National Post (National Edition)
A BILL REID COLLECTION no one WANTS
ONE-TIME COLLABORATOR BLAMES ‘CABAL’ FOR KEEPING MEMORABILIA OUT OF MUSEUMS
GIBSONS, B.C. • Grace Mooney insists she is not paranoid. But there are hidden forces — a “cabal” — within Canada’s cultural institutions working against her, she says.
Conspiracy theories are just one of the things you have to put up with when you enter Mooney’s orbit. So are the incessant phone calls gently pleading with you to come see her collection.
Eventually, you relent. And when you do, a realization sets in that maybe, just maybe, this feisty 87-yearold grandmother and retired artist does have something valuable. You begin to understand her frustration and sense of urgency.
So you dig a little more.
What you discover is that at the peak of her career in the 1970s and ’80s, Mooney commanded the attention of government dignitaries and top museums around the world. Her claim to fame? An uncanny ability to create replicas of three-dimensional artwork that were practically indistinguishable from the originals.
Locally, she worked alongside the inimitable Haida carver and goldsmith, Bill Reid, and other Northwest Coast artists.
From these relationships, Mooney amassed an impressive collection of memorabilia: a couple hundred moulds, castings and wax impressions that she has carefully preserved in bubble wrap and protective cloths; several of Reid’s original drawings and a discarded sketchbook; a gold bracelet that Reid gifted to Mooney’s daughter; and binders filled with letters, invoices, memos and personal commentary documenting her professional affairs and the growing native art scene. There is no question these items hold great historical value, experts say.
Yet, despite years of trying, Mooney has not been able to find a cultural institution that will house her collection.
Mooney and her supporters have a theory: because she has dared to publicly question the authenticity of some of Reid’s work — accusing him of taking credit for work he barely laid his hands on — she has essentially become blacklisted.
“I now believe that there is a cabal that operates within our cultural institutions in self-interest,” she says. “They should be exposed.”
Curious, the National Post filed a freedom-of-information request with Victoria’s Royal B.C. Museum, whose staff quietly catalogued every item of her collection in 2013 with an eye toward acquisition only to change course and send everything back in 2014.
Over 800 pages of emails and memos were returned, providing rare insight into the museum’s messy deliberations. Though there is no smoking gun, one document comes tantalizingly close to supporting Mooney’s theory: a briefing note to the CEO that suggests some members of the public might not look too favourably on Mooney’s criticism of Reid and may want her records “suppressed.”
But other, more mundane, factors were also at play. Staff struggled to find appraisers who could agree on a price tag for the collection. They wrestled with lingering questions over ownership and copyright.
Mooney doesn’t buy any of those other reasons. Exhausted and suffering from frequent bouts of brain fog, she is now in a race to find a home for her collection.
“I’m just trying to deliver this where it belongs,” she says.
“I want to be free of it.”
Mooney lives with her daughter, Sam Mckillop, in a modest bungalow in Gibsons, about a 40-minute ferry ride from Vancouver on B.C.’S Sunshine Coast.
On the morning of my visit, it is dark and drizzly. But inside, her living room is bathed in warm colours. Mooney is wearing a slightly rumpled white shirt, sleeves rolled up, with glasses draped around her neck.
Though she can be saucytongued, she carries a mostly refined, professorial air about her.
Born in Quebec, Mooney completed a four-year program at the Vancouver School of Art in 1954 with an emphasis on sculpture and painting. Her post-graduate work took her to London, Paris, Rome and Florence.
Mooney started her career working on animated films and creating threedimensional models for television. Then, in the 1970s, after much trial and error, she developed a manufacturing process for reproducing three-dimensional art.
“I loved the problem solving,” she says.
Word spread about her unique talent and orders started coming in from the National Museums of Canada, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the British Museum for her to reproduce artifacts — everything from small totems to jade frogs — that they could sell in their gift shops.
A 1979 marketing consultant’s report, produced as evidence when Mooney successfully sued the National Museums of Canada for breach of contract, lauded Mooney’s abilities as “bordering on genius.”
“Representatives of the Metropolitan Museum (New York) recently affirmed that they have never found her equal,” the report said. “Other individuals engaged with this business have unequivocally stated that pieces she has replicated are impossible to do.”
For years, Mooney worked alongside Bill Reid. Their first collaboration took place in 1974 when the Government of Canada wanted to showcase Reid’s design of a salmon on the cover of a limited-edition book it planned to present to heads of state at an international conference. Mooney was asked to do the reproductions.
She would go on to do many more for Reid, including most notably replicas of his original boxwood carving known as “Raven and the Clamshell.” Reid’s carvers used Mooney’s castings as a visual reference for carving a much larger version of the sculpture out of yellow cedar — a version that is now the centrepiece of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC.
