Sharing Our History: Augmenting the Thomas Bouckley Collection

The Curator’s View this week comes from the desk of Sonya Jones, Assistant Curator, and Curator of the Thomas Bouckley Collection.

Thomas Bouckley’s fascination with his father’s collection of historical photographs of Oshawainspired his passion for documenting Oshawa’s past. He was concerned with the condition of the historical photographs, and took it upon himself to learn how best to preserve and reproduce them for future generations. Thus began his collection, which continued to grow in various ways, one of the more unique being from local garbage men who found photographs and albums in the trash. Oshawa families would also provide him with copies of their historical photos. Additionally, Bouckley took up photography himself capturing images of Oshawa as it existed in his lifetime—for example these photographs documenting the demolition of Centre Street United in 1967 (located where Rundle Tower is today).

His vision for the Thomas Bouckley Collection when it was gifted to the RMG in 1985—in addition to it being preserved, a community resource, and used in public programming—was for the collection to continue to grow and also to carry on his practice of documenting Oshawa. Throughout the years Then and Now projects have been done to show the transformation of the city, and donations have added to the collection. There are, however, still areas and time periods that are not well represented in the collection. In the spirit of Thomas Bouckley’s desire to visually document Oshawa’s history, I’m always interested in augmenting the collection and encourage anyone who would like to share their historical photographs to contact me. Seeing as Bouckley himself received copies of family photograph collections, I would continue this tradition by scanning photographs in order to enhance the collection. Everyone will benefit as the collection is a community resource that is available to search online, and in person.

Some time periods that are not well represented in the collection are:

1940s- WWII years
1950s
1960s
Oshawa Generals
Oshawa Airport
Early photos of North Oshawa
Smith Potteries (located on King Street West near the Hollows)
Parkwood Estate
Lakeview Park 1940s onwards

With questions or to share photographs, please contact Sonya Jones
[email protected] or 905 576 3000 x110

The Curator’s View: Holidays

This post comes from the desk of Linda Jansma, Curator

Mt. Chocohura, NH

Some of my holidays are purposefully full of art. This past March’s trip to New York City and last summer’s long weekend in Chicago are two examples of such trips. Plans are made according to the opening hours of museums and galleries and what special exhibitions are being shown. These are great trips, but aren’t necessarily relaxing.

(image of TOAE via BlogTO)

This past week’s vacation started off with art, but, after that, was deliberately meant to be a no- art holiday. The first Saturday saw us heading to the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition (TOAE), an annual ritual. Along with the wonderful art by both emerging and established artists, it’s always interesting to see what’s trending—in the past, it’s been “Marcel Dzama” style drawings; painting on wall paper, and there’s always loads of painting with encaustic (the smell of wax being particularly aromatic on hot days in July). This year the trend was anthropomorphic drawings and paintings— animal heads on humans. Animals have been somewhat topical over this past year—the RMG hosted the exhibition Animal that dealt with our relationship with animals, while Montreal’s musée d’art contemporain is hosting Zoo this summer, an exhibition about the place of animals and nature in the universe.

Our non-art holiday began on Monday. We headed out on the 401 east bound to Vermont and the next morning got up to make the rest of the drive to New Hampshire and a few days of hiking, golfing and reading. We drove for a couple of hours before stopping for breakfast at the Dancing Goat Cafe in Plainfield, Vermont. Our meals ordered at the counter, we turned to find a seat. Imagine my surprise on seeing four framed lithographs on the wall: two by Inuit artist Ashevak Kenojuak and two by West coast artist Bill Reid. Plainfield, Vermont has a population of around 1300 people and it wasn’t a place where I expected to see some really wonderful Canadian prints. The proprietor, who was scrambling up our eggs, said that yes, they were part of his collection.

A conversation followed with his childhood recollections of standing in line in the 1970s with his parents when he was a small boy, waiting for the coming editions of prints to be released at their local gallery. He was both passionate and knowledgeable about his collection speaking about his preference for myth-related imagery in the works he owned. His wife took over the breakfast-making duties while we chatted about the RMG collection and the 2013 exhibition that will feature some of its Kenojuak prints.

It’s great when a non-planned art moment can sneak into a no art holiday.

The Curator’s View: Revealing Spaces

Sonya Jones is the RMG’s assistant Curator and Curator of the Thomas Bouckley Collection. In this post she shares a reflection from artist Kate Wilhelm.

Revealing Spaces, is a current exhibition featuring three emerging Durham Region artists, Kate Wilhelm, Shaun Downey and Andrea Carvalho. One of the woman depicted in Kate Wilhelm’s photographs of derby girls sadly passed away just this past April.

