The National Gallery art-share program: one less reason to go to Ottawa

The National Gallery art-share program: one less reason to go to Ottawa

The National Art Gallery comes to Toronto (Image: Catherine Bulinkski)

We’ve all got one less reason to go to Ottawa, thanks to a new art-sharing program that will display items from the National Gallery of Canada at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. MOCCA announced Tuesday that a new three-year partnership with the National Gallery will bring prestigious contemporary artwork to the newly renovated Queen Street West gallery space. The partnership follows a similar agreement made last year between the NGC and the Art Gallery of Alberta.

The MOCCA and NGC will co-present at least five shows a year over the next three years, kicking things off yesterday with Adams/Demand/Farmer. The joint show features the work of photographers Kim Adams, Thomas Demand and Geoffrey Farmer of Toronto, Berlin and Vancouver, respectively. It will be followed in February by an exhibition of the work of Peruvian-born Torontonian Luis Jacob, who will select pieces from the National Gallery to be shown alongside his own art.

National Gallery director Marc Mayer sees the partnership as a way of reaching out to the sizable Toronto art community. “We are the National Gallery of Canada, not Ottawa, so we need to be all over the country, and this is a great way to accomplish that in Canada’s most populous city,” he told the Globe. MOCCA artistic director and curator David Liss hopes the partnership will raise the profile of contemporary art in Toronto, which he told the Post often “seems to fly so under the radar in our own city.”

• Toronto museum announces art-sharing program with National Gallery of Canada [National Post]
Partnership brings National Gallery works to Toronto [Globe and Mail]