Public Art and City Planning – A Conversation with Jane Perdue

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

Interview by Rosemary Heather and Yan Wu.

“Two Circles” by Micah Lexier, Two circles of identical size, identically positioned on either end of the lobby. One circle is solid black, the other a thin, black outline. Bay Adelaide Centre, Toronto. Photo by Tom Arban.

In the second interview in the series, Public Art and City Planning – A Conversation with Jane Perdue, Yan Wu, Public Art curator for the City of Markham, and art writer Rosemary Heather, talk with Perdue about her career, the changes she has seen over the years, what tools planners have for the provision of public art, what it’s like to work with private developers, and whether she has a favourite amongst the hundreds of Toronto’s public artworks.

Jane Perdue has worked as the City of Toronto’s Public Art Coordinator for the City Planning Division for almost three decades. As an independent consultant, Perdue developed a Public Art Policy Framework for the City of Markham (then Town of Markham) in 2003, predating the public art program that was formalized in 2013. Perdue has also worked with other municipalities in Ontario and Canada on developing public art policies and public art master plans.

RH: How long have you been in the field of public art and what are the major shifts you have seen over the years?

I was hired by the City of Toronto in 1991, so I’ve been with the City for almost 30 years full-time as City Planning’s Public Art Coordinator. I studied film history and art studies and after I graduated from York University my background in public art really started when I was hired at A Space, the artist run centre. I was hired by AA Bronson of General Idea at A Space. I had some idea about General Idea, but I did not realize that I had such a wonderful opportunity. I worked with them for four years. We did a number of satellite projects. Some of them were on the TTC. Ben Mark Holzberg created a project called Rolling Landscape, using Cibachrome in the ad space inside subway cars and also installations in the bus shelters. So that was really innovative, it was around 1980-81. A Space also sponsored a performance at Nathan Phillips Square, with Marina and Ulay, and that was a fabulous opportunity for me to help with that. It was a 24-hour performance of Marina Abramovic and Ulay staring at each other. Then I was appointed to the Public Art Commission in 1985 and was on the Commission for four years as a volunteer to help advise the City. I came to the City with a visual art and film background but I became an accredited planner about 12-13 years ago, because I realized how interesting planning was and I wanted to understand better how planning worked. For my first assignment, it was urgent, I had to help write a report for something that didn’t happen for another 25 years and I had trouble for a while understanding that but that was also a lesson realized: you plan for an idea and it may take a decade or two to actually be fulfilled. As far as changes, at the beginning we would be speaking with the architect with the developers and urban designers and so on and it was a very conservative approach and it was usually sometimes they are already had an artwork in mind that they thought would just be perfect for the site and they wanted to know where they could site the plinth. So it was really about an independent sculpture—and there is nothing wrong with that—but the change has been over the years is about looking at the various opportunities for how public art may play a role in defining a character or identity or terminus, or locating people to an area as a draw. The public art might be part of the community planning guidelines and the urban design guidelines objectives, so the understanding has expanded in that way.

RH: A lot of public art today is associated with condo development. Can you describe what public art looked like before there was so much development happening in the city?

When I started, it was a recession, so there wasn’t a lot going on. There were a lot of policies that were put in place. Our official plan came in, I think it was 1994, and before that we had hired a woman—Patricia Fuller—who is very well known in the States as a public art consultant. She helped us to do what we called City Plan 91, and we had a whole chapter on public art. We were very new at it as far as implementing policies and programs. Before I was hired, Ken Greenberg, who is very well known in Toronto, was running the Urban Design section and worked with a woman—Mary Lynn Reimer —and they looked at policies and programs in the United States, because those started in around 1960, 1959. We were looking at examples that might fit for Toronto. That’s why there was a public art commission in 1985. We didn’t have a lot of programming then but that was the beginning of it, looking at the processes and what would work. Since then, yes there’s been a lot of condominiums that have been built, but that’s the market. That’s not our policies, that’s what the market has offered. But we do have public art in offices and in other institutions for sure, and there’s a number of examples that are across the city and it’s not just in the downtown core. Development certainly is happening the most in that area, but also in North York, East York and the West District, former Etobicoke.


Aerial view of sculptor Richard Serra’s controversial piece “Tilted Arc”, prior to its removal, at Federal Plaza, New York, May 10, 1985. (Photo by Robert R. McElroy/Getty Images).

RH: You’ve been on the scene a long time, and you were working with American public art consultants. How did the controversy around Richard Serra’s public work Tilted Arc affect you?

I’m not sure it affected us but we heard about it and realized what it really came down to was moral rights and copyright. Who owns the sculpture and who can remove it? I mean, how appalling of this developer to actually remove the artwork. So rights of artists were very important to us, so we have that in our contracts with the developers. It’s a hard one to get your head around saying “Well, I own the art but I don’t own the idea.” We saw that as a landmark case. We also had our own controversy in Toronto, with Michael Snow and his geese sculpture in the Eaton Centre. The marketing people wanted to put little ribbons around the geese for Christmas, and then they were thinking about Easter, that might be fun. Michael took them to court and said “No, you can’t do that.” That was also lessons learned for all of us, about the importance of respecting an artwork. On the other hand, there are two Jonathan Borofsky’s Hammering Man in Frankfurt and Seattle. It moves and, seasonally, it gets different hats. But Jonathan likes that. It’s playful and he supported it. But someone else might not think that’s a fun idea. People crawl up it and put a hat on it. And that’s public engagement. The Eaton Centre one was about marketing but this was not about public engagement.


YW: Part of the reason we commissioned this conversation is to look at different working models and how different the municipalities have public art programs and what we can learn from them. I’m very curious about the two streams of public art in the City of Toronto—one under Planning and one under Culture—and how they operate separately. What’s the difference? How do they interact with each other and facilitate each other?

Well, with the former City of Toronto—and this is going back before amalgamation—City Planning did all of it. City Planning commissioned capital projects, our own infrastructure projects—that’s when the public art program started—and then also the private developer program. This is when we had North York, East York, Scarborough, Etobicoke, Metropolitan Toronto. There were several different layers of governments and agencies. Metro Toronto had its own agency, and the other boroughs were beginning to have their own public art policies. With amalgamation, almost 20 years ago, the roles and responsibilities were divided up, because the City just became so big for one department to be able to manage or handle all of that. It wasn’t possible. So, the culture division is responsible for the art that is on City-owned lands. Planning is responsible for overseeing the private developer program. But from that, culture gets a lot of money from the developers. The developers have three options. One is to commission public art on site on their own property in the public realm, or they can donate the funds to the City and that would then go to the culture division. Culture is not going to commission on the developer’s property. They’re going to find a park or a public area in the vicinity of the development—ideally—and then commission the artwork. If it’s not a big enough sum, they will collect the money until there’s enough there to commission a work of art. Then the third option is a combination of the two. There might be some money that would go to the City and then some that would remain on-site. The culture division runs competitions. They are open, they are transparent, they usually happen in two stages, and they do a public call. With the install, the City oversees this, and hires consultants to help them, because it’s not a large department. City Planning oversees the method within which the developer will commission public art: what kind of competition they have, where will the art be, who is on the jury, who is making decisions, who are the artists, and so on. It’s a paper trail, in a way. They put together a public art plan. It comes to a group called the Toronto Public Art Commission, chaired by David Anselmi, which is a group of volunteers who advise the Council, and they also advise City Planning. When the plan is approved, we report it to the Council, and then they go ahead with the actual commissioning of the work. So there’s two different streams, but we work together very closely, and while the Culture division is responsible for works on capital infrastructure, they don’t always get it. It’s not always applied consistently. They actually get a lot of money through City Planning, that goes directly from the private sector. A significant amount is generated from the private sector that comes to the City.


YW: In that case, if it’s option one and the developer decides to run their own plan, on their own site, and the developer keeps ownership of the work, do they have the option to do direct commissions? In the context of municipalities, commissioning methods are limited by procurement policy or purchasing by-laws. Because of budget size, this usually requires a competitive procurement process, which makes directly working with certain artists not an option—either through direct commissions or curated projects, even though we know their work will work well in the context of the site.

Exactly. You have to be accountable. Everybody does. It doesn’t matter what kind of competition. At the end of the day everybody has to be able to say, “This is how it happened.”


YW: Even with a private developer, do they have to do this?

They don’t have to do it. But they bring forward a public art plan to the City. We review it. It goes to the Commission. We report on it to the Council, and if there’s changes, they will let us know. But the changes might be because an artist that they want to work with isn’t available. Or maybe a jury member isn’t available. But do they have to explain how they do it? Perhaps not, but they might want to. They might have a brochure or they have a plaque. And that’s for the public to enjoy as well. That’s such an important aspect of this as well. That’s really how it works. There’s a lot of accountability. Not to get too much into the bureaucracy, but let’s say they had committed a million dollars, they actually provide financial receipts. They let us know how the money was spent. We have a chart specifying how much you can spend on maintenance, on administration and how much should be held for the actual artwork. That’s what we’re interested in knowing and making sure that it’s there, that it’s not being used up by changing drawings or architecture—all of that. The other aspect you asked me about was: what kind of competition? We encourage the developers to have a competition. They could have a direct commission, and they have. Sometimes it’s worked. We just warned them, I guess you could say: “You know what that means? You’re working with one artist and what happens if it doesn’t work out? You need to have a memorandum of understanding. You need to work with the artists. Have legal agreements, that if you need to say, we can’t do this together, you can get there. I won’t name the artist, but there was a case—probably now about 10 years ago—where the artist sued the developer because the developer did not go ahead with that particular commission and commissioned another artist. And we had to be all involved in that. So they do have the option to do a direct commission, but for the most part it’s a limited competition and it’s probably five or six artists that they’re interested in. Some developers will do an open call, which is great. But you usually know which artists might apply. Or they could encourage artists to apply. So they’ll have a two stage or maybe three stage process: an open call to see what’s out there, just send in your credentials to get a short list together, and then invite those artists to produce proposals and be paid for it. That’s the other part of it that we look at with the developers, of course, how much are the artists getting, what are the fees? It’s very important to oversee that. We help the developer spend their money, in the right way.


