ART OF THE MATTER
Ian Thom curates his final exhibition after 30 years with the Vancouver Art Gallery
After curating more than 100 exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery during a career that spanned three decades, Ian Thom has overseen his last one.
It’s called A Curator’s View: Ian Thom Selects. The exhibition represents his favourite 90 or so paintings, prints and sculptural works from the gallery’s permanent collection of almost 12,000, many of which are in the collection because of Thom.
The exhibition continues to March 17, 2019, on the top floor of the gallery.
Thom started working as curator in 1988 and retired from his position as senior curator-historical at the end of June.
Thom’s accomplishments as a curator are legendary. He was instrumental in bringing into the permanent collection 119 works by the Group of Seven and 32 historical Indigenous artworks.
He curated major exhibitions such as a retrospective of E.J. Hughes in 2002, and Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon in 2006.
He has contributed to 78 publications and written 13 books, including Art B.C.: Masterworks from British Columbia, the first comprehensive history of visual art in B.C.
In 2008, in recognition of his contribution to visual arts, he was appointed to the Order of Canada.
Thom said his final exhibition as a VAG curator isn’t meant to be a history of the VAG. The works he has chosen represent those that had a big impact on him personally, and those he played a key role in bringing into the collection.
He started a media preview with a painting by Joyce Wieland. It was a great choice because it illustrated Thom’s ability to put works in context and to describe them in way that instantly made them memorable. Often that involved humour.
Wieland made the painting when she was living in New York in the 1960s. At the time, she was married to Michael Snow, another Canadian artist who was much better known than she was.
Like other women in what was then considered the centre of the art world, Wieland was struggling to establish herself as an artist.
What was the art world at the time like for women? Thom described it as “male, male, male, male, male, male, male, male, male, male, oh there’s a woman over there, male, male, male.”
So Wieland responded by using humour and her body.
“How did she make this painting ?” Thom asked. “She put a bit of paint on the green background and she put her lips in there and moved her lips back and forth — and that’s The Kiss.”
It includes an arrow pointing upward to the daub of paint in the centre to make sure nobody missed it. On the right side, there’s a smudge of red to reassure viewers, Thom said, that she could make lipstick red if she wanted.
Across the exhibition space is a work chosen for its historical balance to Wieland’s painting. It is a representational sculpture called Walking Woman, made from pieces of wood found by her husband Snow.
As curator, Thom explained that Snow made it in the style of Louise Nevelson. The difference was that Nevelson used found wood to make abstract rather than representational sculptures.
Snow’s sculpture is believed to have been inspired by a photograph of the jazz musician Carla Bley. It represents one of the first of many Walking Woman works Snow created during his career.
Thom’s final exhibition shows his breadth of knowledge of the gallery ’s permanent collection and includes works by artists such as Emily Carr, Robert Davidson, Gathie Falk, David Hockney, George Segal and B.C. Binning.
In a separate interview, Thom said that he didn’t grow up in a family interested in original art.
“My mother has occasionally said she wondered where I came from,” Thom said.
He recounted a story of being a teenager when the family drove across Canada for Expo 67.
“To the extreme chagrin of my siblings, I insisted that we go into art galleries,” he said. “They didn’t want to do that. We visited every major art gallery in Canada on that trip.”
Unlike today, where curators are trained in university, Thom’s route into the field was much more indirect. It occurred somewhere between working at the VAG as a cataloguer and as the registrar who kept track of all the artwork.
Whenever there was a gap in the exhibition schedule, a curator would come and ask him: “‘Ian, what should I put up?’ I would say, ‘Why don’t you think about this, this and this.’ And they’d say, ‘That’s a great idea.’”
That continued several times until Thom thought to himself: “Maybe I could do that.”
One of the biggest influences on his career was Doris Shadbolt, who worked at the VAG from 1950 to 1975 in various roles, including senior curator and acting director. Some of her groundbreaking exhibitions included Art of the Raven and New York 13.
One thing he learned as a curator is to “dare to ask” for artwork.
He said a good example of that is the show the VAG did for the 2010 Winter Olympics. He didn’t want to do something predictable such as an exhibition about winter sports. Instead, he decided to arrange an exhibition about bodies, since that is what athletes use as their instrument to compete.
Who made the best drawings of bodies ever? Leonardo da Vinci. Thom knew that The Royal Collection in Windsor had a collection of 34 anatomical drawings by the Italian Renaissance artist, on 18 sheets of paper.
“I wrote a letter and said: ‘ Would you consider doing this?’ They said, ‘Why don’t you come and we’ll talk about it?’”
It resulted in Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man, one of the outstanding cultural events during the Olympics.