent COVID sort of shacked up in motels in Algonquin Park and Calabogie and other parks around Ontario, making paintings about climate change in the park and species loss and

her own experience there as a woman on her own. So obviously there's a feminist inflection to that project and we'll be showing that as well in the summer. And then we just keep going from there. So it's- There's a piece of the story that I forgot to mention.

This is the only Canadian art museum with a mandate to show exclusively Canadian art. That's the thing. And if we hadn't just had this conversation, some people listening might think that that was a restrictive mandate but obviously now it's it it's everything thank god i have some restrictions or my head would explode it's uh it's a fantastic you know mandate because of course the whole world is in canada and all the issues we deal with in the newspapers that we read about they all bear fruit

ultimately in the art that our our country, artists produce of all different kinds of people. So the museum is about Canadian art, but it's really about Canada and all the things we cherish, all the things we need to work on. And we are working on those things. I do have some hope. I think, you know, we need to work on the environment. We need to work on Indigenous issues deeply. We need to make a better experience for new arrivals in Canada. All these things we need to do, but those are all things that, we had Wanda Koop, who's a contemporary painter from Winnipeg, of Ukrainian Mennonite background, and William Kurelik, a new acquisition called Jewish Life in Canada that we acquired last year. It's the biggest acquisition we've made in terms of purchase acquisition in the museum's history. But so two leading Ukrainian-Canadian artists of, of course, very different generations. And our head of exhibitions, Anna Stanisch, was brilliant enough to have the idea

to bring Ukrainian refugee kids who were new to Canada that were settling in Toronto in summer camps up to the McMichael and be with us there and be with Karelik's paintings and hear Karelik's story and be with Wanda's ravishing paintings that are inspired by her experiences of northern Manitoba and the world that she lives in, the contemporary world she lives in. And that was deeply meaningful for them,

and we had a lot of them with us in the summertime. And it was like that pivot in the idea of a museum from being a pleasure palace or a place of entertainment to being a place that is of service to different communities and a gathering place where people can feel like they're in a safe, warm space to share their stories and get to know each other better in a really positive environment. So that's what we're trying to create. Sarah Milroy, you and I had schemed about things that we might discuss, and we didn't even scratch the surface

of all the stuff we thought we were going to talk about, which means I think we're just going to have to have this conversation in installments over time. That'd be great. But thanks for getting it started tonight. You bet. My pleasure to be here. Good night. Thank you. that'd be great but thanks for getting it started tonight you bet my pleasure to be here good night thanks for listening to the Paul Wells Show

the Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the National Arts Centre and the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy it's published by the Toronto Star and iPolitics thanks to our founding sponsor, TELUS, and our title sponsor, Compass Rose. Our senior producer is Kevin Sexton. Our associate producer is Haley Choi. Our executive producer is Lisa Gabriel. Stuart Cox is the

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