YW: On this type of project, does the developer usually hire a third party to run the competition, or run the project as a whole for them?

Always. They will always hire a consultant. We have had a couple developers in the past who are art collectors—and again I won’t say who—but very prominent collectors, who say “I can run this competition”. And within a few days we get a phone call back asking “Who is it that we could hire”? Because it’s a lot of work. It’s administration, it’s understanding what artists are out there, understanding the implications of a contract for an artist—all of those things that happen behind-the-scenes that aren’t as much fun and interesting, but are obviously key to the success of the program. So that’s why we have in our chart a limit on how much a developer could spend on a consultant and running the competitions. If they don’t hire an art consultant, we know that the staff at the City are going to be doing a lot of work, and that’s not our role.


YW: Does the developer have the option to let the City run the project?

No. In the agreements with them, we outline what our expectations are. This includes administration, running competition, etc. Frankly, if a developer asked us to run their competition, we would say “No, we can’t do that. We don’t have the staff or the resources, and why would we be running a competition for something that then would be not on our land? That’s not part of our mandate.” Another city might say “We can help you.” And certainly, I’m not suggesting that they write a public art plan and we report to Council and hear back in three years. Not at all. It’s almost on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that we are hearing from the art consultants. If they run into problems and challenges and updates, we’re there to help them, for sure, but not to run the program.

RH: I had a conversation with the public art consultant Brad Golden and he was talking about how the competition in the market ramped up and that’s why the architecture in the city got more ambitious, let’s say, because there was so much building and they needed to differentiate themselves. That brings up the question: do the developers see that public art as a necessary evil or do they like it? Would they see it as a way to differentiate themselves in the market?

Yes, they do. And if they see it as a necessary evil, they won’t be doing it. Remember, this is an option for them. It’s voluntary until they agree to do it. It’s about density bonusing. It’s about allowing the City to be in a position to secure public benefits, and public art is one of them. It may not be on all projects that are eligible. It’s the developers option. If they want to enter into the field of public art and commission public art, they will say that. If they don’t want to, if they think it’s a necessary evil, as you put it, they’re not going to do it. And frankly, I don’t think it would be much fun for staff either. If they come in and say “we were told we had to do this, how do we get it over with, how do we do it, and so on”. Actually, sometimes it turns around and it’s more positive but for the most part, if they don’t want to do it, they won’t. But if we’ve secured a public art commitment initially, it could be different owners by then. So they may just decide to go for option two and just give the money to the City, and that’s a contribution as well. And I think when you say that some of the buildings, because of the market, are more interesting, and they’re more innovative and creative, absolutely. And so are the architects, and the urban designers and the planners for that project. A lot of them see public art as a real benefit, because it can add that character and signal that this building, this development, is different. Come stay here, come live here, come buy. Rent an office here, or whatever. I think public art not just in Toronto but in the Western world and much further has really taken this on. And it’s not new. It’s been going on for hundreds of years. What public art is, with a plaza and so on. But it has evolved and I think that some developers are more open to it because they see the benefits they see how it has the potential to improve their development. They also get awards, they get acknowledged. There’s been a number of awards recently. Concord Adex got the Arts and Business award from the Toronto Arts Foundation at the Mayor’s lunch just a few weeks ago, which is fantastic. And that’s for all the public that they’ve done in the city. The Toronto Urban Design Awards for Micah Lexier at the Adelaide Centre won the top award, this is two years ago. So that gets their attention as well.


YW: How has Section 37, which allows the developer to add community benefits in exchange for increased density, played a role in the public art program?

Section 37 is part of the planning act and it has formalized the public art program. Whereas, before it came into play—and I think we’re talking probably about 15 years ago or so, in the planning act they included Section 37—and they allowed municipalities to secure public benefits as a trade-off to density and bonuses, so really formalizing that kind of engagement. Public art is mentioned, but it could be many public benefits. And it’s for municipalities to choose to use Section 37. A lot of municipalities don’t use it. They never have and that’s their choice. Before that, we had different kinds of agreements. Basically, they were called collateral agreements, formalizing a commitment from a developer to commission public art. Over the years, these agreements have become more fulsome. The public art provisions are pretty tight. We have a template that we provide to the lawyers and then the lawyers go back and forth and have a look at it and so on. So it’s a tool that we use. It’s not the only tool. We have Urban Design guidelines. We have public realm guidelines. We have secondary plans. We have tertiary plans. We have all kinds of different documents that help to engage, or help to forecast that there’s a potential for public art. And I I think in my introduction here I did mention but, I’m a planner as well as coming to the field with my background in the visual arts and film, because I find it so interesting. So I’m an accredited planner. I’m a combination of the two, which is fantastic, in that it helps me when I’m in conversation with other developers and planners. Because I understand that public art isn’t the first thing that they think about. It’s the first thing I think about. But it’s about trying to find that balance. How they would benefit. If public art can play that role, it’s fantastic.


RH: When I looked at the City’s map of public artworks, which is great, there are many little art works, but does Toronto need some kind of big huge iconic work, like the CN tower? Something that really brands the city, like Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Chicago?

When you say there’s lots of little works, I mean, there are hundreds of works and some of them are little but I think a lot of them are very large, and really have impact. That map represents what Culture did and what the private developers have done and there are probably about 400 works on that map. It goes right back to the 1850s when donations came to the city and most of those are monuments and memorials and pretty traditional works. Something like Cloud Gate could be fantastic but I did hear Ken Lum’s keynote speech, and he wasn’t being critical of Cloud Gate, but he talked about the attention and how much money it takes to actually maintain that artwork, a million dollars a year, but that remember that Cloud Gate it started with a smaller budget and then it went up and up to about $25 million, and it’s fantastic. It’s a great tourism draw. I went to Millennium Park. because I want to see that and the Plensa that’s what you go to, but Chicago also has fantastic art everywhere else in the city, and architecture too. That’s a city that understands what private can do to improve the public realm. And that’s what Millennium Park is. I’m open to it. If there’s an idea for an iconic work of art. Where it would be, I don’t know. Who it would be by, I don’t know. But if we could ask the private sector to contribute to amassing monies to do this, I think that would be great. But if that means that’s all we’re going to get, then I think that might be a problem. I think you have to have a balance. In planning, if there’s an initiative—like the John Street Corridor or the Bloor Street streetscape—if there is an initiative that we say “This is real. We want to dedicate public art dollars to it” then that’s what we’ll do. And we’ll secure that from the private sector. It comes to the City. It’s held until there is the opportunity to actually do it.


YW: So about half of the works on the map are owned by the private sector?

Yes, and the City is working on expanding that inventory to incorporate existing public art websites from City Planning, Culture, and Transportation, and launching it with the Year of Public Art. This includes all of the street art programs. There are dozens and dozens of murals. That’s under Transportation, which is another really interesting program that the City does. That came about because of the graffiti that was happening. Because of the street art that wasn’t considered art—it was tagging and vandalizing private buildings. And there was an initiative to put together a committee that looked at the so-called graffiti art and an owner would come forward to the City and say, “I like it. I commissioned it. People want it,” and so it would remain. Otherwise, they were being told to remove it by the bylaw officers, by municipal licensing, and if they didn’t remove it, there would be a charge. So they would then sometimes resist and say “I like it.” We haven’t met for a long time, but I’m actually on that group that helped to evaluate whether it was art or not, which was a problem too, because that’s not for me to do, so we would say “Get some support from your neighbour or your local business association. Write a letter and tell them. That started because of all of the tagging. How can we clean up the street—maybe? And out of that came the StreetARToronto (StART) program, approaching some of these artists and saying “Do you want to do this officially, or not?” If you don’t want to do it officially then we won’t work with you. But do you want us to work with you and commission works that you can have that might be on a more permanent basis. We can pay you to do that. We can find walls and areas and you can work with the community and actually install these artworks. And that’s how that program started. That’s going back about a decade and it’s just fantastic—what’s been done and how it enlivens the city.


YW: One last question, you can choose not to answer. You have all these hundreds of works and commissions realized through you, what’s your favourite piece?

No. I can’t do that. I remember somebody else was asked that once and said it’s like asking me who’s your favourite child? We have so many backstories on projects that they might be more about how we got there to have something that’s magnificent, but I don’t think I can do that. When I do slide presentations, I do select ones that are probably the most prominent and maybe the most sophisticated in their presentation. That for me is then congratulating and celebrating whoever commissioned it and the artist, of course, but I do like the ones that people maybe don’t know about and maybe discover. There’s a lot of artworks in the City of Toronto that people don’t even know exists. Maybe you know, we have a sculpture installation by Evan Penny right at Bay and Wellington, right in the downtown core there’s an installation there that he did over 20, 25 year ago, and it’s fabulous. And then there are the big scale ones, like the James Turrell, it’s so fantastic to have one in Toronto. I remember the art consultant was saying that the construction crew were saying “What is this? It’s just light and colour. That’s not art.” It’s really more of not a trick but it’s just something that’s a little more subtle in some ways that I enjoy. But they’re all my children. They’re all my favourites.

Interview conducted by Rosemary Heather and Yan Wu on October 21, 2020 as part of Markham Public Art’s Becoming Public Art: Working Models and Case Studies for Art in Public, a nine-week virtual summit presented by the City of Markham in partnership with ART+PUBLIC UnLtd. Framed by current discussions happening at the intersection of contemporary art, public realm issues and urbanism, the summit features working models and case studies that address the challenges and opportunities faced by those working in this constantly evolving field. 

