Why the NGC Really Needs to Change
More than 95% of the solo contemporary exhibitions at the NGC from 2011-2020 were by white artists. In other words, 20 of 21 solo shows were by white or non-racialized artists. This is simply unacceptable.
Numerically, this is a worse record than the previous decade, 2000-2009, when almost 25% of the gallery’s solo shows were by artists of colour (Dymond, 2019, Fig. 2.6). Given the strides the NGC had made from 2000-2010 toward a more inclusive practice, this record of foregrounding whiteness was very disheartening and even a shocking result. This record is a stark call for change.
That call has been answered, in words at least, by the summer 2021 release of a new 5-year strategic plan, Transform Together, and a social media campaign proclaiming “We’ve changed.” The Gallery’s new director, Sasha Suda, appointed in 2019, has announced ambitious new plans to put Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility at the forefront of the Gallery’s work. New vision and mission statements proclaim an activist stance and the changes are framed within a promise to centre Indigenous ways of knowing.
I am optimistic that this revitalized staff will make significant changes. What I would like to see, however, is some acknowledgement of the past, of the processes that lead to the fact that 95% of solo shows were by white people.
Disastrous as this metric is, I think it doesn’t quite tell a representative story, at least with respect to representation of Indigenous artists. And I see the gap between how the NGC has shifted with respect to Indigenous artists and how little it seems to have changed with respect to other groups it has marginalized as a significant challenge.
More equitable representation of Indigenous artists has been at the centre of museum studies discourse in Canada since the 1990s. And although it’s clear the NGC has not finished this job, they’ve made more progress than the solo exhibitions data suggests. I’ve argued elsewhere that solo shows are often representative of overall inclusion (see Dymond, 2019, 8-9). But at the NGC from 2011-2020, the category of solo exhibition belies the significant progress the institution has made in other categories. That single solo show by an artist of color in the data set was the 2016 major career retrospective of Alex Janvier, Denesuline artist from the Cold Lake First Nation in Treaty 6 Territory. It was the 6th is a series of major retrospectives of Indigenous artists initiated by Audain Senior Curator of Indigenous Art, Greg Hill. These included senior native artists Norval Morrisseau (2006), Robert Davidson (2007), Daphne Odjig (2009), Carl Beam (2010), and Charles Edenshaw (2014), who doesn’t get included in our count because he is a historical figure.
Add to these solo shows:
two major group exhibitions, Sakahàn in 2013 and Àbadakone in 2019 (these were initially framed as an FNMI quinquennial, although there was actually 6 years between them);
the re-installation of the newly renamed Canadian and Indigenous Galleries in 2017;
several smaller group shows of contemporary Indigenous artists, including Don’t Stop Me Now and New Voices from the New North
This list makes evident that the NGC has made significant progress since Hill’s appointment as Audain Curator of Indigenous Art in 2007. While I think that this is a place where the metric of solo shows does not tell the whole story, I want to keep the metric as a kind of early warning system. As explained in the methods section, I count solo shows partly for pragmatic reasons, but also because they remain the single most important marker of an artist’s currency in the art world. And this data also supports this. It reads as if, when Hill moved into the Curatorial position, he focused on creating solo shows of the most senior, and far too long excluded, Indigenous artists. Having completed 6 major shows in under a decade, he seems to have switched focus somewhat to cast a wider net.
Yet there are several things we need to keep in mind about this as a strategy. First, if major galleries don’t have solo shows of mid-career artists who’ve historically been excluded, this hampers them from making the leap to international and commercial recognition. It’s also just not fair since plenty of the solos shows of white guys are mid-career. I assessed the age of artists with solo shows at the NGC from the period 2000-2010, and found it to be significantly older for artists gendered female (see here); that would certainly be true for Indigenous artists who’ve had solo shows at the NGC. Another factor to recognize is that this shift from solo to group shows speaks of the limited resources of one area: of course the Indigenous area, as currently staffed, cannot mount major international group shows and major solo retrospectives year after year, even though that is what is required to rebalance the record.
While I applaud the progress with respect to Indigenous representation at the Gallery, it’s important to underline that zero racialized artists who aren’t Indigenous had solo shows in this 10-year period; and this is a major warning sign.
A Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility framework does not allow access for one formerly excluded group and keep the gate shut on all the other groups. It does not mean adding Indigenous artists. It means changing the paradigm, so that all the groups that have been historically discriminated against are given fair representation.
