Hammer Museum

Art Museum: U of T unveils Toronto's newest, coolest gallery and collection

sgupta — Mon, 25 Jan 2016 10:15:11 +0000

Art Museum: U of T unveils Toronto's newest, coolest gallery and collection sgupta Mon, 01/25/2016 - 05:15

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Hamster wheel? This installation by the VSVSVS collective is intended to comment on the fitness fixation of condo dwellers (all photos courtesy the Art Museum)

Arthur Kaptainis

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Arthur Kaptainis

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More than 8,000 holdings from four collections comprise city's largest museum-standard visual-art museum and collection, after the Art Gallery of Ontario

Doors opened at 7 p.m. By 8 there was a lineup.

“We are truly inspired by the response,” said Barbara Fischer, executive director and chief curator of what is now known as the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

“We very much want people at U of T and the public at large to know where we are and what we do. And we are confident that we will become an ever-more-vital hub for the arts and culture community.”

The January 21 event marked the opening of Showroom, an exhibition of recent artworks that comment on the social repercussions of rapid urban development. It also marked the rebranding of the University of Toronto Art Centre (in University College) and the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (in nearby Hart House) as the Art Museum.

With more than 8,000 holdings from four collections, these federated galleries represent the largest museum-standard visual-art museum and collection in Toronto after the Art Gallery of Ontario.

“The Art Museum serves as a vital centre for research and education and is a vibrant cultural resource,” U of T Vice-President and Provost Cheryl Regehr told a wall-to-wall crowd estimated by gallery representatives at between 600 and 750.

“In this new form, the Art Museum continues to be emblematic of President Meric Gertler’s priorities to engage in city-building, to increase the internationalization of U of T and to reimagine undergraduate education.”

Professor Donald Ainslie, principal of University College, noted that the UTAC, one of the Art Museum’s predecessor institutions, came about thanks to the vision of alumni from UC and from the Toronto chapter of the Delta Gamma women’s fraternity.

“The idea was to have a venue to preserve and display U of T’s and University College’s art collections and to ensure that the university’s broad expertise in so many areas could be shared with the general public through the medium of visual art,” Ainslie said.

Showroom – the title riffs on the ubiquitous model suites that offer a generic ideal of living – includes works in a wide range of media and styles. Visitors are first confronted with a please-touch array of exercise machines made of wood and concrete blocks. This installation by the VSVSVS collective is intended to comment on the fitness fixation of condo dwellers.

In adjacent rooms are videos, sculptures, photographs, digital images, paintings applied directly to the gallery walls and even some traditional oils. Chalk to Cheese by Roula Partheniou, a table of carefully arrayed household and recreational objects (including a bowling pin, a doorstop, a Rubik’s cube and a Slinky), perhaps evokes the myriad ways city-dwellers make less-than-optimal use of time. Jimmy Limit’s Fruit and Ceramic Arrangement 4 pays playful homage to the traditional still life.

Most biting of the parodies is Model for Water Route Waterfront Development Project, a tabletop model of a hypothetical (and flagrantly ordinary) cluster of buildings at the water’s edge in Toronto. Panels on the side of this sculpture by the collective called Life of a Craphead invoke spurious comparisons with the dazzling Sydney Opera House and majestic Mount Fuji.

While most of the Art Museum’s interior space is dedicated to temporary exhibitions, it remains anchored by selections from the acclaimed permanent collection, including ancient steles, medieval icons and Adam and Eve, a priceless painting of 1538 by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

“We are immensely proud of this great collection and want to share it with Toronto,” said Fischer, who is also an associate professor, teaching stream, of curatorial studies.

While the Thursday turnout created a dramatic start for the Art Museum, there will be further developments.

“We look forward to intensified programming and exhibitions, as well as a major renovation of our front entrance and collections spaces,” Fischer said. “We want to increase engagement with students across the university, and to support a new generation of artists, writers, curators and culture-sector professionals.”

