In which we discover treasure under our feet.
At the beginning of 2013 the GAC got a grant to hire a digital media specialist, and I was offered the position. The digital world has always fascinated me, so I launched into the job with great enthusiasm. One of the first videos I produced was a tour of the Gallery with Heather Fullerton, the Executive Director.
Touring the Arts Centre with Heather Fullerton
At the same time, the GAC obtained another grant for an indigenous coordinator, and was lucky enough to enlist Suzanne Smoke for the position. Suzanne was a powerhouse of energy, and she organized indigenous classes and exhibitions, a bustle workshop and even a powwow in front of the Gallery!
As the year progressed, the Arts Centre became a lively focus point, not just for painting, but also for crafts and sculpture, for music and dance.
One day I went down to the basement of the Art Gallery, to a storage room hidden away around a corner. There I found a Permanent Collection of over 200 paintings that had been donated some years earlier by the philanthropist Bruce Smith. Most of these were by an excellent but at the time little-known Italian-Canadian painter by the name of Albert Chiarandini.
I found gem after gem, and immediately decided that I had to find out about his life and give a presentation on him. I then made a further discovery: his daughter Joan and her husband Pat Tadier were on the board of directors of the Art Gallery!
Thus was born a long friendship, which took us…Well, you will see where it took us when we reach 2015.
Laurence Ritchie, one of the Gallery directors, talks about the foundation of the Permanent Collection
Bruce Smith, the philanthropist who donated all these paintings, was himself a painter. He met Chiarandini when he enrolled as a student in Albert’s art class, and they became great friends. Bruce Smith’s collection of Chiarandini paintings was second only to the Chiarandini family’s collection. When he donated paintings to the GAC, he included eighteen of his own canvases.
Having discovered the Permanent Collection, Steeve and I immediately began work on a presentation featuring the life and work of Chiarandini. Joan and Pat Tadier invited us to their home to see their private collection of Chiarandini’s paintings, and showed us newspaper articles, sketches, his palette (still covered in paint!) and his violin (like Steeve, Albert was a violinist).
The presentation on Chiarandini was by far the most elaborate so far. Steeve had been perfecting the art of writing PowerPoint presentations (the visuals that are projected onto a screen), and there were three musicians on hand to perform live music!
When we gave our first presentation, in 2010, we announced it as ‘free admission’, since we had no idea how much interest there would be, and we did not want to scare people away. By 2012 we took the plunge and charged $5… And to our surprise, our audience kept coming! Better still, we were getting more people. This was explained to us by a friend who had more worldly financial knowledge than us: If it is free, it has no value. If you have to pay for it, it must be good.
And now it dawned on us that by charging more, we would have a great fundraiser for the Art Gallery! We therefore upped the admission, which, together with a donation box discreetly placed where everyone would see it, raised over $2,000 at each presentation.
One of my main tasks during 2013 was to document everything: activities, people, storage, and of course, paintings. I photographed exhibitions, made videos of artists talking about their work, and created videos to sum up the teachings of workshops. Here is a video of a medicine pouch workshop given by Suzanne Smoke:
Medicine Pouch workshop with Suzanne Smoke
I also wanted to do a presentation on the Permanent Collection – who was a part of it, what kind of artwork it was, and – very importantly – what was the need to have a Permanent Collection.
As luck would have it, a fundraiser had been scheduled, and I was asked to do a short presentation on ‘Art at the GAC.’ I talked about Bruce Smith and Albert Chiarandini, of course, but also about the photographer Tom Zsolt, who had donated a number of his photographs to the Gallery and which therefore were a part of the Permanent Collection.
We gave two big presentations in 2013: one in the Café series – Café Venice – and one on Albert Chiarandini. Here is an amusing moment in the presentation:
After the Chiarandini presentation we made a full-length video that you can watch here:
It’s good to have the recordings in an archive; but it is much better to make them available to everyone who visits the Gallery… And as it turned out, there was money in my grant to purchase a touch screen computer!
I therefore started editing images and videos, writing information and explanations, and uploading everything to the new computer.
I even took recordings of our Art Scandals and Café presentations and edited five-minute videos of them. And of course this was the perfect opportunity to increase awareness of the Permanent Collection, the treasure underneath our feet.
Albert Chiarandini – Canadian Landscapes