Thank you to everyone who took the time to submit their
vote for the Volunteer Endowment Trust (VET) funding proposal. This year, we
received 107 votes which is the highest level of participation we have seen
since launching the democratic process in 2020. We are thrilled to announce
that the project that the volunteers have chosen to financially support is Virtual
School Programs. Virtual School Programs have made art and learning
more accessible than ever before, removing financial and geographic
barriers to participating and learning and helping the AGO connect with
new audiences.
On behalf of the Volunteer Council and the AGO
Development team, we thank you for your support!
Meet a new generation of diverse Canadian artists with Inner Space, an original AGO web series where artists give personal tours of their studios.
Image courtesy Inner Space
Get up close and personal with 12 emerging Canadian artists by tuning in to the AGO’s new original web series, Inner Space. Available at the end of every month, each episode follows a young artist who gives an intimate tour of their studio and a behind-the-scenes look at their creative process. Covering a diverse range of art forms and styles, each artist was co-curated by the Inner Space Youth Advisory with AGO Staff.
Made for youth and by youth, the current iteration of the Youth Advisory is project-based and is made up of members ages 16-25 from across Canada. Advisory members chose artists from their local communities to give a spotlight on their art.
These videos are personal and inspiring! Watch the series, linked here.
Blurred Boundaries: Queer Visions in Canadian Artfeatures a select 13 works, all pulled from the AGO Collection, by the likes of General Idea, Will Munro and Frances Norma Loring, alongside some recent acquisitions of Cassils, David Buchan and Robert Flack. Curated by Renata Azevedo Moreira, AGO Assistant Curator, Canadian Art, Blurred Boundaries is not intended to be an exhaustive survey of queer art in Canada, but rather, an entry point into broader conversations on the topic. Visitors are asked to consider how queerness is understood and visualized within the landscape of Canadian art.“This exhibition,” explains Moreira, “suggests queer readings in contemporary and historical works, offering connections that are not exclusively bound by gender or sexuality, but rather focus on how the works question the status quo of their time. What does it mean to explore, from a queer lens, our understanding of artistic practices today and 100 years ago? That’s the challenge.”
I AM HERE: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces(April 13- August 14, 2022)
From the earliest cave paintings to TikTok, humans have found creative ways to document their day-to-day lives.I AM HERE: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces, a major new AGO exhibition opening in April of 2022, is a revealing look at our universal need to capture, share and cherish the everyday. Featuring lost-and-found home movies from the Prelinger Archives, alongside celebrated artworks by the likes of David Hockney, Patti Smith, Claes Oldenburg, Annie Pootoogook, Arthur Jafa and Mary Pratt, as well as snapshots, photo albums, letters, television, grocery lists, and social media, I AM HERE brings together a broad range of personal records from different time periods and locales to explore the shared human impulse to document life as it happens.
Co-curated by Jim Shedden, the AGO’s Manager of Publishing, and Alexa Greist, AGO Associate Curator and R. Fraser Elliott Chair, Prints & Drawings, in collaboration with archivist, scholar and writer Rick Prelinger, the exhibition is a celebration of daily life and human creativity, replete with music and creative prompts. Among the artworks on display will be a digital collage of the more than 3000 submissions received from around the world as part of the AGO’s 2021 Portraits of Resilience exhibition.
Faith and Fortune: Art Across the Global Spanish Empire (June 8 – October 10, 2022)
Faith and Fortune: Art Across the Global Spanish Empirebrings together more than 200 sumptuous and inspiring works of art from Latin America, the Philippines and Spain made between 1492 and 1898. This exhibition, from the collection of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, allows us to study critically the mechanics of colonization by examining the visual culture of the Spanish Empire. As artists, books and patrons moved throughout the Empire, the art created was beautiful, highly international and cosmopolitan. Visitors will see Latin American, Filipino and Spanish paintings, sculpture, printed books and textiles alongside each other, revealing the material and artistic connections.
Through the lens of great art, visitors will encounter the global, cross-cultural movement of people, ideas and artforms happening across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Beginning with the earliest episode of colonization — Columbus’s arrival in the Americas — the exhibition offers visitors important insights into the histories of resource extraction, the spread of Christianity, the development of racial categories and Indigenous resistance to conquest. These four centuries of art provide a unique perspective on the lasting legacies of colonization.
Organized by the AGO, from the collection of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library
Hello volunteers – from time-to-time we share volunteer postings with our community! Here’s a great opportunity to support Luminato. See details, below! – Holly
This week, while a crew is busy installing
I am Here: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces at the AGO, there are
two international exhibitions on view connected to the AGO: Diane Arbus:
Photographs, 1956-1971 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark,
where Sophie Hackett attended the opening; and the Whitney Museum of Art, which
features work by Denyse Thomasos. The art of Thomasos was introduced to the
curator at the Whitney the other year by Renée van der Avoird, and now is
showcased in this year’s Biennial.
These are two very good examples of the
AGO leading global conversations. Below is an installation shot from the Arbus
show in Denmark and a picture of Georgiana Uhlyarik and Sally Frater in front
of a large work by Thomasos.
Also – we are pleased to welcome back the volunteer Gallery Guides to the galleries this month! Look out for Gallery Guides featuring new “Let’s Chat” lapel buttons and floor dots. Gallery Guides will be engaging visitors between 1-3pm daily, and 6-8pm on Wednesdays and Fridays, through a program coordinated by our Education and Programming Division.