Here’s the artist’s reflection about Kiss My Ashlinn:

Kiss My Ashlinn
July 2, 1957 – April 5, 2012

She was in treatment when we first connected by email. We had to keep rescheduling visits because my family was a walking petrie dish all winter and her immune system was in no shape to protect her. If it wasn’t me suffering pinkeye, it was my six-year-old’s scratchy cough and runny nose or my baby’s diarrhea. When I finally managed to squeeze a visit in between illnesses, she told me her lung cancer was incurable. She also said she would skate again. “I just need to get off this damn oxygen, and then I will.” The way she said it, I believed her.

I photographed her and Thom just before Christmas. I was about to reschedule because I was still coughing, but she encouraged me to just wear a mask. She couldn’t keep her eyes off my baby, and she wrote me about a month later to tell me how much she enjoyed having him in her home. She had one granddaughter, whom she adored, and she couldn’t wait for more.

I did see her once more, before she died, at a party. I hadn’t been expecting her or I’d have brought the copy of Spontaneous Healing I’d been meaning to give her for months. The book sat on the floor by my front door for ages so I wouldn’t forget. Around the end of March, I dreamed about her. I can’t remember now what happened in the dream, but I know I didn’t want to tell her the details. I think I dreamed she died before I gave her the book and I felt awful. I woke up determined to give it to her that week and thinking of another woman’s miraculous recovery from cancer. I tried to make a time to drop the book off, but she never replied. I found the silence ominous, and sure enough, 5 days later she had passed.

I only put the book back on my bookshelf a couple of weeks ago. As I type this, the mask I wore when I photographed her hangs on the window right next to me. I don’t know why I’m keeping it.

Revealing Spaces is on at the RMG until August 26.

The Curator’s View: Maralynn Cherry’s Retirement Farewell

From the desk of Linda Jansma, Curator.

Hospitality

It’s a word that Maralynn Cherry brought up different times in her talk at Bowmanville’s Visual Art Centre last Friday evening.

The context was Maralynn’s farewell fête as she is retiring from her position as the art centre’s Curator. I felt privileged to be one of some 75 people who came to wish Maralynn well and thank her for what she brought to the visual arts in the Durham Region.

I’ve known Maralynn for many years having curated her work into a two-person exhibition, as well as engaged her as a writer for one of our publications. We also participated in a series of Curatorial workshops many years ago that were held at the VAC. Maralynn is an intelligent, creative, inquisitive and compassionate individual and all of those attributes were made clear through the work of the artists she brought into the VAC and the beautifully crafted essays that she wrote.

Maralynn speaks with Sean McQuay at her farewell event. Photo by Jean-Michel Komarnicki

Back to hospitality. Maralynn has made the VAC a place where both artists and visitors are made to feel welcome. She was able to encourage and accommodate visions and share those with the curious, the inquisitive and the knowledgeable. She finished her talk by stating that in the end, it’s about the artist. It sounds obvious, but in the midst of grant writing, fund raising, facility management, programming, etc., we can lose sight of the fact that without the artist and the art, there’s not much for us to work with. Maralynn understands that and deeply values and respects the artistic vision. As an artist herself, this may be one of the reasons she’s moving beyond the VAC—she has spent years encouraging artists and now needs to more fully and deeply engage with her own artistic practice.

From one Durham Region curator to another: thank you Maralynn.

The Curator’s View: Thomas Bouckley Collection, An Art Perspective

Today’s blog post comes from Sonya Jones, Curator of The Thomas Bouckley Collection.

When looking at images we bring our own history and memories to the experience. For me, coming from an art history background, there are times when I not only look at the images in the Thomas Bouckley Collection from a historical perspective, but also from an “art” perspective. There are many images in the collection that are not only historically significant, but aesthetically beautiful. The majority of the images were taken for documentation purposes—snapshots of events, buildings, or people—but there are many that were clearly taken by a skilled photographer. For example, the composition and lighting of this 1912 image depicting young men playing billiards at the YMCA is striking.

Other times I’m pleasantly surprised to be reminded of famous paintings when looking at images from the collection. There are a couple that have always reminded me of artworks, for example the Oshawa beach scene and Seurat’s painting below.

Beach Activities, Oshawa on the Lake 1915

Georges-Pierre Seurat A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte 1884

However, in preparing this blog I put on my art history goggles and even more jumped out at me. Although there are differences, the similarities are what are enjoyable to discover.

T.N. Gibbs Daughter, c. 1850s, (detail)

Jean-Honoré Fragonard The Reader c. 1776

On the Oshawa Creek, 1900

Pierre-Auguste Renoir The Skiff (La Yole) 1875

Oshawa Junction, 1912

Claude Monet Gare Staint-Lazare 1877

Newton Home, located at 246 Albert Street, 1880

Grant Wood American Gothic 1930

A new installation of photos from the Thomas Bouckley Collection opens Saturday 28 April. Music To Our Ears: Oshawa’s Musical History is on view until 23 August, 2012.

The Curator’s View: Meet me at the MoMA

From the desk of Linda Jansma, our curator.