What is a Public Art Master Plan?

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

Helena Grdadolnik talks to Rosemary Heather

Ken Lum, Monument to East Vancouver

This interview is part of a series, commissioned by Markham Public Art on the occasion of their virtual public art summit Becoming Public Art: Working Models & Case Studies for Art in Public.

In What is a Public Art Master Plan? Helena Grdadolnik talks to Rosemary Heather about her work with Markham to make a Public Art Master Plan for the city, providing insight into this complex undertaking and what role the public plays in the process.

Helena Grdadolnik is a Director at WORKSHOP Architecture, where she leads the studio’s urban design and cultural projects. In this interview, Grdadolnik talks about her work with Markham to draw up a Public Art Master Plan for the city, a process that involves extensive consultation with a range of stakeholders—including artists, the public, city officials and staff, and private developers. The Master Plan was approved in the Fall of 2019, with the followup Implementation Plan approved this past Winter. How public art gets made and who, in addition to the artist, makes decisions about where it gets built and the form it takes is often an opaque process. With experience that includes creating Public Art Master Plans for the cities of Kingston and Newmarket, Grdadolnik provides insight into this complex undertaking and what role the public can play in the process.

What is a Public Art Master Plan?

I think when people hear “Public Art Master Plan” they think members of the public would really be involved in its development—and you do want that input and feedback on the vision for the Public Art Master Plan. But really so much is tied to details of how a City works. There are three things in most Master Plans—they differ from one city to another—but basically they are: the goals of the program itself where public input is important, then there’s the rules which, in City terms, are usually called policies, and there are the processes, like how things work in the city, who does what, who’s responsible for what, where the money comes from, all that. So when you look through this kind of document, although it has a lot of nice pictures and diagrams, a lot of it is just kind of “city speak”—stuff the City needs to figure out for how it’s going to run the program that crosses a lot of different departments. The task is to try to ensure quality and integrity in the decision-making process and make sure that who they’re hiring is a professional artist who may challenge ways of thinking, not someone who is just decorating the landscape.

So much of a Public Art Master Plan is inaccessible, or hard to understand because it involves the nitty-gritty of City work. One thing a master plan can do is set locations and budgets for a work. It’s disappointing when a master plan stops there—e.g., x marks the spot in five different locations in the city, and we’re going to spend $200,000 here and $1,000,000 there—because I think that really limits the artistic process if you make all these decisions before you get an artist involved. In Markham, people in the city have helped us decide those locations. Another thing is to set out the main goals—like, what is the city trying to do, why even have public art? Also, you always have to figure out where the money’s going to come from for a program, especially in the first couple of years, otherwise it’s not going to happen.

You might have heard of the Percent for Art Program? This stipulates that if you build a new building, one percent of the budget of that project is invested in an artwork on that site. Now, it could be that a good artwork gets made, but it also means that the work has to be in the location of a new building. It tends to be that new artworks appear in these locations where there is all this new development, and not necessarily where artists and community members might want to see new works.

The typical process that many cities follow is to hire an artist through an open call asking for examples of their previous work. From there, three to five artists are shortlisted. At that point, the artists are each required to work out in detail a proposal for an artwork without getting a chance to have any meaningful dialogue with the communities, including with the public art curator for the City, and then one of the proposals is selected by a jury.

This process is codified in a lot of City’s master plans as the only way to commission art. We have tried to move away from that and bring in more options for how to work with artists that better follow artistic practice and give opportunity to involve members of the public. Sometimes, yes it might be that open call, but other times it could be a curated process. In some cases, its by invitation because it’s a very specific project. Other times, it could be you’re sending out a call where artists can propose what they’d like to do and where. I think Vancouver has a good example of that, with their artist-initiated program.

Can you describe who the Public Art Master Plan is for?

Ultimately, it should be for the people who live, work and go to school in Markham. That’s the ultimate goal of any of these City plans. It’s not for the politicians, it’s not for the people who work for the City and it’s not for the artists. In some ways, it should support quality art and fair practices, so it is for artists in some ways, but it really ultimately is for the people; particularly, the Plan’s vision says local residents and visitors. So if you work in Markham but you live in Toronto, this plan should still work for you because it’s making places that are interesting for you to go to, and which are free to see. At the same time, to make quality artworks, we need to make it work for artists and the way they work. I think many plans miss this element of understanding how artists work. That said, it is a different type of process for making a public art piece than in a gallery setting, different types of people will look at your work every day on their way to work, for instance. At the same time, why bother having a public art program if you have this process that just makes the resulting art super safe and you don’t take any risks and you don’t challenge people at all, and it’s just decorative?

Why would it be less desirable to have a public artwork that is just decorative?

In terms of public art, do you want it to make you think? And do you want it to be more than a one liner of, say, oh that looks pretty. You don’t need artists involved to make something that’s prettier or eye catching. You can do that in other ways, whether that’s through landscaping, or whether that’s through building design, or the decoration on the outside of the building. The purpose of having an artist is to make you think a bit differently, to make you notice things. There’s a term in public art called “plop art”, which has a negative connotation, and which is this idea of just putting a statue on the corner of a building site and calling it a day. It is put there with no attachment to the community, it doesn’t really talk about anything about the site, you could have picked it out of a catalogue and then placed it there. I personally go back and forth on whether we should expect public art to be a more socially engaged process? Not always. But you need different ways to engage with how artists work if you’re going to have a program that is not just about making visually appealing work. I think there’s nothing wrong with something that is visually appealing, but it’s not the only aim. If you have a lot of public art in the city, you’re not going to always love every piece, but hopefully you love some of them and they go beyond just looking good in an Instagram photo. And maybe some of them you don’t like at first, but then they grow on you over time.

Part of the goal of a Master Plan is to get urban planners, developers, artists, elected officials and staff to be in alignment on the role public art can play in a city. Did you have input from any or all of these stakeholders when making your Master Plan?

Yes. With a Master Plan, I might have personal ideas of what I think is best but my job is to work with all these different departments and stakeholders and listen and try to make sure that we are making a plan that’s flexible and responds to the place. We had engaged the local developers that play a major role in development in the city, and the City’s urban planners, public realm and facilities staff were part of that process. It can be really hard because this document needs to balance and create consensus between a multitude of stakeholders. Then we also need to bring the public into moulding the plan’s vision and that can be challenging. But we did weave all of those voices and then try to make a workable plan. The first chapter in the Master Plan is the public art vision, which describes what the vision is, I’m reading: “Innovative Public Art will highlight the city’s unique characteristics and create new experiences and destinations through which local residents and visitors can engage with each other and the rich surroundings in Markham.”

Basically we are saying that the public art will be specific to the city and will give people new experiences. Then you get into objectives, and you always have trouble crafting the exact wording to speak to so many different perspectives. Many of these professionals know planning policy and understand the ramifications of a single sentence in an official plan that could really make a difference to what is asked from a developer. We had a public workshop and we got people to literally cross out the words in the first draft that they didn’t like and then we took the next draft to a public art advisory committee, which is mostly made up of residents in Markham, some of whom have art knowledge and some of whom don’t. They again picked through words and we went through a few more revisions. The vision sentence is always going to be aspirational and hard to pin down. The objectives need to get more tangible, (and again, I’m reading) to: “Inspire people to live in, work in, visit and invest in Markham; Celebrate the diverse cultures and heritage in Markham from multiple points of view; and Connect residents to Markham’s built and natural environment.” The plan states that every public art project needs to meet at least two of these objectives—to inspire, celebrate or connect. A work is not going to do all of these things every time; every piece of public art does not need to celebrate the diverse cultures of Markham, for instance. If you try to say it has to do all of these things every time you are getting to a weird point where the work does nothing. We can judge what an artist is developing based on these three things, but they don’t have to hit every point in every work.

The last element in the Master Plan vision is the Guiding Principles. There are seven of them and that’s where you make sure, for instance, that there’s quality control. One of these is “artistic excellence and innovation”. You want to make sure that you’re not getting just any artists, but the best artists. Another one is “protecting artist integrity, copyright and fair pay”, which is needed to protect artists’ interests. This is needed because when budgets get tight, like they are right now, the City might be tempted to say “Well, we are using this artist we found who will do it for free”. Instead of paying an artist that is really well-respected, we’re going to have this other person. So 1) that’s not meeting artistic excellence, and 2) it’s not fairly compensating artists for their work. Other points of quality control are “meeting accessibility standards” or “geographic reach”—making sure that public artworks are not only located downtown. Those are the elements in the Master Plan that are probably the easiest for people to understand who are not in the art world or in the City policy world. This means that when a person is starting in the Public Art Curator position and starting a project with staff from other departments, it makes sure that there are standards and objectives that can be referred to, without this detail getting lost in a 50-page document.

Did you have artist input on the plan?

Yes. We worked with the York Region Arts Council and the Markham Arts Council. They had helped us circulate the invite to a public event, as well as working through the public art advisory. As well, we did get input from artists from Markham, but I would say the number of artists we spoke to wasn’t that large. I would say, it could be better. As part of our public workshop, we had local artists and other art patrons on a panel to talk about their perspective and give their thoughts as well as an artist who has worked a lot in public art and was commissioned for a piece in Toogood Pond Park, by Mary Anne Barkhouse. She gave a great presentation in which she just talks about her perspective working on these projects, including what a city gets wrong in the process and how they could improve. There were a lot of people who work in city departments in the audience, so I think for them this was really helpful. So we had some artists that were engaged, though I would say that’s where generally Master Plans could be better but, as I said, the plan is not for artists, so engaging them is not the primary focus. We were also really lucky to be working with the Varley Art Gallery, based in Markham, and Yan Wu, Markham’s Public Art Curator. They already work with artists and have a lot of processes in place for working with and commissioning artists.