The Art Museum at U of T will offer supporting programs, including afternoons of performance art on Feb. 6 and March 5, a curatorial tour on Feb. 11 and a panel discussion with Fischer, Luis Jacob and Showroom curator Sarah Robayo Sheridan on Feb. 24.

Art Museum hours are noon to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday and noon to 8 p.m. on Wednesday. Go to http://artmuseum.utoronto.ca

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Why Steve Martin borrowed a Lawren Harris from the University of Toronto's art collection

sgupta — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 12:52:41 +0000

Why Steve Martin borrowed a Lawren Harris from the University of Toronto's art collection sgupta Wed, 10/21/2015 - 08:52

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(photo courtesy Steve Martin via Twitter)

Arthur Kaptainis

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Arthur Kaptainis

“Thank you, University of Toronto, for lending the US Harris's wonderful Isolation Peak.”

This was not an official dispatch from an American government agency but a recent tweet from the comedian, art collector and curator Steve Martin.

Like many American art enthusiasts, Martin grew up with no awareness of the Group of Seven or Lawren Harris, arguably its most distinctive member. After spotting a canvas in an auction catalogue in the 1990s, Martin became a fan.

He also became a collector. When the director of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles – equally unfamiliar with the Group of Seven – saw a Harris canvas in Martin’s home, the plan to mount an exhibition was hatched. Martin is credited as co-curator of The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, which runs until Jan. 24 before moving on to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Read The New York Times article about the exhibition

Isolation Peak, Rocky Mountains, which is part of the Hart House permanent collection, will join more than 30 oils by Harris portraying characteristic Canadian landscapes.

“The goal of the exhibition is to present, in a focused way, a distinctive painter who should be considered a leading artist of his time beyond Canada,” reads the description provided by the Hammer Museum. “Harris was not a provincial echo but an innovator on par with the likes of Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O’Keeffe.”

Martin has praised Harris’s originality in several interviews and characterized the neglect of his work in the United States as regrettable. The comic owns three Harrises, none of which will be part of the exhibition.

"We are thrilled for the recognition of Lawren Harris in the United States and for someone of the stature and visibility of Steve Martin to take such interest in his work," said Barbara Fischer, executive director and chief curator of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery/University of Toronto Art Centre. “It is our pleasure to draw from one of the strengths of the Hart House collection and to participate as lenders to such a significant exhibition.”

This is not the first time Isolation Peak has been seen south of the border. The painting was seen last year as part of Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art, 1775-2012, at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Wash.

The name of the mountain is generic. It is in fact a distant view of Mont des Poilus in Alberta’s Yoho National Park. Martin counts it among his favourites. In an interview with The New York Times, he called the work “an incredible, solitary, Hopperesque painting.”

“I love standing in front of paintings,” he tweeted last January, along with a selfie including Isolation Peak. “Especially this beauty by Lawren Harris.”

Isolation Peak is one of many acclaimed holdings of the Hart House Permanent Collection. It was purchased by the Hart House art committee in 1946 with income from the Harold and Murray Wrong Memorial Fund, a resource of $5,000 that was also used to buy Tom Thomson’s Birches.

Harris paintings now sell in seven figures. The $3.51 million paid by an anonymous philanthropist in 2009 for The Old Stump, an oil sketch for the familiar North Shore, Lake Superior, represented a record for a Group of Seven painting. There has been speculation that the Los Angeles exhibition and Martin’s endorsement will add market value to Harris’s work.

A scion of the Massey-Harris family of industrialists, Harris studied at U of T for less than a year before shifting his education to art and Europe. Some of his earliest work was at Hart House, designing sets for a theatre production in 1921.

The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris includes paintings from the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Thomson Collection at the AGO, the National Gallery of Canada, the McMichael Collection and other sources. The exhibition will end its tour at the AGO in the summer of 2016.

The title, as the Hammer Museum website acknowledges, is doubly Canadian. “The Idea of North” is derived from the best known of the documentary broadcasts of the late pianist Glenn Gould.

News of the show is spreading across social media, with Martin's thank-you tweets to U of T, Saskatoon and other art lenders retweeted by followers such as Joyce Carol Oates.

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