Ann Thomas curates what might be final exhibition
Senior curator started ‘five year’ stint at the National Gallery nearly 40 years ago
When Ann Thomas first accepted a position at the National Gallery of Canada, she planned to give it five years.
That was almost 40 years ago. Thomas began working at the gallery as the assistant curator of photographs in October 1978, joining the collection’s founding curator, James Borcoman. She enjoyed her previous job as architectural historian for the Canadian Inventory of Historic Buildings, but thought she’d try something else.
“I’m just going for five years,” she told her manager at the time. “I’m not going to stay forever.”
Now 74, Thomas has curated what’s likely her final exhibition, though she has not set a date for retirement. Her swan song, The Extended Moment: Fifty Years of Collecting Photographs, runs until Sept. 16 in the gallery’s Canadian Photography Institute. She will share her passion for photographs during a tour of the exhibition at 11 a.m. Monday.
The senior curator of photographs since 1994, Thomas has recently stepped in to help fill the leadership vacuum caused by two high-profile departures at the institution.
She is currently acting as the gallery ’s chief curator, taking over from deputy director Paul Lang, who left to become director of Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg in France earlier this year.
Thomas is also overseeing the CPI after the resignation of Luce Lebart, who quietly left the director job in March after just a year and a half in the position. Lebart, a native of France who moved to Ottawa to work at the gallery, wrote in an email that she has embarked on a “new wonderful photographic adventure that brings me back to Europe.” She did not elaborate.
Thomas plans to stay at the gallery at least until the chief curator position is filled. A search is underway.
“I’ve had several periods when I was going to retire and then something came up,” she said. “I’m not anxious about it. It’s to the benefit of the institution. Whenever they get someone in here I can go, or if they need someone, I can hang in for a little bit.”
There are a few reasons Thomas feels she’s lasted so long. For starters, she’s never bored.
“With the field I specialize in, you never stop learning,” she said. “Because photography touches on so many parts of our world and our lives, there’s always something new to learn about. It’s not one of those jobs where you get so mesmerized by routine that you wish you had windows that open so you can jump out.”
She also gets caught up in the cycle of organizing exhibitions. “What happens with museum time is that you propose an exhibition, you connect yourself to the exhibition and when other opportunities come up, you think, ‘Oh, I’m in the middle of doing this.’ So you don’t want to drop it and you find yourself in another four-year cycle.”
Another thing that kept Thomas going was a 2011 fellowship at The Getty, when she took three months to conduct research into the impact of electricity on art and photography.
“It was so good to get away,” she says, “to be dedicated to doing research for three months, and to be surrounded by people who are invigorated and interested in what they’re working on. I came back and it felt like a resurge of energy.”
Thomas was born and raised in South Africa, but left when she was 21.
“I wanted to come to some place that was a little bit saner than South Africa in the midst of apartheid. No one felt particularly comfortable,” she said.
Her first experience with the power of photography occurred as a teenager when she visited her older sister, a journalist, in Johannesburg. They arranged to meet at an art gallery. Instead of paintings, Thomas saw the work of the celebrated photojournalist Peter Magubane.
“I was absolutely knocked out by his photographs,” she recalls. “I had a short stint of thinking maybe I could become a social documentary photographer ... but as I matured over the next three years, I realized I had to get out of the country.”
She headed to Montreal’s Concordia University, where she wrote a master’s thesis on the relationship between Canadian painting and photography. She also did some teaching before taking a job in Ottawa.
Looking back, personal highlights of her long curating career include exhibitions of the work of Lisette Model (1990), Lynne Cohen (2001) and a 1996 exhibition titled, Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science.
“My great passion has been for the collecting, for exhibitions and for educating people about photography and its role in the arts from the 19th century on,” Thomas said.