Art of survival
Their grand project completed — knock on wood — the people who made MOCA live again talk about the struggle
It’s been a roller-coaster three years for MOCA, amid setbacks, leaps ahead and everything in between. But the long-mothballed museum is finally, actually, happening this weekend. Along the way, people committed to making the museum live again, this time on Sterling Rd., have endured a lot. What do the final few days before opening look like? Let’s let five of them talk about persisting through a long, sometimes messy journey.
Heidi Reitmaier, director and CEO
In the brand-new office space of the brand-new MOCA, small victories count, and the noticeable lack of plaster dust this week seemed to signal something big. “When the drywallers left, that meant something,” laughed Reitmaier, who joined MOCA at the beginning of this year. Her task? Open a museum in a pristine building — and, if you don’t mind, in five months or less, please?
The undauntable Reitmaier took it on board, but had to make a call: The museum’s May opening had to be pushed, but with an olive branch to an expectant public. For Doors Open Toronto in May, MOCA let in throngs of the curious and expectant, offering them a glimpse of the work in progress. “We had 4,000 visitors in two days,” she marvelled. “It told us three really important things: The demand is there, people are really excited — and there are a lot of things we didn’t have in place that we really, really needed.”
Between now and then, a lot of those things have been slotted — dozens of staff, volunteers and, yes, plenty of drywall. It’s been a mountain to climb, but Reitmaier is circumspect, and looking forward, not back. “These things take time,” she said. “When we open this weekend, there will be a moment when I’m like, ‘yes!’ But museums are machines that change and move, and MOCA has nimbleness built into its DNA. This is a big milestone — it’s huge! — but there will never be a time when we feel like we’re done, or this is finished. So let’s get used to it.”
David Liss, curator Standing amid the mild disarray of an exhibition install in progress this week, Liss, MOCA’s longest-serving staffer, let go a sigh. “Pulling an all-nighter, Dave?” teased Julia Ouellette, MOCA’s board chair, on a quick look-see. “Not tonight,” Liss said. “Ask me tomorrow.”
For Liss, 18 years of service has come down to this: Five floors of a new museum that he insists, in his mind’s eye, he could always see. “This is what I moved here to do,” Liss shrugged, in his good-natured way. “And I believed it would happen from day one. I never wavered.” Did it ever look this far away? “No,” he said, laughing. “That’s the part I missed.” When he arrived from Montreal in 2000, the Art Gallery of North York, tucked in the back of the northern borough’s civic centre, had just decided on a new name — MOCCA, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art — and a new ambition: To shrug off regional suburban culture and become a national concern. Liss engineered a move from Mel Lastman Square to Queen West in 2005, and shepherded the institution through its first decade on sheer force of will: Staffing was scant, and often temporary. The move downtown morphed MOCCA into an unofficial clubhouse for the Toronto art scene, driven by Liss’s doors-wide-open conviviality. The old MOCCA was a hub — and he wants that for the new MOCA, too. But first: Friday. “There’s not a single big thing left for us to do,” Liss says. “It’s the hundreds of little things I’m thinking about.” November Paynter, director of programming Paynter, a Brit by way of Istanbul, arrived in January 2017 to one of the most bitter winters in recent memory, and a museum struggling to find its feet. MOCA had just delayed its opening, first set for May 2017, a perma- nent director was yet to be named, and the team was working out temporary offices. Still, Paynter, who held a senior curatorial position with the SALT cluster of contemporary art museums in Istanbul, had seen worse.
“I ended up being tear-gassed a couple of times,” said Paynter, as various knocks on her door — installation questions, signs quandaries — came fast and furious this week. So a delayed museum? No big deal. “Our second building in Istanbul was delayed six months,” she said, unfazed. “And really, it’s been worth it. Seeing it now — there’s such great energy in this building. It has such a good vibe.”
Some background in the fits and starts of getting new museums off the ground has no doubt come in handy: Paynter was among those who brought SALT, now internationally renowned, into being, and MOCA’s nascent state was part of the attraction. “Having done it once, it was such a gift to be able to help build a museum from scratch again. And if it took a little longer, so be it. We knew we needed to open with a splash. And we will.” Julia Ouellette, board chair Some have served longer on MOCA’s — and MOCCA’s — board than Ouellette, but few are identified so closely, and have been so visibly its advocate.
So Thursday night, when she hosts a dinner for the museum’s many donors, is significant to no one more than Ouellette. “It’s going to be that ‘pinch me’ moment,” she said, grinning while at the vast boardroom table in a sun-filled expanse on MOCA’s fifth floor this week. “I hadn’t been around much lately, and then to arrive here today — I thought, ‘My God, where am I?’ ”
It’s been six years of waiting and hoping for Ouellette and Liss both. “That’s how long ago it was when we first saw it, and we thought: Yeah. This is it,” she said. Three years later, when MOCCA shut down in 2015, they were finally able to announce it. “I had people saying, ‘it’s perfect,’ ” she said.
But buildings don’t make culture on their own, and Ouellette’s here to safeguard that old MOCCA spirit as the new MOCA blooms. “I’ve never doubted there was an important place for MOCA in the cultural landscape in the city,” she said. “That’s what drew me to the project — how connected it was to the grassroots.” Sure, it took longer than anyone imagined. But that’s just par for the course.
“Ambitious projects always take more than you can ever truly anticipate,” she said. Gina Facchini, exhibition manager and registrar On an afternoon earlier this week, Facchini watched impassively as a worker on a scissor lift removed the final letter ‘E’ from ‘BELIEVE,’ a white neon artwork by the British artist Kendell Geers which just happened to be the eponymous title of the brand new MOCA’s inaugural show.
The E was on the fritz, and had to be replaced, stat. A bad omen? “Let’s hope not,” she said with a laugh.
“You have to maintain a sense of humour. It’s not life and death. But there are a lot of expectations.”
That much is certain. Thousands will throng MOCA’s opening night Friday, with just as many expected in the days and weeks to follow. Call it pent-up demand: In the three years since MOCCA went dark, picked up stakes and headed west to Sterling Road, much has happened, some of it trying, to say the least.
When Facchini joined the team, hers was the task of keeping everything in its right place. It’s been a handful, to be sure. When the museum last hosted a preview in May, “this whole space was filled with elevator parts,” she said, gesturing towards a now mostly vacant main floor.
“Not being in the building has been the hardest part,” she said.
She paused, as though not quite believing it herself, before snapping back to her logistics role.
Will she celebrate on Friday night? “I’ll be running around,” she said. “We, as a staff, celebrate on Sunday at 5 p.m.” By going home to lie down? “That’s exactly it.”