Curator turned artist gets proper homecoming at last
Ydessa Hendeles helped build Toronto contemporary art scene while growing along the way
It’s an announcement that would typically register on the Richter scale of the Canadian art landscape, but when the Power Plant quietly added its summer show to the “upcoming exhibitions” section of its website earlier this month, it was with a whisper, not a shout.
Maybe it’s a strategy designed to temper expectations, of which there will be many, most of them great. And fair enough. In June, the Power Plant will open The Milliner’s Daughter, the first survey of Ydessa Hendeles’ work here in her hometown, and a more momentous occasion in the Canadian art world would be hard to imagine.
Hendeles, now 68, is nothing less than a legend. In the 1980s, she opened the Ydessa Gallery, on Queen St. near Spadina, where she helped launch the careers of Canadian artists like Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham, among the country’s biggest art exports of all time.
But she was destined for even bigger things. In 1988, she opened the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation on King St., a two-storey brick warehouse whose innards she had polished to an international art-museum sheen.
There, she displayed works from her remarkable collection, which she had gathered not to sell, but to fill a public need. When it opened, the landscape for seeing international contemporary art here was desolate, indeed. By the time I first encountered the foundation, as a young and curious fan in the early 2000s, it became my reliable window into a greater art world. The roll call of A-list artists I saw there for the first time is almost too long to completely remember: Jeff Koons, Bruce Naumann, On Kawara, Robert Gober, Pipilotti Rist, Shirin Neshat, Christian Boltanski, Maurizio Cattelan — the list goes on.
Over time, Hendeles evolved at the foundation a unique model, taking authorship over her exhibitions with such voice and coherence that her curation became something of an art practice itself. Looking back, a 2003 show at the foundation, Partners, now seems the departure point: An overwhelming display of thousands of vintage photographs of people posing with teddy bears (Hendeles had hunted them up personally, on eBay) all led to a single, chilling piece in a final room: Cattelan’s Him, a child-sized sculpture of Adolf Hitler on his knees.
By the time she closed the foundation in 2012, her position as an artist had become less a notion than a fact. Its closure signalled a shift, both for the city — which had caught up, finally, with her vision of an intermingled local and international scene — and for Hendeles herself.
As she began to split time between Toronto and New York, she started to divest her collection. She had already donated 32 works to the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2009, but in 2013, she sold 144 pieces, many of them monumental, to the Glenstone Museum, a privately owned institution near Washington, D.C.
It left her suddenly untethered, and free to take on the role more fully. Hendeles’ public self-declaration as an artist had taken place at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York in late 2011, just months before the foundation was closed.
There, she presented an installation of photographs by Walker Evans and Eugène Atget, among others, alongside intricate antique woodworking — an enormous, cathedral-esque birdcage, for one. The pairing, of images long-acknowledged to be within the realm of art and evocative objects outside such distinctions, had become her signature, and a unique art practice of its own.
From there, Hendeles embraced her second act more clearly. From her wooden sleep. . ., an arrangement of hundreds of wooden mannequins dating across a span of nearly 500 years at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2015, was its full declaration; last fall, at New York’s New Museum, Partners appeared as part of an exhibition called The Keeper, further establishing Hendeles’ second act for all the world to see.
The Milliner’s Daughter, then, in an odd way, marks Hendeles’ Toronto debut (museum-wise at least: Death to Pigs, an intimate, intense small show at Barbara Edwards Contemporary here last fall officially holds that distinction). Its details remain to be seen, though the gallery offers some clues. Portions of the London Institute of Contemporary Arts show will be here, as will earlier projects from Berlin and from Mar- burg, Germany, where Hendeles was born in 1948, and from where her parents, both of them Auschwitz survivors, bundled her up in 1951 and brought her to Canada.
Whatever its final form, The Milliner’s Daughter serves both as a declaration of self (Hendeles elides autobiography, though as she once told me, “if you’re not pulling on something of your own, you’re not showing what it feels to be alive today”) and as an urgent reminder of the here and now.
Hendeles arrived as a refugee from a war-torn state and grew up to become one of the most significant contributors to the culture of her adopted homeland of her generation. She tells stories, through objects, of collective identity forged through loss, tragedy and, ultimately, humanity and survival.
With the world flooded with displacement and humanity in short supply, her official homecoming, 40 years later, couldn’t come at a better time.