In a talk you gave you defined the goal of public art as “Letting you know that you’re in Markham” I love this idea. Another way to say it is: You’re creating landmarks. Do you strategize in this way so that you have a project that’s created at such a scale that it is iconic for the city?

No, every public art project doesn’t have to be iconic, every project doesn’t need to do the same thing. At the same time, the City of Markham is pursuing a “gateway strategy” that means, for instance, you are driving on the highway and how do you know you’ve gotten to Markham? Their thinking is that public art is one of the ways that you can make this kind of gateway. The easiest way doesn’t involve art, you could just literally make a big sign that says “Markham”. So you could consciously have a public art project where part of the stated goal is that the work is a kind of signpost. But I don’t think every project has to do this and I do think that some projects can do this in a subtler way, or that they aren’t intended as a symbol of a place, but become this over time. Ken Lum’s East Van sculpture, for instance, is a place maker that was a result of Vancouver’s artist-initiated public art program. The program wasn’t saying “We want a marker for East Vancouver, can you make one?” Ken Lum said he wanted to make a marker for East Vancouver and he decided where to put it. With a lot of other pieces, it’s the other way around. I think of Angel of the North in Northern England at the edge of Newcastle, which is this Antony Gormley piece that was intentional in making a landmark. That’s one thing you could do but there are other projects that I like that are just kind of quiet and almost hidden and small that maybe make you stop and notice something, redirect your attention to look on the ground. I personally tend to be less interested in the iconic pieces. I think they’re easier to conceive but don’t always have the same level of depth or staying power.

Recent trends are favouring more temporary works or digital screen based works. In your plan, do you make a recommendation for a balance between the two types, more traditional and the latter, and do you think temporary events like Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, for instance, could provide a model for Markham?

In the Master Plan, we included a few relevant case studies from similar-sized cities to get people to visualize what could actually happen within a public art program. Surrey B.C. has a lot of similarities to Markham. It’s a suburban community that is rapidly urbanizing but is close to a larger urban centre (in this case Vancouver) and it has a huge immigrant population who bring a different vision to the place and lots of good food. Surrey Urban Screens, for example, is a large screen on the side of a community centre featuring a rotating program of curated digital artworks. That was one suggestion we had for Markham as it bills itself as a “high tech capital”. The City has a lot of high-tech companies located there, which I hadn’t known before this project. So that was a question: Could they build on that branding? There were also many people we heard from living in the villages in Markham, who tend to want to mark the nineteenth century colonial heritage of the place. And we wanted to make sure that there’s some balance that that’s not the only thing that gets marked. We heard from other community members that they wanted to diversify the stories that are being told. And to tell the other stories that aren’t being told. There are segments that were very focussed on putting up monuments to the location’s heritage and see public art as only putting up these monuments. We also heard from people who were interested in looking at other aspects of the city. An example is the Rouge National Urban Park, it goes partially through Markham. National Park staff and non-profit Park People came to our meetings and brought the idea that, as the Trail Network is not complete, how do you make people know about the Park and when you are in it? Can you do something different that doesn’t involve a monument? In the Master Plan, we used the Münster Sculpture Project as a case study example. Could you have an event, like Münster, that would build up a program of public art overtime, that was more focussed on the wider national or international arts community coming to the place, but that also would be of interest to the local population and leave a legacy?

Thinking about the programming that Markham did over the summer, in a project called Delimit, people were invited to make a proposal for hypothetical artworks for sites in Markham, chosen partly by the public and partly by the curatorial team. There was no expectation that these would get built, which gave participants licence to dream big. Regardless, is there any chance that any of those projects could get made?

I was involved in the jury. Yes, some could be built, but I don’t think they will be. I’m probably not the right person to ask, and it wasn’t the intention that the City moves ahead with any of the projects. But I think the program was helpful, a lot of people have an idea about what public art looks like and this program had artists show people what different types of projects could look like, and the way artists think when considering a site. I think it was helpful in that respect, but I don’t think any of them went through a feasibility study determining if they could work on a site. For instance, is there a manhole underneath or will the proposed connections harm a healthy tree? To make artwork in public spaces there is a lot to consider. Many of the proposals would be doable, like the idea for temporary projections onto the Town Hall, but others would need more development and changes to make them work. There was a nice mix of artwork proposed, and I feel if you showed people the range that everyone would find one that they would really like, and also other things that they didn’t or that weren’t what they’re used to.

You’ve worked on the Public Art Master Plan for a number of cities, including Kingston, and Newmarket, what was different about Markham compared to these other jobs?

I would say the biggest difference is that Markham has someone, Yan Wu, who is the City’s Public Art Curator, and who is also working meaningfully in the art world. I think that’s really helpful for a real understanding and grounding in not just City processes but also art-making practices. An individual in that role can really be key to connecting all the different players and communities that have to be involved in a public art project. I think that really was helpful in the process of going through the Public Art Master Plan and also for what happens next and how the program is implemented. The other thing is that Markham is a really interesting mix of small-town, heritage sites and newly developed urban form. It has a really unique mix and differs in how people expect a suburban city to operate when compared with some of the other GTA cities around it, of a similar size. This creates interesting prospects for its future, which is why it’s important to make sure that the Master Plan makes recommendations to accommodate those different voices and perspectives.

Interview conducted by Rosemary Heather on September 24, 2020 as part of Becoming Public Art: Working Models and Case Studies for Art in Public, a nine-week virtual summit presented by the City of Markham in partnership with ART+PUBLIC UnLtd. Framed by current discussions happening at the intersection of contemporary art, public realm issues and urbanism, the summit features working models and case studies that address the challenges and opportunities faced by those working in this constantly evolving field.

Why Toronto is trying to evict an arts organization on Queen West

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

The fate of the Toronto Media Arts Centre on Lisgar hangs in the balance as a civil dispute with the city drags on

BY ROSEMARY HEATHER MARCH 9, 2020

Just John and Dom Dias perform at TMAC for the opening of an art exhibition by Jordan Sook in June 2019. Photo: Jennie Robinson Faber

A years-long dispute between the city and a Queen West arts space could soon find a resolution.

Since 2015, the artist-run Toronto Media Arts Centre (TMAC) has been in a fight over its occupancy of a building on Lisgar south of Queen West. The 30,000-square-foot facility is home to four non-profit art organizations focused on media arts: Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC) and Charles Street Video – early partners in the project – and video game arts organizations, Dames Making Games and Gamma Space.

TMAC wants legal title to the space. Without it, the organization can’t make full use of the location, which is staffed by volunteers. TMAC members were closely involved in the design of the facility – the build was financed through the city’s Section 37 provision, which allows developers to add density or height to a building in exchange for community benefits – and in 2015 the organization signed an agreement of purchase and sale.

However, within a year, city hall moved to cancel the agreement, citing a lack of confidence in TMAC management, in part due to infighting between the various organizations. (At the time, there were different organizations under the TMAC umbrella.)

In response, TMAC sued the city, and the parties agreed in 2018 that TMAC could take occupancy provided the organization met certain fundraising targets. Whether TMAC succeeded in meeting these targets is being challenged by the city, which asked TMAC to vacate the premises last March.

“It is the city’s position that statements on TMAC’s website regarding the funds it raised do not satisfy the clear targets it agreed to,” Pat Tobin, Toronto’s director of arts and culture services, wrote in a statement to NOW, adding that the organization has failed to demonstrate that it has “the financial capacity to successfully fit up, own and operate the facility over the long-term.”

In response to the city’s demand that TMAC leave the building, TMAC filed a motion against the city in June.

At stake is the future of the purpose-built space, home to a community of artists and makers. TMAC estimates more than 60,000 people have attended workshops and events at the centre since April 2018.

Complicating the situation is the building’s developer, Urbancorp, filing for bankruptcy in 2016, leaving the building unfinished and not up to code. Concrete floors are unpolished and accessibility considerations were never provided. TMAC’s 200-seat cinema space is half-finished, though potentially functional.

“Under the terms of our agreement with the bankruptcy trustee, TMAC can’t use the cinema,” says Lauren Howes, executive director of the CFMDC. “We know we are getting a space loaded with deficiencies, but the benefit TMAC brings to the community is clear.”

The idea to create a hub on West Queen West devoted to film, video, photography and interactive web art dates back to 1994 when a feasibility study for the project was commissioned by six Toronto non-profit arts organizations.

As originally envisioned, it would bring together production, exhibition and distribution services for media-based artists and create a home for a broad cross-section of creators, as well as enabling cost savings for the tenant organizations. Ownership would, in the words of the study, “anticipate the future needs of the organizations.” Today, the phrase reads like a grim foreshadowing of the ongoing fight for arts organizations to find – and hold on to – affordable real estate in 2020.

In late February, the two parties underwent a cross-examination. In civil disputes, judicial mediation provides a non-binding opinion on evidence given by the opposing parties. The finding can then be used as a basis upon which to negotiate a settlement, avoiding the expense of a trial.

Henry Faber, founder of Gamma Space, a co-working space for game and interactive media makers and president of the TMAC board, spoke on behalf of TMAC at the cross-examination.

“We maybe saw a glimmer of hope,” Faber told NOW. “My cross-examination took four hours. But I was asked no questions about TMAC’s ability to deliver benefit to the community.” Who benefits from TMAC’s existence is at the core of the organization’s appeal to the arts community for support in the dispute.

“I spent all day being grilled about the viability of TMAC and then came back to a vibrant event at the space,” Faber said, referring to an all-day symposium about the future of arts management in Toronto. It is one of more than 450 events TMAC has hosted since 2018.

Howes told NOW that TMAC has received over 250 detailed letters of support.

“These are impassioned letters. TMAC is a meaningful organization within the community,” she says. “What we have provided to the community is well beyond what even we envisioned,” she adds.

The city remains unconvinced.