I photocopied an ArtsNews article that appeared in the magazine this past winter. It described a unique program offered at the MoMA in New York City that brought patients with dementia and their caregivers into the gallery for tours and discussions on a monthly basis.

(all images via MoMA.org)

I contacted the woman who has spear-headed Meet Me at the MoMA, a program that started in 2006, and arranged to watch a tour during a recent visit to New York. I was one of 115 people who met at 2 p.m. on a warm Tuesday afternoon (the day the gallery is closed to the public, making it easier for the groups to move through the gallery spaces). We were divided into coloured groups: blue, purple, green, red, orange and yellow and given name tags and stools and then each group was led into the gallery spaces by an instructor and volunteer. Our group had a second observer – Ali, who works at the Alzheimer society in New York, helping patients paint – he sensitively equated the disease with art, calling it an abstraction of the mind.

Our leader, Meryl, stopped in front of two paintings by surrealist artist Yves Tanguy. We spent twenty minutes contemplating the colour and shapes in each painting, and listening to the comments of both patient and caregiver. No one was in a hurry and there were no wrong answers: what looked like a desert to one, reminded another of the board walk of Atlantic City, while many could see the “body” after it was described. Meryl worked her magic by coaxing patients to draw on past memories to bring meaning to the work. She did the same in front of Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (William kept coming back to just how large that woman’s arms were!), and the minimalist sculpture of Lynda Benglis (definitely looked like duck-billed platypuses). What everyone seemed to agree on was that none of them would actually want to live with any of the work they saw that afternoon.

The disease had progressed differently in many of the patients: I spoke with Karen on the way to the gallery, assuming that she was a caregiver, and was told that she has had Alzheimer’s for “a long, long, long time,” while other participants could only whisper simple answers to the questions asked. The caregivers were equal participants in the program, an acknowledgement to the difficulty inherent in their jobs and that this was an outlet for them, as well.

The gallery deserves the accolades and awards it has received for Meet Me at the MoMA, a program delivered with sensitivity, awarding each of its participants with dignity by drawing on memories that tell of lives that continue to be meaningful.

Read more on the MoMA’s website: http://www.moma.org/meetme/

The Curator’s View: COHCA & OSNAP Meet at the RMG

From the desk of Linda Jansma, our curator.

We had a great day at the RMG on April 2^nd. We were hosting COCHA, as well as the newest members of OSNAP. You may be thinking: “what the heck?” Two seemingly disparate groups like COCHA and OSNAP meeting on the same day, and, for half that time, together?

Oh… you’re wondering what COCHA and OSNAP actually are…

COCHA is the former group known as CHAPS. Since 2009, we’ve been trying to agree on what that stands for: Canadian Historical Art Projects? Canadian Historical Art Professionals? Despite loving the acronym, in the end it really didn’t say who we actually are. So, on Monday we decided it was COCHA: Curators of Canadian Historical Art. We’re a group of 13 Ontario-based curators who are passionate about historical art and get together twice each year to discuss our collections, the projects we’re working on and any possible collaborations between its members.

As the host institution for this meeting, we decided to put our social media guru, Jacquie Severs, on the hotspot to give our group an overview of what she does on a daily basis (including posting blogs, of course!). We also invited the social media types of the COCHA galleries to join us.

Jacquie did a brilliant job of presenting the fast paced, ever changing world of social media, and how through it, we hope to capture the hearts, minds and imaginations of a generation who derive much of their information through social media sites. The medium certainly continues to be as important as the message, and the community that it helps build will be the backbone of our galleries moving into the future.

Jacquie was able to recruit the newest members to OSNAP, the Ontario Social Networking Arts Professionals. This is a group that started in 2011 as a way for marketing and communications professionals in the arts community to come together to explore social media best practices and build alliances for collaboration in galleries, museums and other arts organizations.

At Monday’s meeting, OSNAP worked on strengthening the links between Ontario’s art galleries, while COCHA members discussed presenting the past in meaningful ways. Many of us work in relative isolation, so days like Monday are not only rejuvenating, but inspiring – and yes, just plain enjoyable – there are some great arts professionals in this province.

The Curator’s View: Thomas Bouckley Collection: Oshawa Then and Now

Sonya Jones is the Curator of The Thomas Bouckley Collection.

In looking at Oshawa through a “Then and Now” lens, it really puts into perspective how much Oshawa has changed in the last 100 or so years. The city continues to grow and seems to always be in transition. Consider, for example, UOIT’s continued expansion in the core of the city and how it is rejuvenating the downtown core; or the demolition of General Motor’s north plant to be replaced by a shopping complex. How do these physical changes affect how we think about our city?

See the full gallery on Posterous

Pictured:

Four Corners, 1911, Now.