But their relationship was acrimonious, stemming from Reid’s alleged failure to pay Mooney for work done and to properly credit others for assisting him with jobs as Parkinson’s disease took over his body.
“He did very beautiful work early on in his career and was properly respected and applauded,” Mooney says. “Later, as Parkinson’s overtook his motor skills, he found it useful to secretly job the work to other unknown artists, take their work, put his name on it, and sell it as his own.”
The two parted ways. In late 1988, Reid’s lawyers sent Mooney a letter informing her that he was “terminating all his business dealings” with her and that he wanted back “all moulds, wax impressions and castings.”
A few months later, Reid’s lawyers sent another letter, stating there was “no doubt that Mr. Reid owns the copyright to all works to which the moulds pertain.”
But Mooney did not budge and retained everything.
“I said, ‘Good, take me to court,’ ” Mooney says.
A lawsuit was filed but ultimately abandoned.
A year after Reid’s death in 1998, Maclean’s magazine published an expose that suggested Reid may have committed artistic fraud. It quoted many of Reid’s closest collaborators who “say they felt used, were badly paid and got little credit for their labour.”
Mooney served as an anonymous source for that story, a fact that was later revealed by the National Post’s Brian Hutchinson in an article in 2010. “I’m already a pariah,” she said at the time. “I have been since I began to question Bill.”
It was against this backdrop that Mooney approached the Royal B.C. Museum in late 2012 with an offer: would they work with her to find a benefactor who could buy her collection and then donate it to the museum?
Records obtained by the Post show staff were enthusiastic. They took in her entire collection on a temporary basis in January 2013 so they could examine each item.
Raymond Frogner, then the museum’s archivist, recorded six hours of interviews with Mooney. As far as her written materials go, “there are not many archival fonds quite like it” and they hold “significant symbolic value” for First Nations communities in the way they document the work of local native artists, he wrote in a report in April 2013.
Frogner noted that Mooney’s records repeat criticism that Reid “relied heavily on other artists to complete some of his greatest works and these artists have not been fully acknowledged for their work. This is not unique but perhaps significant in the detail it is recorded.”
Frogner did not see this as an impediment.
“I view this as part of the discourse on art and the role of the archivist is not to edit such criticism but include it as a part of the rich context of discourse Reid’s art elicited,” he wrote.
A briefing note prepared for CEO Jack Lohman in May 2013 noted the acquisition of Mooney’s collection “would support several key strategic directions" for the museum.
But it cautioned some records were “personal and critical of particular artists’ practices and would need to be restricted for some time. There may be some organizations and individuals who would want this information suppressed. We have relationships with some of the same.”
Still, the museum forged ahead. Don Bourdon, the museum’s curator of images and paintings, emailed Mooney in July 2013 to say staff believed her archival materials were “of outstanding significance” to the province and “we commit to obtaining a fair market valuation of the entire collection so that we can explore options for acquisition.”
The next month, Lohman and Bourdon visited Mooney and her daughter and took them out for Japanese food.
Lohman was “delightful, entertaining,” Mooney recalls. “It was such a warm, good feeling that this was the right thing.”
Mckillop remembers them saying they couldn’t make any promises. But the meeting “left you feeling there was every reason to be very optimistic that this was going to be a meaningful end — what mom had been looking for.”
Days later, Lohman wrote to Mooney, saying how enchanted he was by the visit and how he appreciated her “candour and creativity.”
“I look forward to completing this fascinating acquisition and to exploring the ideas of your fertile imagination,” he wrote.
Setbacks soon followed. On Sept. 4, 2013, staff discovered a gold casting of a killer whale was missing from the collection, prompting a frantic search.
After a weeks-long internal investigation, the whale pendant could not be located, leading to only two possibilities, according to a staff memo: it had been misplaced or “secreted away with criminal intent.”
Victoria Police were notified on Nov. 18, 2013. But their investigation didn’t lead anywhere. The museum later cut a $15,000 cheque for Mooney.
Meanwhile, staff were becoming nervous about whether Mooney had rightful ownership and copyright over all of the moulds in her collection, given Reid’s previous legal threats.
“It is much more murky than we imagined which plays into her position that people are intent on protecting Reid’s reputation at the expense of hers,” Kathryn Bridge, then deputy director at the museum, wrote in an email.
They also ran into problems appraising the collection. A Nov. 6, 2013 status report for Lohman noted that while three appraisers had reached relatively similar conclusions on the value of the paper records, two appraisers who had assessed the physical objects reached wildly different conclusions, rendering them “entirely unusable.”
