A lack of ethics and due diligence in cultural gatekeeping

Earlier this year I received an email from the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery, at the University of Saskatchewan. It was unexpected, as I’d had no interaction with that gallery, or the Kenderdine / College Art Gallery for quite some time. Prior to leaving Saskatchewan in 2015, I had donated a work to the university collection, and a previous piece of mine, from my MFA exhibition in 1999 was in the Snelgrove collection. The latter piece had been requested to be donated, by several members of my MFA committee: it had been damaged, due to the poor state of the Murray Building, but I had replaced it at my own cost. At the last update I received prior to this latest email, it was still installed in one of the buildings around campus. The other work – a small sculpture by Monika Napier – had been donated by me when I was divesting myself of some books, artworks, and other items, prior to moving to Ontario. I had planned to donate a larger painting, as well, by Tatiana Gershuni, but found the Kenderdine / College Art Gallery too disorganized, as regards moving a painting that was approximately 4 feet by 8 feet (that was gifted to a friend). 

The email that came to me in 2021 was from a student employee at the Gordon Snelgrove, and informed me that my artwork was being ‘returned’ to me, and inquired when could I come by to pick it up. When I expressed concern at this unceremonious divestment, my email was met with a number of emails from the new director of the gallery, jake moore, who had unilaterally decided that the gallery and university no longer had space for these works, and was purging them from the collection. 

A side note: I worked at the same gallery, being instrumental to their first full inventory, and my own time at the University of Saskatchewan and experience with the Snelgrove Gallery (when it was under the directorship of Gary Young, and later, under the incompetent and careerist Marcus Miller) had indicated – or given the impression – that works donated by BFA and MFA students would be absorbed into the University collection. Whether this was to happen during an acquisitions committee meeting, or by decision of the director, was unclear (the University of Saskatchewan has had a problematic history of collecting, such as having the nephew of an artist submitting work to the collection on the committee, or a gallerist sitting on the committee who was the primary representative of another artists’ work, acting as an appraiser). 

This questionable approach to collecting and the role of the Snelgrove Gallery therein (which had primarily been designated as the gallery space for BFA and MFA exhibitions, and sometimes other shows, such as the now annual Sessional / Staff exhibition, that I began, and facilitated, nearly two decades ago, with the support of previous Snelgrove Director Gary Young) only became worse under Miller. He seemed to regard the gallery as a space for his wife to exhibit, and his departure from that position to the Mann Gallery in Prince Albert makes me worry about that institution and the strides made there by previous Director / Curator Jesse Campbell.  

However, I’ll return to the motivation behind this post (as I’ve had little interest to engage with the Saskatoon cultural landscape, with its pot holes and treacherous slicks, for some time, and the excessive display of hypocrisy by many there, as regards the Remai Modern, soured me on it forever). The decision by new Director moore to shed works donated – often requested – is the latest in a number of disturbing trends by cultural institutions to not only not value artists, or collections, but to actively disrespect them, whether through inexperience or incompetence. 

My disdain for the actions of moore and the KAG / College Gallery are not just as an artist who now sees their work devalued and dismissed. I have also curated from that collection, and spent several years documenting works, creating artist files / object files, and installing exhibitions. My roots in that community, before I ripped them up in response to similar actions to this when I left Saskatoon, were deep. Speaking as someone who has deep knowledge of that collection (and its failures, both in collecting and storage, and presentation) and of the history of art making in Saskatchewan, this move is not so much alarming to me, as the latest in a series of institutional failures by the University of Saskatchewan. 

When I didn’t receive a professional or considered answer regarding the ‘handing back’ of my work, I indicated that the Napier sculpture I had donated should be returned to me, as well. After all, what guarantee did I have that a future ‘director’ might deem it ‘unnecessary’? A work I purchased for $400 dollars, that I had gifted to the university, might also easily be turned around and converted into profit, as the current iteration of leadership at the University of Saskatchewan is a hypocritical one (much lip service about a project to build a large, arts and culture space was spewed several times during my teaching career there, and it never came to fruition, but austerity cuts that were enacted with a blatant, ignorant cruelty were. In a like manner, much jawing from the university echelon regarding the institution’s history of racism was recently exposed as smoke and mirrors). 

Frankly, if i had donated any other works, I would have also asked for their return: it is amusing, in a dour way, that the large painting I mentioned earlier, that I had hoped to gift to the Kenderdine / College Art Gallery, that I instead gave to a friend, is secure, well cared for, and valued greatly by him. It is sad that a gallery space, within a university, has no such commitment. In correlation to this, a friend who lives in Saskatoon still will be picking up my work, and my previous ‘donation’, and I have no doubt they’ll care for them better, it would seem, than the current regime at the College / Kenderdine Gallery.

I offer this article to chronicle my poor experience, and also as a warning, as it’s also come to my attention that other universities are not acting as good shepherds of collections (a similar collection of printed works, at the University of Windsor, was expunged in a similar manner). Frankly, I did not think my opinion of the University of Saskatchewan could sink lower, but I would caution that anyone who is considering donating work to them should look elsewhere, as the vagaries of individual agendas seem to have trumped due diligence and respectful, informed collection management.

The artwork pictured is the piece in question: Untitled, from the series Adam’s Second Wife, 1999. This work would be exhibited in PROOF, at Gallery 44 (1999 – I am the only graduate of the U of S program to be curated into that annual, national exhibition), Platform Art Gallery (Winnipeg), Forest City Gallery (London, ON) and numerous spaces around Saskatchewan, as part of the Viewing Distance travelling exhibition. This information is offered as an indication that my experience as an artist is more significant, and arguably more relevant, to the collection that numerous other works I know are within the collection.

Other articles that explore institutional and ethical failures at the University of Saskatchewan, as manifest in cultural spaces, can be read about here and here. I share these to help illustrate a pattern, so this might not be dismissed as just an aberration, but more so a policy, in that place.