Regent Theatre, 1936, Now

51 Nassau Street, c. 1890, Now

This idea of comparing history to present day is explored in the current Thomas Bouckley Collection exhibition in partnership with the Oshawa Seniors Citizens’ Camera Club titled Oshawa Creek: Then and Now. Using historical photographs from the Thomas Bouckley Collection as a starting point, members of the Oshawa Seniors Citizens’ Camera Club have photographed the Oshawa Creek as it appears today. The photographs examine the evolution of the creek and illustrate its continued importance to the foundation of this community. Please join us for the opening reception on Tuesday, February 7th, at 11:30am. Oshawa Creek: Then and Now is on view until April 26^th.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Pictured:

Mouth of the Oshawa Creek, 1922

Oshawa Creek Today, Photo Credit: Don Wotton

Cedar Dale Dam Destroyed by Flood, c. 1900

Mill Street and Oshawa Creek Today, Photo Credit: Don Wotton

The Curator’s View: True Power at UOIT

From the desk of Linda Jansma, our curator.

On Monday, 28 November in the morning, I attended the official opening of UOIT’s Energy Systems and Nuclear Science Research Centre (ERC). Six years ago, we invested in a ground source heating system for our home, so I am excited to know that Oshawa’s university is a leader in research into innovation in clean and renewable energy as this is where the future is undoubtedly taking us. After the dignitaries spoke, they gathered in front of a sculpture to cut the ribbon and declare the building officially open. Yes, they stood in front of a sculpture!

And not just any sculpture but Geordie Lishman’s True Power, a magnificent 4.1 metre high stainless steel horse that I first saw at Geordie’s home and studio in Ajax. True Power was the central work in the exhibition Hidden Worlds held at the RMG this past summer and which I described in the catalogue essay as an “other-worldly creature of graceful power.” This exhibition was definitely a highlight in our 2011 programming year as shown by the hundreds of people who attended the opening and the number of repeat visitors we had over the summer months.

I was thrilled to hear of the community grass roots initiative to purchase the work for UOIT and specifically for the new research centre. Oshawa and its citizens continue to support this place as a creative city and it shows in how quickly they were able to raise the funds to make this initiative happen. Geordie describes his sculpture as symbol of untapped potential in harnessing energy. How perfect that it would become a centre piece for an institution that is also seeking to harness renewable energy sources! Congratulations go to Geordie, our tireless community supporters of the arts and UOIT in making this match possible.

The Curator’s View: Diverse Art Experiences

Curator Linda Jansma discusses some recent art experiences and how their diverse natures created three unique experiences.

I’ve had three distinct art experiences over the past four days. The first was this past Friday when I attended the 12^th annual Toronto International Art Fair at the Metro Convention Centre.

Art fairs are primarily about selling art, its commoditization. From $600 8cm square paintings to large works closing in on $200,000 this is much more about business than what happens in a public gallery setting such as the RMG. Past art fairs are compared with this one; dealers woo both experienced and new collectors; lectures help the novice into the world of buying art for both pleasure and investment. Toronto-based artist, Kent Monkman’s installation maze spoke to the life of the artist: grants, dealers, curators, biennales, etc. Words were linked by four tableau rooms representing the artist, curator/museum director, collector, and galleriest, all with actors playing roles. Art imitating life right outside of the walls of the maze.

The second experience was the grand finale of the Office of Identity Collects on Saturday afternoon. Two Saskatoon-based artists, Heather Cline and Michele Sereda, spent a week at 16 King Street East, just east of Oshawa’s four corners. The 27 people who attended the “Citizenship Ceremony” were some of the people who had participated, earlier in the week, in Cline and Sereda’s art performance where they were photographed and interviewed as part of a piece that will result in an exhibition of Cline’s paintings and video work in September, 2012. Saturday’s group was sworn in and then asked to walk up and down King Street while Cline recorded the events from the opposite side of the street. As artists—for whom this was their first Oshawa visit—they revealed as much about Oshawa and those of us who live or work here, as they learned from us. I’m very much looking forward to September’s exhibition.

Monday morning’s experience was diametrically opposed to Friday afternoon’s. I came into work with my gardening gloves, tools and a tarp taken from my garage. And then I, along with other gallery staff and Sympathetic Hunting Magic’s curator, Gil McElroy, began to strike the exhibition. Striking usually implies wrapping and crating works of art to be returned to the artist or sent on to the next gallery. This was true in the case of Niall Donaghy’s sculpture, but Shelly Rahme’s work was disassembled and will be hauled to a landfill later this week. Shelly spent a week earlier in September assembling/creating three sculptures, primarily with twigs, roots, branches, and clay. They were powerful works that related to consumerism and longing. But they will never end up at Toronto’s Convention Centre, or in anyone’s collection. They are site specific work, meant to exist for the moment and only live on in the catalogue and installation photographs of the exhibition.

For three very different reasons, this has been a good four days.