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Placing Art at the Center of Our Activities to Foster Resilience

Photo Credit: Don Hall

by Anthony Kiendl, Executive Director and CEO | MacKenzie Art Gallery

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The 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.

In the late 90s, before any other museum in the country, The MacKenzie hired LeeAnn Martin (Mohawk) as the first Indigenous Head 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.

When I joined the staff as executive director and CEO in May 2014, the MacKenzie had been struggling for several years under transitory leadership, increasing costs, diminishing government funds, and a fledgling culture of philanthropy.

Shortly into my tenure, it became apparent that the gallery would struggle to maintain its capacity to deliver the program standards the community had become accustomed to and demanded. It was structurally in decline and if radical action was not taken, we would have to downsize into a less-ambitious and minor regional institution. In a summer planning retreat in 2015 the Board confirmed that not only was change needed, but that radical, transformative change was required.

Photo Credit: MacKenzie Art Gallery

I was aware of the challenges facing the gallery when I arrived, but the solutions were not straight forward. Having successfully completed a $4 million campaign and built a building for Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, I was prepared and focused on now building the MacKenzie's fund development strategies and campaign readiness. What was becoming quickly apparent was that all the issues outlined above, readily visible from the outside, were not the most pressing demand. The main challenge was actually staff morale and the culture of the organization.

After years of uncertainty, staff were deeply demoralized and, in some cases, suspicious. We had entered into collective bargaining with unionized employees. Communications had to become highly structured, and any talk of the future or change had to be in the context of the bargaining table or would be considered bargaining in bad faith. I struggled as a leader with appearing transparent and authentic amid these constraints. While I was aware that if things did not change the museum would be in deep trouble financially in a short period of time, discussion of this type became viewed as veiled threats or a bargaining strategy. I also wanted to not appear alarmist, as we needed to generate support for the organization in the community. These constraints led me to feel isolated and appear reserved. Staff did not know me well yet and questioned whether there was some secret plan that I was concealing from them. In many ways, I did not yet have the answers.

Photo Credit: Don Hall

Working closely with our management team, a plan was developing. Our goal was to launch a major campaign to raise necessary funds for our programs and make required upgrades and improvements to numerous deferred capital projects. While still a beloved local institution, I felt a generational rift was developing where younger visitors were not engaged by our offerings, and an older generation was content to maintain the status quo, particularly in a difficult economic environment.

We needed to critically analyze our program, and I engaged professional support to undertake a curatorial review which clarified and began to build consensus around necessary changes in our programs.

We began the hard work of re-focusing our program on visitors. A number of new initiatives included hiring Storykeepers to facilitate visits to the gallery, and ultimately creating a new position of Curator of Community Engagement. In addition, we identified four short-term goals required just to ready us to re-position the gallery’s value proposition and engender a tenable new narrative that people would diversify our audiences and our revenue. They included:

• a renovation for a new community program space and opening a permanent museum café for the first time in our history;

• a new visual identity and brand exercise;

• and, perhaps most-importantly, commissioning a major new outdoor artwork to grace the façade of our building.

• working with our provincial landlord to designate more and clearly marked parking at the facility;

Approaching five years into my tenure as CEO, I am pleased that we are about to achieve all of these short-term goals.

This is deeply satisfying, however, it still is just a beginning. These changes have brought us to the brink of a new reality, but now we need to double down and realize that transformational change. In August 2018 we announced an anonymous donation of $25 million to create a new endowment for the gallery. In January 2019 we announced a promised gift of 1,000 works of Indigenous art from private collectors. These gifts were from donors identified among our campaign prospects and I was moving ahead full speed with donor prospecting as opportunities arose, even as we were still not ready for the campaign.

This past year we unveiled a major public art commission entitled Kâkikê / Forever (2018) by Omaskêko Ininiwak (Cree) artist Duane Linklater. It is a site-specific text-based work, drawing from unattributed Indigenous words spoken during the making of treaties (between Indigenous nations and the Crown of England): “As long as the sun shines, the river flows, and the grass grows,” poetically reflecting Canada’s conflicted past, charged present, and future (post) colonial imaginary. We further developed a new community program space that consists of meeting rooms and an open design for reception and events adjoining an independently managed café. Central to the design of the space was another artist commission and installation by Bill Burns, a Regina-born artist who has exhibited internationally. This summer we will launch our new brand, visual identity, and website.

While I am encouraged by these developments, numerous other opportunities and challenges have arisen during this time. More behind the scenes, and yet no less impactful, other events also transpired. In the March 2017 provincial budget, the government directed the University of Regina to cut off an annual allocation of $400,000 to the gallery that was used to care for the university’s permanent art collection and a range of program partnerships. This annual allocation has been diminished by $100,000 per year until it will evaporate in 2020. This decision alone threatens to consume about half of the annual revenue we are budgeting as income from the new endowment. Currently, the City of Regina is implementing a new policy that may see non-profits, including the MacKenzie, pay property taxes for the first time.

As these developments transpired, it became all-the-more apparent that in order to ensure our sustainability, we had to become more publicfacing and build upon the visitor experience and customer service. While governments are increasingly unreliable, we can win the hearts and minds of visitors and patrons—we have proven that—and in doing so ensure our ongoing success and relevance. To further these initiatives, we engaged TRG Arts to help us transform our operations. Historically, gallery admission has been free of charge. This spring we are implementing a new admission policy and fee, and a renewed membership program. To facilitate this, we are continuing the facelift of the gallery entrance, and again we will be incorporating a new opportunity to make art part of the visitor’s first and primary experience. I am confident that by building on the quality of our offerings, and improving communication with a revitalized membership, we will build a more reliable and engaged donor base.

I hold opportunities to work with artists and support their practice as imperative to our work and of greater importance than all our other measures and initiatives. Engaging with artistic practice elevates all of us—staff, board, stakeholders and visitors—and focuses on our mission. It upholds art and artists as of primary importance. It improves our quality of life. I have always maintained that artists have a unique ability to shift the frame, re-articulate our real problems and opportunities, and find alternative means to negotiate the world. Whatever challenges are thrown at us, I will remain committed to negotiating the world through the lens of art, and in doing so, revealing never before seen opportunities and perspectives.

Photo Credit: MacKenzie Art Gallery

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