Good morning, members of the committee, and thank you for the invitation to speak today on this important subject. It is an honour to be here and to share my thoughts.
I thought it might be useful to provide some biographical information. I am from the United States, and I completed a bachelor's degree in art history at Columbia University in New York and a master's degree in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. I have been working in the visual arts in New York and Toronto for more than 20 years. I joined Art Toronto in 2010 and was promoted to director in 2014.
Art Toronto was founded in 2000 and it is Canada's only international art fair for modern and contemporary art. While there are more than 300 commercial art fairs worldwide, and dozens in the U.S., Canada has only one. Art Toronto is a five-day annual consumer event that takes place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, and it is the largest and most important annual visual arts event in Canada. It has grown to become an essential meeting and networking event for arts professionals from across the country.
The fair is composed of approximately 100 Canadian and international commercial art galleries selling modern and contemporary art as well as hosting booths for art museums and other not-for-profit art spaces, art magazines, and curated projects. A multi-day program of talks and tours featuring prominent art-world figures takes place throughout the duration of the fair.
In 2017 Art Toronto was attended by more than 23,000 art collectors, art professionals, and art lovers, and it contributed over $10 million to the arts economy through artwork sales, in addition to tourism dollars spent in the city during those five days. Art Toronto's opening night event is a fundraiser for the Art Gallery of Ontario, raising close to $400,000 annually for the gallery's exhibitions and programs.
Art Toronto is owned by Informa, a multinational company headquartered in the U.K. Informa has 7,500 employees worldwide and is a leading business intelligence, academic publishing, knowledge, and events business.
In thinking about your request to speak about gender parity on the boards of Canadian cultural institutions and among artistic leaders across Canada, I did some research into Informa's hiring policies and the programs it has put into place to reach the company's goals in terms of employee diversity. While I was pleased to learn that 56% of Informa's employees are female, in the leadership groups at the higher levels this number drops to 27%, and in the directorships at the highest level the number drops even further to 22%. The number of female directors, however, is a higher percentage in Informa's Canada offices.
A similar trend can be found in U.S. and Canadian art museums. In 2018, though, I do not believe that it's sufficient to look at gender parity in these institutions and across the arts in Canada without also considering ethnic diversity.
In the U.S. and Canada there are clear disparities in gender representation in museum directorships, depending on operating budget size. The majority of museums with budgets less than $15 million are run by a female rather than a male director. The reverse is true for museums with budgets of over $15 million, where female representation decreases as budget size increases.
A study published by Canadian Art magazine in April 2017, entitled “Hard Numbers: A Study on Diversity in Canada's Galleries”, looks not only at gender discrepancies but also at the demographics of museum staff by job title. While the top directorships skew towards men in these roles, the study finds that visible minorities and indigenous people are severely under-represented at all levels of gallery administration, including curators and directors.
While these numbers have a variety of effects across an organization, it is perhaps most visible when looking at the gender and ethnicity breakdown of solo exhibitions presented at these institutions. A 2015 report by Canadian Art magazine looked at these exhibitions from 2013 until 2015 at one major institution in each province, plus the National Gallery of Canada, focusing on living artists by gender breakdown and racial distribution. The national average of this study showed that 56% of these solo exhibitions were given to white male artists, 33% to white female artists, 8% to non-white male artists, and 3% to non-white female artists. That is to say, what happens at the top affects what visitors see and experience at these institutions.
Informa has put into place new company-wide programs in the past few years to improve the gender balance at the senior management level and to create more diversity overall throughout the company. I think that some of these initiatives could be applied to the issue of gender parity and diversity in Canadian cultural institutions and on their boards.
Several years ago, an Informa graduate fellowship scheme and an Informa apprenticeship scheme were introduced, as well as a leadership development program to increase professional leadership skills, provide networking and collaboration opportunities, and to support succession planning, which is essential in any institution.
I believe that this last point about leadership, mentorship, and succession planning is key in developing future leaders in the arts in Canada who reflect the diversity and plurality of the Canadian population of the 21st century, and of the communities that these institutions exist to serve. This lack of leadership training resources to date in Canada has been cited as the reason that many of Canada's, and specifically Toronto's, more recent hires for CEOs, including the AGO, the ROM, and the McMichael, have all hired from outside Canada.
Like Informa's programs, I am aware of two excellent leadership development programs to be considered as examples, but also as opportunities for Canadians. The Clore Leadership Programme, in the U.K., aids in the professional growth of museum professionals; and in the U.S., the Getty Leadership Institute assists top-level museum and cultural executives from around the world to become better leaders, with the aim of strengthening their own institutions' capabilities, as well as advancing the international museum field.
Some good news is that new leadership programs in Canada are now available, including those at the Banff Centre, the Cultural Human Resources Council, and through Business for the Arts. These programs are a start, but more needs to be done to provide leadership training resources to a greater number of people in the culture sector, and to provide specific outreach to women, indigenous people, and visible minorities.
The resources of the federal government could help to make these existing programs more robust, and the government could work with other partners to provide additional opportunities. For example, the government could work with partner institutions from across Canada such as the Remai Modern, Ryerson University, the National Gallery, and The Rooms, to develop a cross-country leadership program with candidates in each location who meet annually for a leadership summit, with the opportunity to present and share ideas and meet with national and international arts sector leaders. These programs could be developed to specifically target female and diverse candidates that reflect Canada's population, and could create a new generation of Canadian leaders in the arts and culture sector.
I've also been asked to share my thoughts on gender parity on visual arts boards. The good news there is that these boards do have majority representation for women, though visible minorities and indigenous people are again greatly under-represented. I believe this needs to change.
In addition to my work at Art Toronto, I'm also a founding member of the board of the Toronto Biennial of Art, a new multi-venue art event that is set to launch in 2019. We are in the process of board-building and have set ourselves the task of building a diverse board of talented and passionate arts supporters who reflect our core values as an organization.
In considering how the federal government could work with partners to diversify these boards, I think this could be most effective in the grant application process. The Canada Council for the Arts has recently updated its funding policies with an emphasis on diversity as funding criteria that have a new weight. In this vein, there could be a preferred status given to charities or not-for-profit organizations that are working to address the issue of diversity in their representation, and these organizations could be eligible for more support for their projects. This could, in turn, lead organizations to create a greater range of board roles that encourage participation from a broader range of potential members.
Thank you again for the invitation to speak today.