Thank you, sir. Thank you very much for the invitation.
I would like to speak to you briefly about the National Gallery of Canada, which is now 132 years old. It was created in 1880 as a pantheon not only of Canadian art, but also of the choices Canadians have made on the international scene. The museum began by showing contemporary art. It exhibited contemporary art when it was created.
We have stayed fairly close to that priority ever since. Contemporary art is our priority; however, it isn't exclusively what we do.
Our collecting areas are contemporary art, Canadian and international; old master European paintings, of which we have perhaps one of the most important on the continent, and certainly the most important in Canada; an extraordinary and very comprehensive collection of photography, Canadian certainly, with one small qualification that I'll make in a moment. We have a very large collection of 19th century French and British photographs and a very important collection of 20th century photographs.
We have only been collecting Canadian photographs directly very recently, because there was a separate organization that did that for many years.
At the end of the 1970s, a deal was struck that the National Gallery, Library and Archives, and the National Film Board couldn't all be collecting Canadian photography. So Canadian historical photography was collected, and still is, by Library and Archives. Canadian contemporary photography was collected by the National Film Board. That division of the National Film Board, the stills division, was merged with the National Gallery in the 1980s and is now part of our collection. We are speaking with Library and Archives in order to present Canadian historical photography.
The other area where we are very involved is indigenous art--there again, only from 1985 to the present. Historical materials we borrow from other organizations.
So those are our collecting areas.
It is the largest travelling art exhibition network in the world. We have a network of 40 museums with whom we share the national collection. I do not know of any other museum elsewhere that can organize between 35 and 38 exhibitions a year, sometimes more, sometimes less.
That's really an enormous number of exhibition productions. We really are the world champions, and that's just because of the nature of Canada and the nature of our organization.
Since I have been at the gallery one innovation has been what we call the branded galleries, but that's our colloquial expression. What we mean by that is the “NGC at” program. There is the National Gallery of Canada at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton. There was one that was named last year: the National Gallery of Canada at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto. We will be announcing a third one before the end of the year. This gives us a higher profile, and it is a true partnership, in that these museums tend to want their own exhibition program. They are not borrowing exhibitions from our catalogue of available shows.
This allows us to maintain a more direct relationship with those communities. This is based exclusively on our permanent collection, so as to keep costs down. We collect specifically to serve that network.
We're not only collecting for our location here in Ottawa, but really it's to serve the entire network of Canadian museums, of which we are a very, very important part. That has been very successful. And those programs are not imposed on our satellite galleries; they are actually devised together. We work together with them. And what's been wonderful about their success is it helps us think about another community outside of Ottawa, outside of the more abstract notion of our abstract community, which is the whole country. We're working now with specific communities, and that's been very helpful in getting us to really internalize and understand the idea of serving an entire country, which we always have done.
What we're planning for the 150th--I'm very excited about it--is a complete reinstallation of our Canadian permanent collection to integrate not only indigenous art seamlessly into the story that we tell of art-making in Canada, but also photography. With that, we've been in brief preliminary but very enthusiastic discussions with Library and Archives Canada and also with other organizations that can help us present material that we don't have in our collection.
By reinstalling this way we want to tell the true story of art-making in Canada going back many, many centuries, as opposed to just the ancien régime in France, and forward. We think it's important for our identity and for us to really understand more clearly and more accurately what we mean by art-making in Canada. This is something we've been doing for thousands of years, not just hundreds of years. So that's very important to me. We have a named curator of indigenous art, and we have a department that has been working mostly with contemporary art,
but also, increasingly, with historical material. Of course, we have to borrow expertise. However, it is very important to us to tell that story which gives a more comprehensive idea of artistic creation in Canada. Photography, of course, is part of that.
Temporary exhibitions are another project. In Ottawa and for our program of travelling exhibitions, we are very interested in 1917.
That is a very important year in Canada's history. It was the 50th anniversary of Confederation. That was 100 years ago. We're thinking of the 150th, but we're also thinking of the 100th anniversary since 1917. It's an important moment in Canadian art history as well as Canadian history. It's the year of all the great Canadian battles in Europe. It was the year that Tom Thomson died. It was one of his most productive years. Tom Thomson is a very important figure in Canadian art history. We plan to celebrate his 100th anniversary in a specific way.
We want to tell the story of Canada from 1867 to 1917, and that specific exhibition project is called “Invention of a Nation”. We wanted to avoid the term “Birth of a Nation” because of the references that are not at all in keeping with the spirit of how we do things in Canada, so we found “Invention of a Nation” to be the correct term. But this is going to be in five years, and the titles in museum exhibitions tend to change quite a few times before we actually print the ads. That's one exhibition.
We've been working on an exhibition about art-making in the Second World War to frame within an international context the Canadian project during that period specifically, because it's really a very important moment in Canadian art history. The project on the Group of Seven, which has now become more and more well known in the world, is really quite unique, not unique formalistically, but really as a social project. These were what we call the nationalist landscape painters, the Group of Seven, and 1917 is a very important date for them.
We also have a commemorative publication.
This book will discuss art history in Canada, from 1867 to today. That represents 150 years of creation in Canada. It is a luxury commemorative publication which will be based on our permanent collection. I don't want to tell you more because you are still at the conceptual stage for the moment. We are quite enthusiastic about this project. In addition, a publication will accompany the reinstallation of the permanent collection.
Another recent initiative is a website device and an audio guide which do not discuss art history exclusively. We allow other voices to come forward and talk about these objects that make up art history in Canada. These are professionals from various areas who show us to what extent these objects, beyond their artistic and aesthetic function, can resonate with other ways of thinking and other professions.
Of course, we will be relating the history of art in Canada through the use of many voices and various methods, by using several avenues,
in order to multiply the points of access to Canadian visual culture. We also plan a publication specifically around the permanent collection of Canadian art.
That, in a nutshell, is what we're planning for the 150th.