The two reports, later obtained by Mooney, show the valuations ranged from $46,614 to $559,885.
Mooney held firm in her belief that the collection was worth millions.
“The owner likely has an inflated view of the value of the collection,” the status report said.
A prospective benefactor who had signalled interest in the collection backed out. In an interview with the Post, retired businessman Uwe Mummenhoff of Sechelt, B.C., said he “didn’t want to be involved in anything controversial” or anything that could be “questioned.”
Besides, he was only ever really interested in the gold bracelet that Reid had gifted to Mooney’s daughter, he said.
By spring of 2014, staff at the museum seemed resigned to the fact that the acquisition was not going to happen. Records show they attempted to shop her collection to other places.
“Several attempts to set up a private buyer and donation agreement have petered out,” Gary Mitchell, then the museum’s vice-president, wrote to the National Gallery of Canada’s Greg Hill.
“While I realize Grace herself may want a British Columbia home for her collection it is more important for the collection to be secured and preserved than to languish.”
Mooney did not get very far in her discussions with the National Gallery, nor with folks at Heritage Canada.
Sounding a tone of desperation, Mooney sent Lohman two letters in May 2014 appealing to him to reconsider and to not bow to the pressures of “Canada’s cultural mafia” whose members, she alleged, seek to perpetuate an “ongoing collusion to commit fraud on the Canadian public … by misrepresenting the actual artistic contribution of leading Canadian artists.”
“Canada needs heroes,” she wrote.
Lohman was unmoved. “I sincerely hope a Canadian cultural agency will allocate the resources to acquire, preserve and make accessible your archival collection. It is a regret the Royal B.C. Museum cannot at this time accommodate your collection,” he wrote back 10 days later.
In the aftermath, the museum sought to distance itself from the collection, records show. When staff learned that a media outlet might be pursuing a story, Lohman told colleagues: “I am wanting to keep our name out of this altogether.”
In an interview with the Post, Lohman cited a variety of factors for why he “pulled the plug” on the acquisition.
The collection just wasn’t the right fit for his museum; getting people to appraise the collection was a challenge; and there were lingering questions over the provenance of certain items.
“I know this collection was wrapped up in a little bit of controversy. I was very concerned,” Lohman said.
Asked if there was merit to the theory people were concerned Mooney’s criticism of Reid might taint Reid’s legendary reputation, Lohman said: “Certainly one wouldn’t want to injure other institutions or existing relatives and so on. We have to be sensitive to so many things.”
That said, just because certain records may have been critical of Reid wouldn’t necessarily be a deterrent, Lohman added. “Would that be a reason for not touching the collection? I don’t think so.”
Frogner, the museum’s archivist at the time, agreed.
“You’ll never find a collection of archival material that won’t have conflicting opinions. That’s the messiness of life,” Frogner said.
Allison Andrachuk, who was recently named director of the Bill Reid Gallery (operated by the Bill Reid Foundation), said she could not comment on Mooney’s collection as none of the foundation’s current staff has knowledge of its contents. She did not respond to questions about the allegation Reid did not properly credit other artists.
Mooney’s supporters say there’s likely more truth to her theory than the museum world is letting on.
“(Reid’s) been put on a pedestal that no one wants to see him topple off of. They have an investment in it; perhaps they feel they’ll lose it,” said Lynn Maranda, former curator at the Museum of Vancouver.
Maranda shared with the Post a letter she wrote in 2015 vouching for Mooney’s unique collection. It read in part: “Its historical and research value is without parallel. It is, in fact, a significant tool essential to understanding the work and creative history of this outstanding but often enigmatic Haida artist. In particular, the firstgeneration mould and production materials provide the artist’s thumbprint and form the basis by which his works can be authenticated in the future, thus nullifying creations which are not truly from his hand.”
Canada’s museum community was embarrassed because it was “taken in” by Reid, says James Maceachern, Mooney’s one-time lawyer.
“Grace’s collection proves they didn’t know what they were doing or did know and went ahead in what is essentially a fraud on the taxpayer,” he said. “No one wants to admit they were taken in.”
In recent weeks, Mooney initiated talks with the Vancouver Public Library’s special collections team. Where once she sought millions for her collection, she says she’s now content to gift it away, as long as it goes to a reputable place and is accessible to researchers.
But library staff told her they wouldn’t be able to accommodate her collection as they did not have the capacity or expertise.
“Definitely they are afraid of it,” Mooney says. “That’s my opinion.”
I’M JUST TRYING TO DELIVER THIS WHERE IT BELONGS. I WANT TO BE FREE OF IT. — GRACE MOONEY