The Big Gift in Review: Homefront Helpfulness

In 2005 the board of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum adopted an “arts renewal” initiative. Yet it took the hiring of Jeff Spalding as president and CEO in 2007 for this plan to gain visible momentum. Once at the helm, donations of contemporary art came pouring in, bolstering the Glenbow’s eclectic collection of 31,000 artworks and 1.3 million artifacts. The net result is 900-plus new acquisitions gifted by artists, dealers and collectors from across Canada, precipitating a monumental show: “The Big Gift.” Although it has been impossible to exhibit all works at once, more than 200 were selected for this showcase hosted by the Glenbow, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery and the Nickle Arts Museum.

While the Nickle’s Christine Sowiak curated a prairie and Western Canadian thematic, including a standout Peter von Tiesenhausen gallery and stellar Evan Penny work, Anamorphic Projection #4, the Illingworth Kerr’s Wayne Baerwaldt assembled an idiosyncratic mix. There, earlier works from the Glenbow’s vaults reveal an original Robert Bateman (who has ever seen one of these?!), Peregrine Diving on White-Throated Swifts, exhibited next to Lynne Cohen‘s Warehouse, Canadian Wildlife Association, Ottawa. Both works convey a feeling that Baerwaldt describes as “the air having been vacuumed from scene.” In contrast are two drawings by Marcel van Eeden, a Dutch artist whose dark tonal scenes, achieved by using Nero oil-based pencils, possess a palpable sense of foreboding, the air thick with dénouement. More of van Eeden’s works appear at the Glenbow, including his Untitled (Silhouette of Driver).

If one feels a sense of the past in van Eeden’s work, this would reflect his conceptual approach of drawing from old pictures, all of which predate his birth. In a kind of McLuhanesque looking forward through the rear-view mirror, van Eeden undertakes daily drawings, appropriating random images from the past. Thus, unlike other obsessive documenters of time passing, such as Kelly Wood with her Continuous Garbage Project or On Kawara’s Today paintings, van Eeden’s narratives are not linear, but fragmented, perhaps more indicative of life’s uncertainties.

In reckoning that art and life share the same struggle of searching for certainty in an uncertain world, “The Big Gift” offers more than just art. Spalding’s role as part Pied Piper and part Robin Hood has prompted inter-institutional collaboration, increased audiences, added robustness to a major collection and supported artists and donors by collecting contemporary art and issuing tax receipts. At a time when the federal government has axed millions of dollars from the arts-abroad Promart program, here’s a great example of homefront support.