On a particularly sunny day, Gwendolyn Owens, the director of McGill’s Visual Arts Collection, ushered me into her office on the second floor of McLennan Library. Her office, somehow both in the midst of all the action and comfortably secluded, is framed by the same dominating concrete pillars that characterize McLennan, and is furnished with warm wood furniture. Stepping into the office, I was greeted by the pleasant presence of artwork. The walls were outfitted with many paintings, several Kachina figurines were on top of a filing cabinet, and a glass sculpture sat delicately atop a bookcase.
Prior to the interview, I held the belief that McGill didn’t care so much for the visual arts. While there was room for this critique, I left it outside the door when I walked into Gwendolyn’s office for the interview. My first interaction with her was one day prior when she gave a talk in my class which introduced the Visual Arts Collection and the opportunities that they had for undergraduate students. I was enamored with her passion and sought to know more about the collection. Before her talk, I never knew that McGill had a Visual Arts Collection; nor that it was so expansive, including more than 3,500 works of art. Something that happens to most students in their first year also happened to me. I was so inundated with information about McGill when first arriving that once I was able to fall into a routine here, I never took the time to do any more searching about opportunities or organizations that this institution might have. So I was completely unaware of most things occurring at McGill that pertained to the fine arts.
This idea, that McGill didn’t promote the visual arts, is the very first thing that Gwendolyn and I discussed.
Interview has been edited for clarity.
GO: One of the interesting things is there are a lot of arts activities going on, but how you figure out about them is one of the challenges. There’s an art show right now at the Redpath Museum. But how would you know? Also, during the pandemic, we started something called De-Stress and Sketch. So every week, we put out on our Instagram (@mcgill_vac) something from the collection and tell people to sketch it. We found that they were enjoying it a lot, and then they started sending us their pictures. So the next week, we would post their pictures and send them a different work to sketch. We ended up with a thousand followers on Instagram. So all this to say there’s stuff happening, but we’re not great as a community about letting everybody know about things.
Evelyn Logan for The McGill Daily (MD): Well, that was what I had hoped, because last year was my first year here and coming into McGill, I had so much being thrown at me, but I wasn’t receiving the information about the arts. It led me to believe that maybe there wasn’t that much programming, or that there wasn’t a community of students, or that the school wasn’t trying to cultivate that at McGill. I think it’s much better now knowing that it’s out there, but people just don’t know.
GO: Do you know that an artist is doing a performance all day outside tomorrow?
MD: No, I haven’t heard.
GO: See? So this year’s Indigenous Artist in Residence [Soleil Launière] is doing a performance on the East field [September 12].
Last fall, for three convocations in a row, the person getting an honorary degree was an artist, a visual artist. François Solven got it for [Winter] 2023, and then in the fall, someone named Robert Fuhl, who’s an amazing Indigenous artist, got it. Last spring, Edward Bertinski, who’s a photographer, got it. So that’s a thing that’s happening. I can take some credit for François Solven. The other two, I have nothing to do with.
Those kinds of things are all happening, almost under the radar. From my perspective, we need to figure out a way that people can know about these things.
MD: Circling back to the McGill community, I read on the website that you’ve been here for 10 years. Can you talk about your experience, what it was like when you first joined, and what it’s like now?
GO: What’s interesting with this collection is that it was run by a committee before it was run by me and my professional team, and they were doing their best, but they were a committee. I’ve done research about university collections, and they get organized and become official collections when there is a crisis or an opportunity. So we’re not unique. We can’t wag our finger at McGill. This is the progress that happens with a university collection, as opposed to an art museum, which is often started by artists, and then becomes a place where people donate their art. The business of McGill is education, first and foremost. So the emphasis is rightly on that.
MD: Yeah, that’s very interesting. I feel like when I’m considering the history of McGill, and I don’t even necessarily think of the arts. I’m thinking more about the sciences and math.
GO: I think that’s fair in that the art collection was a sideline. The fun thing I found out was, in 1948, they decided that they were going to have a Bachelor of Fine Arts program. And it went on for a couple of years. Their target audience were veterans coming back from World War II. That’s not who they got as students. They got women.
Then, there was a change of dean. I think we didn’t really understand what a fine arts program was about, so it ended up morphing into the Art History Department, which used to teach more studio art, but now doesn’t. Also to say, what happened here is not unique either. I’ve seen it in other places.
MD: I was never considering visual arts programming at McGill. What’s the balance between the studio class and the rest of my curriculum? And I was critiquing the fact that McGill doesn’t have studio classes more widely available, but not necessarily thinking of who the class’s audience could be.
GO: Exactly. What’s the role of a studio class if you are not going to be an artist? I mean, that’s one of those questions. The structure for what you need [compared to] the role [for] artists is a little different, which was part of what happened in the ’50s. When the dean changed, the next dean didn’t know how to find artists to teach. It’s one of these things where I kept looking for a really bad guy in the story of what happened to this program, and I couldn’t really find it. It was just that people didn’t really understand.
MD: I feel like that’s a very common theme when it comes to art and how it is considered by larger society.
GO: Yeah. I do pottery now at the Visual Arts Center in Westmount, just for fun. There are students in some of the classes who do things there because it’s an art school. I’ve been talking to people and finding out that actually they’re studying something at McGill, and this is what they’re doing with their spare time. I didn’t notice that they’re McGill students, and they did four classes in a row.
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MD: Which accomplishment are you most proud of?
GO: My staff get tired of hearing me say this, I’ve looked at this as the glass that’s half full, and we’re filling it. So, okay, 20 years ago, they were having trouble keeping track of things, and the list we had wasn’t up to date. Our list is up to date now. Awesome. We’re filling that glass. We’re keeping track of things. We’re doing programming. And I’m really proud of the internship program.
At this point, Gwendolyn’s second in command, Michelle Macleod, the Assistant Curator of the Visual Arts Collection, entered her office and showed me a “Gwendolyn original,” a small piece of pottery beautifully glazed in the abstract style.
MD: What do you see for the future of the visual arts collection?
GO: The library is going to be renovated. There’s going to be Fiat Lux, and I want to make sure that we have great opportunities to show the collection. There’s lots of talking that I’m doing to people about what we need to do to make that happen. In an art museum, everything is in climate-controlled space and all of that. We show art in all kinds of spaces [at McGill]. It’s a risk, but it’s a risk that I think we want to take.
One of the things that we’ve worked very hard to do is make this collection reflective of our community. Basically, it began as Canadian portraits, Canadian landscapes. And now it’s got lots of different works. That’s Maori, [Owens points to the work on her wall], it’s about to be in an exhibition in the [McLennan] lobby here. So come back next week in the lobby, and you will see an exhibition that Michelle [Macleod] has curated.
[The goal] is to get all the art out of storage.
Follow the Visual Arts Collection on Instagram at @mcgill_vac.