Kathleen Bartels arrived at her new post as executive director and CEO of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto in April with the gallery still under lockdown. Eight months into her tenure and the Sterling Road museum is once again shut to the public.
While MOCA has learned a lot lately about how to be a museum with its doors closed, this year chock full of pauses and postponements has given the new boss plenty of time to consider what kind of museum she’s running.
“MOCA has had a wonderful history on Queen Street and in North York,” Bartels says. “Now, it’s in the new building where it’s been programming for about two years. So what is the future of MOCA? What does MOCA want to be?”
These are the big questions the museum hasn’t yet answered for itself, but which Bartels is determined to.
Since dropping the second “C” from its name (the one that stood for “Canadian”) and leaving Queen West for the Tower Automotive Building on an ambitious growth project, MOCA has wobbled out of the starting gate. The grand opening was delayed repeatedly, its programming has been scattered and turnover at the very top — four different directorships in as many years — has sapped efforts to develop an identity.
The Junction Triangle outpost has had moments when it rose to its promise but, mostly, it’s felt a bit adrift, in need of surer leadership.
Bartels joins MOCA as an experienced captain with a track record for fundraising and building audiences. (And what budding institution couldn’t use more funds or audience?) For 18 years, she was director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, where she grew its annual membership from 5,000 to 37,000 people and nearly quadrupled private donations.
She was an ardent champion for its ultra-ambitious, starchitect-designed new gallery, which awaits still more funds before shovels hit the ground, though she raised an impressive $135 million from public and private sources. Before that, the Chicago-born art administrator spent 13 years at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where she served last as assistant director.
“(MOCA) hired me for my experience,” Bartels says. “I think experience matters.”
The museum’s new board chair, Brad Keast, confirms it. “Kathleen is a visionary that understands MOCA’s potential to be an important international institution,” he says. “She has extensive experience building programs, audiences and a solid support base.”
Before the gallery closed last month, some of Bartels’ touch was perhaps beginning to shine through.
The museum’s landlord, Castlepoint, retired a $5.7-million loan, completing the museum’s $25-million capital campaign begun in 2017. Shortly after, an anonymous donor gifted $1 million earmarked for exhibitions. Then, in the days just before lockdown No. 2, MOCA opened a rollicking, fun show by the New York-based filmmaker Mika Rottenberg and was applying finishing touches to a new lobby exhibition by Taiwanese artist Michael Lin, who worked with a dozen Toronto artists.
It felt like finally the museum had gathered some momentum.
“We’re in spitting distance right now of having a balanced budget for 2020,” Bartels says, “which I’m not sure many organizations will be able to say.”
Moving forward, the program will be paramount to MOCA’s future. Bartels’ modus operandi goes like this: “build a program, raise the profile, build a broader audience.”
“Whether that’s donors, members or general visitors, it all stems from the work that you’re showing,” she says. The director wants MOCA to expand and diversify its offerings. That means more openings, more art and more types of artwork: “film, new media, architecture, design, fashion,” she lists. “Visual culture overall.”
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One exhibition she’s especially excited about is scheduled to open in the spring (pending further COVID-19 restrictions).
“Greater Toronto Art 2021” will feature the work of 21 artists and creators from the GTA and surrounding areas, including for example the conceptual design team Common Accounts, Hamilton-based painter Kareem-Anthony Ferreira and the sculptor Azza El Siddique, whose work appeared recently at the Gardiner Museum. Some names, like “Wendy” comics creator Walter Scott, may be familiar, while others will be introduced to many for the first time.
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Scene surveys like this have been rare in Toronto in the last decade. This vacant niche represents a space MOCA could well claim on its journey to define itself — and it is certainly an interesting time to see what the city’s artists have been up to.
“These moments allow you to think about the richness of your own community,” Bartels says. “Turning our gaze toward the local is important for MOCA in general, but particularly at this time.
“It will be an important show for all of us,” she says.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
