Thanks to the generosity of the Goodman Family Foundation, I was awarded an Arts Research Internship Award for the summer of 2022. My research internship was conducted at the McGill Visual Arts Collection (VAC). I am in my fourth year at McGill studying art history, particularly interested in post-colonial and critical race theories applied Quebec post-war art. Working with Gwendolyn Owens, I researched and co-authored a paper entitled Diversity of Expression at Femina at the Musée du Québec. Femina was a 1947 exhibit at the provincial museum presenting works solely produced by female artists. This was one of the first such exhibits in Quebec and the first held at the provincial museum. Our article has been accepted for publication in Le Carnet de L’ÉRHAQ, a peer-reviewed journal publishing articles about Quebec art history.
I approached Wendy about doing my internship with the VAC because I knew that the Collection has always welcomed interns and I felt that my field of study fit nicely with its mission. Wendy kindly invited me to research an article she was preparing. Although my ARIA research was my main focus, internships at the VAC include a variety of things like doing condition reports, moving artworks, doing surveys, giving guided tours, and researching the collection. These tasks were thus a daily part of my internship. The Visual Arts Collection at McGill includes nearly 4,000 works of art spread over four campuses and 90 buildings. The collection has been gradually added to since the late nineteenth century, mainly thanks to donations (either in kind or in financial contributions that go towards acquisitions). Today donations are still the bedrock of the collection. Having been professionalized in 2013, the VAC is now headed by curator Gwendolyn Owens, supported by the assistant curator Michelle Macleod and revolving cast of student interns.
As I mentioned earlier, my ARIA-funded research was based around the 1947 exhibit Femina. Seven artists exhibited, including sculptor Sylvia Daoust, and painters Simone Dénéchaud, Suzanne Duquet, Claire Fauteux, Agnès Lefort, Paige Pinneo, and Marian Dale Scott. Our main argument revolved around our belief that the impact Femina had on the exhibiting artists was limited for several reasons: the fact that these artists had little to tie them together, their grouping was created by a curator not the artists themselves, and timing. The Femina artists did not share a common background, education, approach, first language, nor media; when artists share an approach or a style—something more than simply gender and where they live—historically, there is a stronger possibility of a second exhibition that cements the importance of the group. The initiative to bring the Femina artists together was Musée du Québec curator Paul Rainville’s and thus the exhibitors felt less of an attachment as a group than if they had banded together and decided to exhibit their works themselves. The timing of this show also played into why there was no Femina II. The Quebec art scene was being shaken by the publication of manifestoes (Refus global and Prisme d’yeux) and by exhibitions of surrealist-inspired works. The artworks presented in Femina were contemporary, yet they were more in keeping with impressionist, fauvist, and cubist styles than Surrealism. The artistic discourse of the time rejected these “old” styles and favoured the teaching of French theorist, André Breton. Timing, then, was not on the Femina artistsside. .
During the summer, I researched archives, newspapers, and exhibition catalogues, attended regular meetings with Wendy, and co-authored the final text with her. The hardest challenge we had to face was finding the rights to the images we wanted to include in the article. At the time of writing these lines, we are still waiting for a number of replies regarding the 10 images we want to publish. I am receiving academic credit for my ARIA internship. Although the details of my academic and critical evaluation of my internship remain unclear, I am thinking of investigating how an institution can best respond to the questionable acquisition history of a donated object. Another possible research path is looking into the publication culture of peer-review.
Thanks to this internship, I was able to learn a lot more about McGill and its collection. I was subsequently offered a place at the VAC to continue my work with the collection during term time. These consequences could not have been possible without the generous support of the Goodman Family Foundation, and I thus thank them deeply.