In March 2019, TMAC announced it had secured over $2.5 million in sponsorship. Partners include the gaming giant Ubisoft, and local internet provider Beanfield Metroconnect.

But, according to the city, TMAC agreed in writing to abide by a decision made by an independent adjudicator about whether the more than $2.5 million in fundraising partnerships fulfill agreed-upon targets.

“The city has made repeated efforts to support TMAC in its fundraising efforts, including reducing the financial targets over time, providing extensions to deadlines and consenting to the monitor granting TMAC interim occupancy over part of the space,” says Tobin. “Despite these efforts, the city’s position remains that TMAC has still not raised the funds in the manner it agreed to in the minutes of settlement.

“For almost a year, the city has repeatedly asked TMAC to participate in this independent adjudication process on the basis it agreed to in these minutes of settlement,” he adds. “But TMAC has declined.”

TMAC disputes this assertion.

“We followed the steps outlined by the city [in the adjudication process], but the city instructed the adjudicator to disregard our fundraising, then halted the process entirely,” a spokesperson for TMAC said in a statement. “We filed our motion in June precisely because of the city’s interference with the independent adjudication process. We’ve heard nothing further… about proceeding with the review as agreed.”

Transcripts from last week’s cross-examination will be reviewed by a judicial mediator on April 15.

@rosemheather

Cassils turns the act of looking at trans bodies into performance

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

While suspended from a harness in a Plexiglas box, the Montreal artist made a big impression – and a mess – at the Gardiner Museum

BY ROSEMARY HEATHER MARCH 2, 2020

Cassils explored trans visibility and isolation in the performance Up To And Including Their Limits at the Gardiner Museum. Photo: Cassils with Alejandro Santiago.

How hard is it to scape raw clay off the walls of a plexiglass box while suspended from a harness? Very hard, judging by artist Cassils performance at the city’s Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art on February 20. For 90-minutes, Cassils swung themselves against the confines of a 10 x 10 box, moving to different levels within the space with the help of a theatrical rigger.

Visitors to the sold-out performance initially could only hear the sounds – grunts and hard breathing – of Cassils at work. Gradually the artist became visible through the clay-smeared apertures they made with their hands. Visibility was the point, with Cassils being the stand-in for the trans body in public consciousness. During the performance, it was easy to see how the audience becomes a stand-in for society at large.

The performance is part of the exhibition RAW, opening on March 5 at the Gardiner. Unfired clay is the medium for work by artists Magdolene Dykstra, Azza El Siddique and Linda Swanson, along with the performance by Cassils, the remnants of which will be on view in the gallery.

In person, Cassils is an imposing presence. They are of modest height (about 5-foot-6) but packed with muscle. Not surprising for someone who has worked as a stunt person and semi-pro boxer, and who runs a personal training business in Los Angeles. Originally from Montreal, Cassils attended California Institute of the Arts and went on to build a powerhouse art career that includes international recognition, gallery representation in New York City and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

NOW spoke with the artist at the Gardiner Museum the day after their performance.

As a viewer, looking in and hoping to see more as your performance progressed, I felt self conscious about the role I was playing as a voyeur. This faded, however, and I became invested in your efforts to remove the clay. Is that because as we see more of you it becomes easier to identify with you as a whole person?

It’s hard for me to be succinct about the thesis of the work since it’s the first time I performed it. I am making the audience’s act of looking performative, not just being an experience of passive enjoyment. They are going through a process of witnessing my struggle. There is a fascination with the trans identity. In the performance, I am both enacting and denying this dynamic.

I hadn’t before done a work where there was a barrier between me and the audience. At first, this cut my energy. But I see this as an expression of trans isolation. We are in this heightened moment of trans visibility. But without systemic change, it puts the trans body at risk. I am a white, middle-class trans person. I don’t represent the most stigmatized trans people. This is one reason why I trouble visibility.

The body obscured in the performance is a form of resistance to examination. But another element of the work is the way it puts you in control, are you doing this to reverse that dynamic?

No. I don’t feel in control. I am attached to a rope, controlled by someone who I can’t control. When I am upside down, there are straps in my harness that… if they press on my femoral artery for too long, I will die. I don’t have a lot of control over my velocity when I am swinging. I also have the responsibility to make a connection with the audience. The burden of representation is on me – the responsibility to make the work, and to connect with my audience.

The performance evokes a number of artists. I really thought about certain works by Yoko Ono, and especially Cy Twombly.

When I’m pulling the clay off the wall, I’m throwing it on the ground to create a platform I can stand on. When it’s high enough, the performance ends. Most of my work is about the indexical. Clay picks up every gesture. In the process of making the platform beneath me, I’m throwing the clay on the ground, and each time you can see the negative space of my fist. Doing this in a ceramics museum, it’s about self making and embodiment. It’s also about making a mess.

When Cassils pulled enough clay off the walls to create a platform to stand on, the performance ended. Photo: Cassils with Alejandro Santiago.

In one of your works, Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture, you gained 23 pounds of muscle in 23 weeks. I consulted a fairly technical article on bodybuilding.com about muscle gain. Turns out, gaining one pound of muscle per week is pretty much the optimum a bodybuilder can hope for. Sustained over 23 weeks, it’s an incredible feat. Did you do this bodybuilding to make yourself into an object?

It’s not bodybuilding. I was responding to a 1972 work by Eleanor Antin, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, in which she crash diets and documents the effect on her body. She documents performing an act of starvation. In 2011, when I did this work, there was very little awareness of trans identity. I identify as trans-masculine, not non-binary. I don’t believe I need to have a double mastectomy to be trans. I am an athlete and have my own personal training business. I think of my body as both an instrument and an image. To do this performance, I had to lay off the weight training and focus on my core flexibility. This is part of the vocabulary I am working with.

Looking at my snapshots of the performance, I was surprised to see how painterly they are. This is a thread that runs through all your work: becoming image. Formally, the work is very strong, very legible. Since all of it revolves around your body, are you making art as a pretext for circulating images of a powerful trans body?

Yes. I was trained as a painter. My work is always a material exploration; a tremendous goal of the work is formal investigation. I use a formal language that isn’t didactic; though it is still complicated, it can’t just be a clean read. Right now, I am working on something about for-profit immigration detention centres. That needs to be didactic.

@rosemheather

Army of YouTube

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

Faced with the awe-inspiring popularity  of web-monoliths like YouTube, contemporary art  risks becoming nothing more than a quaint relic of the 20th century.

It’s probably not fair to compare contemporary art practice with YouTube; yet there is evidence to suggest that somewhere in the ulterior of its collective brain, the art world does just this, and finds itself lacking. How else to understand the ongoing assurances given in art exhibition press releases and catalogue essays about the important  role the viewer plays in the construction of meaning – and the intention to facilitate it with this very exhibition?

If artists once played a leading – avant garde – role in providing a complex and forward-looking framework for reflection on the contemporary world, it now seems most comfortable bringing up the rear, providing explanations for developments already intuitively understood and widely enjoyed by the culture at large.

Of course, the argument can be made that conceptualism’s emphasis on the disembodied life of the mind presaged our current embrace of virtual experience; and that the early networks fostered by post-minimalism and its precursors – Fluxus, mail art, conceptualism, etc. – anticipated today’s social media. Emphasis on the relational in the last decade of art practice can likewise be seen as having the relevance of putting face-to-face human interaction back into the social media equation.

Still there is something desperate in the artworld’s current desire to kowtow to its audience – through invitations to throw coloured darts at a map, or converse with one another on bean bag chairs, or whatever. By all accounts the Guggenheim New York’s recent theanyspacewhatever, which featured work by known Relational practitioners like Liam Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija was a boring show. A cursory Google search will turn up dismissive blog reviews of the exhibition as such by its intended public; viz.,  Apparently, drinking coffee and standing around is art. Who would have thought ... 

In a recent E-flux article, Dieter Roelstraete voices similar doubts about contemporary art’s relevance, but from a different angle. In The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art he ponders the reasons for current art’s archaeological tendency – which ranges from artworks that investigate modes of museological display and historical re-enactments, to those artists who undertake actual archaeological digs. In Roelstraete’s analysis, such practices are symptomatic of two conditions: the first, to function as a corrective to a mass-culture that consumes its own products – movies, pop stars, best sellers – so quickly that it threatens to suck all cultural memory into a black hole of oblivion; the second, more troubling and readily suggested by the art world’s small army of past-reconstructors: an inability to imagine the future.

According to Roelstraete, this amounts to a failure on the part of current art practice to live up to its role as the avant-garde of our culture. But I would argue that the author’s reliance on a modernist framework when thinking about this problem, a construct that believes in the necessity of an art avant garde, is itself misplaced. Clues to what the future of our culture will look like are abundantly available elsewhere. All you have to do is look on YouTube.

The site is an ongoing argument for why its millions of users everyday have little reason to care about contemporary art practice. That said, it is only fair to point out that in terms of video technology’s cheapness, ease of use and sheer pliability, 70s art practice undertook some essential R&D that was cannily predictive of the technology’s current user-generated centrality to our culture.  For instance, when I look at the videos put on YouTube by San Francisco’s Jib Kidder to accompany the songs, sample-derived mash-ups, from his album All on Yall, I think of the 70s video work of, say, Dara Birnbaum or Christian Marclay’s work made in the decades after . But it’ iss hardly important to know these art historical precedents to enjoy what Kidder does.

When I asked Kidder by email why he chose to use the cut-up technique when making his videos, he responded that the data itself solicits this response to it: “It’s what it’s best at –  being copied.” In Kidder’s video for the song Windowdipper, morphic resonances between each seconds-long “slice” of data creates  a visual tempo connecting with the music’s beat. At the same time, through these resonances, the images editorialize not only on the artist’s chosen technique but also their context of presentation: YouTube itself.

