Canadian Art

Are we going to hear news soon about the status of Canadian Art magazine -- "the pre-eminent platform for journalism and criticism about art and culture in Canada"?

The magazine's last posting -- its fourth "Statement" in a row since its April "pause" of operations -- came on June 15, when readers were reminded once more of the magazine's financial shortfalls (which it links to Covid, though we know from a former editor that fundraising was a pre-Covid problem) and its ongoing attempts to address structural racism towards a more equitable, decolonial model.

To achieve this latter goal, all but three Canadian Art Board of Directors/Members of the Foundation's charity -- Dori Tunstall, Lee Matheson and Gabe Gonda -- have resigned. The hope here is that new Directors? Members? Director/Members? would join the Board? Foundation? both? and, once gathered, embody the kinds of changes the three remaining Director/Members are seeking to implement.

The response to this last hope was met with skepticism on social media, and perhaps rightly so. For it is likely, at least to this reader, that the Board's final report has already been submitted to the magazine's insolvency trustee: that every effort was made to keep the magazine (and the Foundation?) solvent, but as there is no one willing to join the board and take on its financial (if not cultural) liabilities, it would have no choice but to file for bankruptcy.

So now what?

As long as there is a Canadian government cultural policy, a visual art market and a Canadian financial centre there will always be room for a "pre-eminent" Canadian visual art magazine (hard copy, digital, or both). Canadian Art has come and gone under a number names over the years (its official "History" can be found here) and I have every reason to believe it will come again, but under a new name, an organ of an established foundation, not the other way around, as was the case in the mid-2010s when the Canadian Art Foundation was suddenly bigger than the magazine it grew from, thus organ-izing it.

Reading through Canadian Art's "History", one can't help but notice the prominence of Sarah Milroy, who is now, among other duties, a Board Director at the Art Canada Institute, an organization formed in 2013 that claims to be "the only national institute whose mandate is to promote the study of an inclusive multi-vocal Canadian art history to as broad an audience as possible, in English and French, within Canada and internationally." Reading down the Institute's sidebar, I see no mention of a magazine, but it's only a matter of time before it grows one. Not in the wild, of course, but under the strictest of laboratory conditions.