artresilience PLACING
AT THE CENTER OF OUR ACTIVITIES TO FOSTER
Photo Credit: Don Hall
by Anthony Kiendl Executive Director and CEO MacKenzie Art Gallery
he MacKenzie Art Gallery (1953) is one of Canada’s leading art museums with a storied history — it was the first art museum in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, a vast prairie region about the size of Texas. Saskatchewan is an agricultural and mineralbased economic region north of Montana and North Dakota. As the leading arts institution in the province, the permanent collection spans 5,000 years of global art history with some 5,000 works of art.
Curator at a major museum in Canada — this reflected a burgeoning reputation as a champion of Indigenous (Native American) art and artists. The MacKenzie is located in the provincial Capital Commission on the edge of Canada’s largest urban park known as Wascana Centre. The province is home to one tenth of Canada’s Indigenous population and currently comprises approximately 15% of the overall provincial population. This demographic is the most rapidly growing and will exceed one-in-four people over the next twenty or so years. Rapid immigration has created increasingly diverse populations with notable recent growth from the Philippines, south east Asia, and Africa.
In the late 90s, before any other museum in the country, The MacKenzie hired LeeAnn Martin (Mohawk) as the first Indigenous Head
When I joined the staff as executive director and CEO in May 2014, the MacKenzie had -24-