Windowdipper’s rhythmic edits of video-viral clips of kids dancing visually reinforces the rhythm of the song. B By doing this, the artist  points to the way content on the web tends to self-replicate – the reason why the metaphor of ‘the viral’ – played out as dance fads and the hundreds of ‘answer’ videos that users’ uploaded daily – is so aptly applied to YouTube as a phenomenon.

Kidder’s videos provide a glimpse into YouTube’s labyrinthine grandeur. His comment that the data – a lot of it sourced from YouTube – elicits this response from him, is a reflection on the awe-inspiring amount of material that is available to be viewed at the site. It is also suggestive of the way that certain entities on the web are manifesting characteristics of an emergent intelligence.

The standard example of what a properly defined emergent intelligence looks like is provided by the social world built by ants. Possessing only the most infinitesimal of mental capacities, these insects work together to create a second level intelligence: the exceptionally well-run entity that is ant society. Strictly speaking, the web at this stage of its development is far too heterogeneous to meet the criteria of an emergent intelligence. But still, it makes sense to suggest that there lurks within the myriad of hands that continually contribute to the social world comprised by YouTube a kind of autonomous intelligence that wants to be organised into a second level of meaning.

Somewhere within the dynamic tension that exists between its excess and its accessibility, the web offers its users the tools for potentially profound moments of self-reflection on their use of the medium itself. For instance, the numerous Flash Mob tributes to Michael Jackson available on YouTube in the wake of the pop star’s death function like a metaphor for this possibility. Organised via the web and instant messaging, each such tribute is filmed in public space from a high-enough angle to facilitate the pattern recognition that is central to the meaning of the event.

Choreographed with the idea that the individual movements of a few dancers will ripple out, so that within minutes the whole crowd is moving in unison, the Flash Mob dance event creates itself in the very image of the self-organising entity – ie web culture. In this way, it performs the function often attributed to contemporary artworks – to provide a framework of intelligibility for tendencies in the culture as a whole.

The ant-YouTube analogy has further application in that it suggests a demotion of the individual in favour of the many. In this sense, YouTube makes good on Joseph Beuys’ faith in the universal potential of human creativity. Absorption of the one into the many also provides a fair description of the art world today – as it functions, if not how it currently sees itself.

If the phenomena generated by the web do what art is supposed to do, only better, then at the very least this should expand and clarify the definition of what art is – but it also has the effect of relegating much of the activity that currently takes place within the art context proper to the status of mere mannered relics of a bygone age.

The author would like to thank Ann Dean, Willy Le Maitre and Jacob Wren for their comments on this article.

Jib Kidder’s music can be purchased at: http://www.statesrightsrecords.com/

Originally published, September 2009 at the now defunct site apengine.org

The AGYU is opening a major new art gallery in North York

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

Still in the early planning stages, the $8 million standalone gallery will be located steps from the York University subway station

BY ROSEMARY HEATHER JANUARY 12, 2020

R.I.S.E., AGYU, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca,
The agYU commissioned Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca’s 2018 video RISE, which was shot in the Toronto-York Spadina subway extension. Courtesy of Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro

The Art Gallery of York University (agYU) wants to make North York a destination for art lovers.

Thanks to a $5-million donation from patrons Joan and Martin Goldfarb, York University is planning to build a standalone new home for its contemporary art gallery.

Still in early planning stages – the search for an architect has yet to begin – the new agYU location will be adjacent to the current gallery in York’s East Accolade building, just steps away from the York University subway stop. 

“The new gallery gives the agYU an opportunity to expand its art collection,” explains agYU director Jenifer Papararo, adding the school is pitching in $3 million toward the building. “The current collection is limited mostly due to limits in storage.”

Papararo, a Torontonian who recently returned to the city to lead the agYU after stints running galleries in Vancouver and Winnipeg, will head up the project. She hopes the new building will be open in two years.

It’s not confirmed yet whether agYU will continue to occupy the current gallery after the new one opens, she says. Details around the new location also have to be worked out. 

“Decisions have not been made yet about how the building sits in this location,” says Papararo.

“The gallery’s location on the subway [line] is huge,” says Toronto-based museum planner and consultant Gail Lord. “And the accessibility of North York to the rest of the province is very important.”

Lord sees the initiative as contributing to an ongoing democratization of the arts across the city. Recent developments include the city’s new public art strategy, which will get a big push in 2021, and annual art event Nuit Blanche’s forays into Scarborough, Etobicoke and North York.

She notes the new gallery will join the Ontario Science Centre, the Aga Khan Museum and the Meridian Arts Centre as North York venues with an arts focus.

“The data tells us the more art presented, the bigger the arts audiences,” she adds.

York University TTC subway station
A standalone art gallery at York University subway station would make the area more of a destination. Photo: Samuel Engelking

Before the Toronto-York Spadina subway extension opened in 2017, getting to York University was an arduous journey for students and gallery goers reliant on public transit.

The new subway stop meant the commons space situated just beyond the entrance has become more animated. An art gallery would only make it more of a destination.

“The new building could break out into this space,” Papararo says. “It has the potential to be a focal point of the campus.”

How might the new gallery fit in with the York’s large, brutalist concrete structures, which were built in the 1960s?

Newer buildings tend to stand out as experiments in new architectural styles, a sometimes risky gamble. The Bergeron Centre, home of the Lassonde School of Engineering, is one such example on the York campus, with its modish curves and showy glass facade. When asked if there’s an opportunity for the school to build an iconic architecture, Papararo’s response was measured.

“The architect’s vision shouldn’t fight the use,” she says.

It’s a consideration that has special relevance to an art gallery. The building should not overwhelm visitors’ ability to experience artwork. “It’s important to picture the body in front of the artwork,” Papararo says, “and the building should also be situating the viewer within the experience.”

Getting bodies in front of artwork is a challenge all galleries face.

Papararo’s predecessor was writer/curator Philip Monk, who helmed the agYU for 14 years. Along with senior curator Emelie Chhangur, he made community outreach an integral part of programming – not just token gestures toward inclusivity.

Under Chhangur, the agYU commissioned a short film by artists Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca and Scarborough collective R.I.S.E. that was shot in the Toronto-York Spadina subway extension. It screened at the Toronto Biennial of Art last fall and is currently exhibiting at the Jumex Collection in Mexico City.

The agYU’s current programming includes a collaboration with R.I.S.E. Edutainment, which kicked off with a series of arts-based workshops for youth at the Malvern public library. They will take place through June.

The agYU opened in 1988 and moved into its current 3,000-square-foot space in 2006. The gallery served as commissioner for Rodney Graham’s celebrated 1997 Venice Biennial and has had a strong publishing program. Especially under Monk, the agYU has focused on exhibitions that  document the history of the Toronto art scene. Major shows have included The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion, Will Munro: History, Glamour, Magic, and DONKY@NINJA@WITCH by FASTWÜÜRMS.

The university’s Keele campus is also home to a Centre For Fine Arts, established through a donation from the Goldfarbs in 2001.

@rosemheather

Nine art exhibitions to be excited about in 2020

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

Look out for shows by Laurie Anderson, Michael Snow, Wendy Coburn, Tau Lewis and Nuit Blanche’s move into Etobicoke and North York

BY ROSEMARY HEATHER JANUARY 2, 2020

Art, OCAD, Wendy Coburn, Toronto, Slut Walk
Wendy Coburn’s UHAUL Suite, a giclee-print photograph from 2012. Photo: Courtesy of the Estate of Wendy Coburn/Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto

It’s fitting that a Michael Snow survey exhibition kicks off Toronto’s 2020 art season. The influential Toronto-born multimedia artist’s practice has been a baseline for contemporary art in the city for an incredible 70 years. A marvel of productivity – and longevity – Snow deserves much of the credit for the sheer eclecticism of formats and styles that comprise contemporary art today.

As artists like Snow made increasingly experimental and challenging work, the venues where art is shown also expanded. All-night art event Nuit Blanche, which will take place in North York and Etobicoke for the first time this year, is possible because artists have an ability to consider any venue as suitable for showing work. The annual event is part of a wider push to grow art audiences in the city, which includes a major emphasis on public art in 2021. In the meantime, Torontonians have plenty of mind-expanding options in the coming year. Here are our most-anticipated shows.

Laurie Anderson: To The Moon

Royal Ontario Museum, January 11-25

Like Snow, American avant-garde artist and composer Anderson is another influential name with a long track record of experimentation, to great success, across a range of art forms. This winter, she’s exhibiting a VR artwork made in collaboration with Taiwan’s Hsin-Chien Huang. The 15-minute experience is an immersive trip into outer space, and through the DNA of dinosaurs. Anderson is also performing a sold-out show at Koerner Hall, giving a lecture and screening her film Heart Of A Dog at Hot Docs Cinema during her visit to Toronto.

rom.on.ca

Listening To Snow: Works By Michael Snow

Art Museum, University of Toronto, January 18-March 21

The sheer scope of 91-year-old Snow’s practice allows galleries to experiment with the presentation of his work like this exhibition, which focuses on the artist’s use of sound. Sound installations, two recordings and a film will create a sonic experience within the space of the gallery. U of T’s Innis Hall will also screen three of Snow’s most celebrated films, including his landmark 1967 short, Wavelength. Snow will also give a solo piano performance in the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery on March 21.

artmuseum.utoronto.ca

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa: Asymmetries

The Power Plant, January 25-May 10

Absurdist and mordant humour, often about the civil war his family fled when he was a child, infuses the work of this Guatemalan-Canadian artist. Something of a superstar internationally, this is his first major exhibition in Toronto. It will mostly include works from the past decade, as well as a newly commissioned work based on the cacaxte, a ladder-like tool used in Latin America for carrying objects on one’s back.