Take care and stay safe,
Stephan
Georgiana Uhlyarik and Sally Frater in front of a large work by Denyse Thomasos
We know volunteers love checking out the new work in the Toronto Biennial of Art. Building on 2019’s theme of Waterways, What Water Knows, The Land Remembers, the second edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art opened on March 26, welcoming 37 artists, local and international, to nine different sites across the city.
Biennial sites are grouped in relation to both seen and buried waterways, and follow the trajectories of Etobicoke Creek, the Laurentian Channel, Garrison Creek and Taddle Creek.”
Jeffrey Gibson, a Member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and Half Cherokee, is an interdisciplinary artist based in Hudson, New York. His exhibition I AM YOUR RELATIVE is a site-specific project co-commissioned by MOCA and the Toronto Biennial of Art. The work consists of a series of brightly coloured stages that can be moved and reconfigured for spontaneous gatherings and organized performances within the Museum (on now until July 31)
This week, AGOinsider published a sneak peek of their favourite installations, available here.
For more details, including site hours, upcoming programming, podcasts and publications, visit torontobiennial.org.
Our Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora Department strengthens its collection with two paintings by Lagos-born, Toronto-based artist Emmanuel Osahor, on view on Level 4.
With many of us itching to spend more time outdoors and tend to our gardens, it’s undeniable: spring is in the air. On Level 4 of the AGO, two works on view offer up a poignant interpretation of this sentiment. I Have Been Thinking of my Father’s Garden (2021) and I Have Been Thinking of my Mother’s Garden (2021) by Nigerian-born Emmanuel Osahor are large-scale oil paintings cut from the same unstretched, unprimed canvas, hung delicately on the wall like tapestries.
Recently acquired after Art Toronto 2021, these paintings join the growing collection of works as part of the AGO’s Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora department led by Dr. Julie Crooks, including those by Bidemi Oloyede and Moridja Kitenge Banza, two other contemporary African artists with ties to Canada. Born in Lagos, Osahor immigrated to Canada over a decade ago and has since earned a BFA from the University of Alberta and an MFA from the University of Guelph. The recipient of the 2021 Plaskett Award, his work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions.
Sculptures about statues: spoke with London-based contemporary artist Thomas J Price about his nine-foot bronze cast sculpture outside the AGO, and his take on the meaning of monuments.
Since July, the corner of Dundas and McCaul Streets outside the Jackman Hall entrance has been home to Within the Folds (Dialogue 1) – an original nine-foot bronze cast sculpture made by London-based contemporary artist Thomas J Price. The sculpture, part of ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art 2021–2022, depicts a Black male subject standing upright in a relaxed position, gazing forward, wearing a casual hooded sweatshirt and pants.
In recent years, Price has become recognized for his large-scale sculptural works situated in public spaces. These massive bronze figures depict fictional Black subjects described by Price as “psychological portraits.” Their identities are derived from several sources, including real-life individuals observed and sketched by the artist and the use of 3-D scanning technology for body and clothing detail. Confronted with the towering presence of each figure, viewers are prompted to critically reflect on how they socially interact with Black bodies.
AGOinsider recently spoke to Price to find out more about the creation of Within the Folds (Dialogue 1), his philosophy on monuments, and what’s in store for his practice in the coming months. Read the full interview, here.
Join Julie Crooks, AGO Curator, Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora, and catalogue contributors Christian Campbell, Emily Cluett, Dominique Fontaine, Andil Gosine, O’Neil Lawrence, Annie Paul, Marsha Pearce, Harclyde Walcott and Mary Wells for a conversation celebrating the publication, Fragments of Epic Memory.
This critical volume includes works by Caribbean artists such as Wifredo Lam from Cuba, and Sir Frank Bowling and Aubrey Williams from Guyana—who represent the first generation of migrant modernist artists—alongside 21st-century artists such as Paul Anthony Smith from Jamaica (based in the US), Zak Ové from Britain (of Trinidadian heritage), Nadia Huggins from Trinidad (based in St. Vincent) and Sandra Brewster from Canada (of Guyanese heritage), among others. Their works, along with texts by prominent writers of Caribbean descent, serve as counterpoints to the historical photographs and the violence of the imperial project, constituting a conceptual generational bridge across history, geography, time and space.
Denyse Thomasos, Metropolis, 2007. Acrylic, charcoal, porous-point marker on canvas, unframed: 214 x 335.6 x 3.5 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario.
We are excited to share this year’s projects for funding consideration through the Volunteer Endowment Trust 2022-2023. As part of the Volunteer Council’s (VC) ongoing mission to demonstrate transparency in our decision making, Volunteer President Maya Kotlarenko has once again created an online voting process for the volunteer community to help choose the project you collectively want to support most. As a reminder, you won’t be ranking the projects, you can just choose one to support. Your vote matters!
Please click on the link to read more about this year’s funding options that support the Gallery’s strategic priorities of Art, Access and Learning: https://forms.gle/Jm9dDzwA1RmApueP6
The 3 projects can be read about in much greater detail in the attached proposal PDF, prepared by Erin Thandini, Senior Manager of Philanthropy and Planned Giving.
Voting is open to volunteers until March 31, 2022.
Want to know more about the Volunteer Endowment Trust? The VET was established in 2001 with a Letter of Agreement between the AGO, The AGO Foundation and the Volunteers of the AGO. The original capital that created the fund continues to remain invested and an annual distribution of 4% of the fund (approx. $50,000) is made available in order to fund a project. Each year, the AGO’s Development team identifies 3 projects for consideration that reflect the Gallery’s strategic priorities. Many thanks for your support!
Maya Kotlarenko,
Volunteer President, on behalf of the Volunteer Council