thepowerplant.org

Tau Lewis

Oakville Galleries, January 26-March 22

Currently on a tear through the international art world, Toronto-based Lewis is a self-taught prodigy. With a focus on “telling stories about Black identity,” Lewis creates gallery installations in which multiple figures and their accompanying landscapes and backdrops are sculpted from found textiles and other materials.

oakvillegalleries.com

Krista Belle Stewart’s 2019 installation Truth To Material.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist/Sean Fenzl

Fatma Bucak and Krista Belle Stewart

Museum of Contemporary Art, May 1-June 2

Part of Contact Photo Fest, this show presents the two artists’ work in dialogue. Kurdish-Turkish artist Bucak shows photos from an ongoing series, still lifes of found objects taken from border landscapes (including Syria-Turkey and U.S.-Mexico). Stewart, a member of the Syilx First Nation and now based in Berlin, presents work about the artist’s investigation into “Indianers” – the notorious German hobbyists who enact a fantasy of Indigeneity each summer.

museumofcontemporaryart.ca

Fable For Tomorrow: A Survey Of Works By Wendy Coburn

OCAD Onsite Gallery, May 13-October 3

This is a posthumous exhibition of work by the much-loved influential artist and OCAD University professor, who died in 2015. For those introduced to her work through the mind-blowing investigative video Slut Nation: Anatomy Of A Protest – documenting the world’s first SlutWalk protest in 2011 – this survey will provide an excellent chance for Toronto audiences to better understand Coburn’s wide-ranging art practice and activism.

ocadu.ca

Vector Festival

InterAccess and other venues, July 16-19

This festival, which showcases art about digital technology, takes place online and at venues across the city. For the eighth edition, the festival asks what happens after the gamification of everyday life – how do artists respond to tech’s ability to engineer our behaviour? The deadline for art and curatorial proposals responding to this theme is February 1.

vectorfestival.org

Nuit Blanche

Various venues, October 3

The annual all-night art event keeps getting bigger. Judging by the crowd sizes, its expansion to Scarborough (starting in 2018) has been a huge success. Next up: moves into North York and Etobicoke. The event has also appointed Dr. Julie Nagam as artistic director for the next two years. Nagam is planning a city-wide exhibition focused on Toronto’s ravines and waterways. By connecting exhibits via the city’s historical trade routes, visitors will enjoy an entirely different experience of the city.

toronto.ca

Kristiina Lahde: Follow A Curved Line To Completion And You Make A Circle

MKG127, November 21-December 19

A coolly inventive artist, Toronto’s Lahde makes delicate, geometric artworks using everyday items like wooden rulers, envelopes or paper clips. Her upcoming exhibition promises more of her precise minimalistic abstractions, with a focus on circular sculptural works, including circles discovered in found items and the “zeros clipped from advertising flyers.”

mkg127.com

@rosemheather

Look closer at the Toronto Man sculpture on St. Clair West

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
German artist Stephan Balkenhol’s polarizing public art work bears the heavy weight of Toronto’s globalized reality on its sturdy shoulders

BY ROSEMARY HEATHER DECEMBER 17, 2019

Photo: Samuel Engelking.

It was always going to be controversial. A 25-foot-tall sculpture of a man cradling a condo, standing on multi-coloured cubes. Commissioned by the developer Camrost Felcorp and made by celebrated German artist Stephan Balkenhol, Toronto Man (2019) is one of the city’s newest public artworks. It got a mixed reception when it was unveiled in August.

Balkenhol spends his time living between Meisenthal, France and Karlsruhe, Germany, where he teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts. He’s been a commanding presence on the European art stage for decades, and the work is the sculptor’s first commission in North America.

NOW spoke with Balkenhol by email over a number of weeks this fall. His comments made clear why he thinks his work has sparked dialogue: The sculpture is just a pretext for a conversation Toronto needs to have with itself about rapid development in the city.

Where to find it

Located at 101 St. Clair West and facing the street, the work is part of a three-condo development complex on the site of the former Imperial Oil building. It has provoked consternation ever since it went on display: here is the invasion of the city by developers made literal. Is the artist mocking us? Toronto Man inspired a social media debate, with one Twitter user noting that it represents “a certain class dominance over the society that is supposed to be diverse and multicultural.” It’s a fair summation of the ambivalence the work has prompted.

Why it stands out

Toronto Man is big. At 25 feet in height, it’s not at human scale. When asked how he decided on the size of the work, Balkenhol called the sculpture “big, but not too big.

“The location on the street in front of the high buildings demands a certain height of the sculpture,” he said. “It was meant to be a kind of landmark and should be perceived [by] the people driving on the road as well for those who walk by.”

The rough-hewn surface of Toronto Man is characteristic of Balkenhol’s practice. Using a carving style that dates back to the Middle Ages, he hacks and chisels his figures out of single blocks of wood. Casting the figure in bronze and adding a coat of paint is the artist’s contemporary update on this tradition. At the same time, the rustic look conveys a message about the technique’s medieval origins.

The figure of a standing man wearing slacks and an open collared shirt often recurs in Balkenhol’s work. A Twitter comment noted that Toronto Man has “a Soviet messianic look in his eye.” Is the figure some kind of new New Soviet Man? Or, more likely, John Galt, the libertarian architect hero of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged? In the book, Rand conflates architecture with a maverick world-building that cares not for the destruction it leaves in its wake. Torontonians could be forgiven for feeling that developers are equally disruptive, given the impact of condo development on city life.

But this reading falls short of seeing the sculpture as a whole. The cubes at the Man’s feet are as important as the building he is holding.

Who exactly is Toronto Man? “This guy in Toronto is a nobody in an everybody – he could be you,” says Balkenhol. “This sculpture invites you to take his place and hold the tower [while] standing on the coloured cubes.”  

The cubes are a decisive detail. On a traditional sculpture, the pedestal separates the viewer from the figure it represents. The base of Balkenhol’s work suggests a more playful invitation.

That said, Balkenhol makes clear that seeing the man as a developer is not a misreading.

“I don’t want to illustrate stories but invite people to invent some by looking at my sculptures,” he says. “I do make proposals but don’t tell a story myself up to the end.”

Vice writer Mack Lamoureux couldn’t decide if the work was intended as a celebration of developers’ hold on the city or as an indictment of it. Is the “sculptor shitting on the developers for gentrifying cities by putting up some ‘luxury condos,’” he asks, while conceding “there’s also the real possibility that the developers are in on the joke.”

Balkenhol said in a 2014 interview: “It is the viewer who fills it with meaning. Astonishingly enough, many beholders can hardly bear this ‘openness.’”

Photo: Samuel Engelking.

The bigger picture

In the last decade, Toronto has been utterly changed by condo development. The skyline is more glossy, the population is bigger and rental prices keep going up. All of this is rolled up into one big, 21st-century package of globalization.

The Yonge + St. Clair BIA is also pushing to raise the profile of the neighbourhood and make it more of a destination. Public art is a big part of the strategy. Other recent projects include an eight-storey mural by Sheffield, UK street artist Phlegm and the pop-up Tunnel of Glam, an 80-foot long tunnel of sequins running to January 6.

More broadly, the city has a policy that requires a percentage of large-scale development projects go toward public art. Until Toronto Man, no public work has been funded through that program while overtly commenting on the city-building phenomenon that made it possible. Toronto Man bears the heavy weight of Toronto’s new lived reality on its sturdy, capable shoulders.

Look Closer is a column in which a writer visits public art or an art exhibition and explores why a specific work jumped out at them. Read more here.

@rosemheather

The best of Toronto’s art scene 2019

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Our picks for the year’s top exhibition, performance, film program, new art spaces and more

BY ROSEMARY HEATHER DECEMBER 10, 2019

Artist Althea Thauberger and composer Kite’s collaborative performance of with the brass and reed band of the HMCS York was a highlight of the year. Photo: Gillian Harris / Toronto Biennial of Art

This year, Torontonians saw a new vision of the city thanks to the Toronto Biennial of Art. The inaugural, 72-day event was a thoughtful if low-key blockbuster that spanned several sites along Lake Ontario. Curators Candice Hopkins and Tairone Bastien, brought an outsider’s perspective on the waterfront as a site of rich thematic potential. They commissioned a video by New Mineral Collective, a group of artists based in Tromsø, Norway, that revealed the innate strangeness of Ontario Place, a view local curators may have missed.

Homegrown artists are typically under-represented in the international art world, but current and former Toronto residents are changing that. Brendan Fernandes was the star of this year’s Whitney Biennial in New York; Berlin-based Stephanie Comilang won the Sobey Art Award; and the prolific sculptor Tau Lewis exhibited in Miami, Los Angeles and Yorkshire.

Meanwhile, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s new pricing scheme – free admission for visitors 25 and under and a $35 annual pass – is here to stay, making one of the city’s biggest museums a bit more accessible. The city is following suit, firming up plans to expand Nuit Blanche to North York and Etobicoke, part of a commitment to ensure public art works are installed across the city, and not just downtown.

Here is our list of the best Toronto’s art scene had to offer in 2019.

Best Art Performance

Althea Thauberger & Kite, Call To Arms at Toronto Biennial of Art

Vancouver-based Thauberger and Montreal composer Kite collaborated with the brass and reed band of the HMCS York, a reserve division of the Royal Canadian Navy located at the foot of Bathurst, on this remarkable performance.

Call To Arms (which was also presented as an installation work) saw conch shells used as instruments to play a musical score based on the Fibonacci sequence (each number is the sum of the two previous numbers). The score echoed the conch’s nautilus shape, which the musicians further echoed while walking in a slow procession to the centre of a spiral. The coordination of two groups of people that rarely work together (artists and the military) was the point and executed to sublime effect.

Best Film Program

Drowned World at Cinesphere, curated by Charles Stankievech for Toronto Biennial of Art

Artist Stankievech made resplendent use of the Cinesphere’s giant IMAX screen with a five-hour film odyssey during the Biennial that included works about the deep sea, water, and islands. The result was a truly immersive experience.

Casting the Cinesphere as a monument that embodies both ambition and decline, the artist’s accomplishment is also notable for envisioning such a resonant use of the Cinesphere – turning the theatre into a holistic space for visual and sound installation in a way we haven’t quite seen before. A highlight was the audio work For Ann (Rising), from the 1969 composition by James Tenney. Based on the auditory phenomenon known as the Shepard tone (the illusion of a sound that is continually rising), this new version in multichannel sound proved how perfectly suited the Cinesphere is for immersive art, not just retro blockbusters.

Moyra Davey’s Subway Writers (2011/2014), a chromogenic-print photograph with tape, postage and ink, was on display at Ryerson Image Centre as part of a survey show. Photo: Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York; greengrassi, London

Moyra Davey’s Subway Writers (2011/2014), a chromogenic-print photograph with tape, postage and ink, was on display at Ryerson Image Centre as part of a survey show. Photo: Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York; greengrassi, London

Best Art Exhibition

Scotiabank Photography Award: Moyra Davey at Ryerson Image Centre

There was an off-the-cuff virtuosity to the work New York-based Canadian photographer Davey presented in this expansive survey show. Her colour-saturated photo-mail-artworks were the most stunning. Davey took intimate snapshots of people on the subway, or ultra close-up images of pennies, folded them up and mailed them to people in her life. The resulting works were presented with fluorescent tape she used to fold and pack the photos, making for a compelling visual puzzle. Once decoded as mailing remnants, the works cannily vacillated in meaning between their past lives in the postal system and newfound status as art on the wall.

Best Symposium

What Do We Mean When We Say “Content Moderation”? at Art Museum, University of Toronto

Organized by designer/curator Pegah Vaezi as part of her Master of Visual Studies degree at the University of Toronto, this symposium asked essential questions about how art and activism are affected by the web.

How to make web-based artworks was not at issue – instead, the discussion focused on what an ethical internet would look like. Panelists included the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jillian C. York and Jonathon Penney from U of T’s world-renowned cyber-security think tank Citizen Lab. A presentation by Montreal artist Skawennati, cofounder of the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace project, lightened the event’s dystopian vibe with a reminder that the idealistic goals of the early internet are still within reach.

Best Curatorial Initiative

The Black Curators Forum

The goal of this three-day event organized by the AGO and the Power Plant was to bring together Black curators from across the country, strengthen networks, excavate forgotten Black art made in previous eras and provide support to young Black artists in the present.

“While there is Black Art in the U.S. and the UK, it’s only just emerging in Canada,” writer and Canadian Art associate editor Yaniya Lee tells NOW. “Canada as a nation-state still thinks of itself as European. In actuality, Black people have been part of this settler colony for over 400 years.”

She adds that the forum ended up being “very practical. After thinking and theorizing about these issues, what comes next?”

he Jimmy James Evans Friendly Meeting Place and Centre for the Arts co-founders Jeff Bierk and “Jimmy” James Evans. Photo: Jeff Bierk.

Best Community Art Space

The Jimmy James Evans Friendly Meeting Place and Centre for the Arts

Artist Jeff Bierk is known for his large-scale photo works made in collaboration with friends who live on the streets of Toronto. Run out of Bierk’s studio on Dupont, the Jimmy James Evans Friendly Meeting Place and Centre for the Arts is an extension of his art practice.

Since launching in late 2018, Bierk has made the space available, for free, as a drop-in centre, and for a host of events, including art exhibitions and workshops put on by the mental health non-profit, Regeneration Community Services (which resulted in an exhibition at the independent art space the Loon). The goal is to resist gentrification or, as Bierk says, to assert the value of “lives that are often erased in a profit-driven urban context.”

Best New Art Space

SUGAR Contemporary

Named for the nearby Redpath Sugar Refinery, this waterfront space launched in the fall. Curators Ala Roushan and Xenia Benivolski initiated the project so they could propose alternative formats for public artworks, which typically take the form of sculpture or mural.

Instead, SUGAR offers themed programs that invite the public to attend an ongoing series of lectures and performances. A three-year experiment partially funded by developer Daniels Waterfront, SUGAR is a way to continue having vibrant and eclectic dialogues about city life that unaffordable rent and housing costs are putting under threat.

@rosemheather

Toronto wants to make the year 2021 all about public art

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

The city is revamping its public art strategy for the first time in 30 years, but Doug Ford’s developer-friendly Bill 108 is causing uncertainty

BY ROSEMARY HEATHER DECEMBER 4, 2019

After a move to Scarborough, city-run art event Nuit Blanche will expand to North York and Etobicoke in 2020. Photo: Samuel Engelking.

Toronto has declared 2021 “the Year of Public Art,” but new legislation proposed by Doug Ford is already causing uncertainty.

Mayor John Tory announced the city will update its public art strategy for the first time in around 30 years.

“We want to grow Toronto’s reputation as a creative city,” he said during a press conference on November 18, adding that the inspiration for the 10-year strategy – which delivers on one of his 2018 campaign promises – was a 2017 study led by OCAD University president Sara Diamond and University of Toronto associate professor of sociology Daniel Silver.

“This is a rare example of academic recommendations being put into action,” said Diamond, an advisor on the new strategy, at the press conference.

The 2017 study called for an update to the city’s existing public art policy, which was drafted in the 1980s. The program’s costs will be determined through the city’s 2020 budget process, and the proposed strategy will be considered by the city’s Executive Committee on December 11.

Tory noted that since 2017 the city has delivered on its goal of investing $25 per capita in the arts.

The public art strategy took the OCAD study as its starting point and added to that an extensive process of city-led consultation with the arts community, stakeholder groups and an advisory committee.

According to the proposed strategy, the city will coordinate an overall vision for Toronto’s public art offerings and ensure art is evenly spread out across the city. The idea is to create more landmarks, like the dog fountain at Berczy Park, that can foster stronger neighborhood identities and a deeper sense of belonging.

Another recommendation is better integration between public art and city planning, including coordination of how pieces might work together in dialogue with one another. The study also advises the city to broaden its definition of public art to include temporary works – basically, public art pop-ups that might include performances or screen-based works.

At the press conference, the mayor talked about Toronto Man, the controversial sculpture on St. Clair West by German artist Stephan Balkenhol. “I felt joy to see the debate that this work has inspired,” he said.

He added that art plays a role in branding a city’s identity. “I visited Austin,” he said, “to try and understand how that city got its reputation as a creative hub.”

Fostering Toronto’s reputation as a similar hub is a goal that lies behind the new strategy.

However, incoming provincial legislation from Doug Ford’s arts-averse conservative government could complicate the strategy.

Late last year, the Tories cut the Ontario Arts Council budget cut by $5 million, and chopped more than $2 million from the Indigenous Culture Fund, effectively eliminating it.

Now the premier’s developer-friendly Bill 108 jeopardizes Toronto’s ability to obtain benefits such as public art from developers.

To date, “developers are responsible for over 300 public art projects getting built,” councillor Gary Crawford, one of the leads on the Year of Public Art’s advisory committee, noted during the press conference.

The city runs three public art programs, including the Percent for Public Art Program, which mandates that one per cent of a new development’s cost is budgeted for public art initiatives. New commissions are funded by developers on a per-project basis and administered by the city.

Bill 108 puts the future of the program in doubt.

The Percent for Public Art Program dates back to the mid 80s, but the last 15 years saw the majority of new projects built thanks to the explosion of condo developments. Though the rate of new condos developments is slowing, the first quarter of 2019 saw 242 condominium projects constructed, an all-time high for the city, according to Urban Toronto.

“The province has replaced development-related revenue and benefit tools with the community benefits charge,” a city spokesperson told NOW. “The impact on the city’s Percent for Public Art Program is unknown.”

However, others see less reliance on developers for public art funding as a good thing.

“If [Bill108] helps to uncouple public art from condo development, this would be a positive effect,” says Rebecca Carbin, a public art consultant who advised on the city’s strategy. “One goal of the strategy was to look at other sources of funding. Currently the city’s dependence on developers creates public art deserts.”

Ensuring that public art is evenly spread out across the city is one of the strategy’s goals. Carbin notes the majority of new major public art commissions are concentrated in the core. The suburbs are home to many street mural projects, but the exact number of these and other works is a question that will be answered by a newly announced public directory of projects.

But public art is more than sculptures and murals. “One-hundred-year monuments and one-night events” are also considered public art, says Carbin.

At the press conference, the mayor made clear his commitment to the latter format, announcing that annual all-night art event Nuit Blanche will expand to Etobicoke and North York in 2020. The previously downtown-centric initiative branched out to Scarborough over the last two years.

The Year of Public Art will also be supported by new funding opportunities for artists, administered through the Toronto Arts Council (TAC). There will be grants of up to $20,000 for Nuit Blanche projects and up to $50,000 for Year of Public Art projects.

Given that Percent for Public Art Program budgets are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the TAC grants will cover only a portion of an ambitious art project. As such, major art institutions like the Toronto Biennial of Art and the Power Plant will partner to help raise funding.

While new money to make art is always welcome, how artists will  continue to afford to live in the city was not discussed at the mayor’s press conference.

Giving funds to public art initiatives is an easy concession developers can make. This allows them to expand the terms of a building project in the face of opposition. Working with artists helps to burnish their image, and Toronto condos are increasingly home to some impressively ambitious projects like Balkenhol’s sculpture or Israeli artist Ron Arad’s monumental work at Yonge and Bloor, Safe Hands.

But many people who make art may not be able to afford a unit in these buildings. A November 2019 report says that the average rent in Toronto is now $2,350 for a one-bedroom apartment. As a next step, Mayor Tory could declare 2020 as the Year of Affordable Housing.

@rosemheather