Raising capital at the Design Exchange
At a time when Toronto’s major art institutions are leaderless, Shauna Levy has raised the profile of Canada’s only design museum. And she’s just beginning
In the autumn of last year, Shauna Levy took her daughter to visit the Duomo in Milan.
Levy and her husband, Dutch-born Arne Vos, wanted to show their 11-year-old the grand, Gothic cathedral for several reasons, chief among them being that her parents had met in Milan some 16 years previously, during the Salone, a world-renowned furniture fair.
“We arranged to meet on our first date in front of the Duomo,” Levy recalls fondly.
About the family followup a decade-plus later — Milan being a stop on their way to Venice — she remains nothing if not effusive.
“It was absolutely incredible to see Italy, the de facto country of design, through her eyes.”
Indeed, if there’s anyone who’s in the business of “seeing” — and someone who lives and breathes design — it would be the 47-year-old director of the Design Exchange, Canada’s first and only museum devoted to design.
Known for her irrepressible pep — not to mention the visual iconography she brings herself, with a crown of curly hair — Levy is nearimpossible to miss in the Toronto cultural firmament. Her rise? It coincides, many will tell you, with not only a breadth of programming at the museum, but also a time when the two big-cheese institutions in the city — Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum — have been wanting on the leadership front. Both lost their CEOs in the past year.
And if the role of the modern museum director involves being both inevitable envoy and ceaseless cheerleader, Levy easily aces the part.
Her Google Calendar, not to mention her Instagram, tells the story: There she was, in Ottawa, during one sample week in December, meeting and greeting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a holiday celebration held at the home of the U.S. ambassa- dor; then, the very next night, back in Toronto at an intimate party hosted by Saks Canada for supermodel Cindy Crawford.
During her nearly four-year tenure at the museum, Levy has also welcomed such superstars of the design-verse as Jonathan Adler and India Hicks, and lured high-profile exhibitions such as the shoe fest devoted to Christian Louboutin.
Her ultimate coup de grace? Possibly one that is gestating now: a 10day biennale that’s slated for June 2017 and meant to sync “with Canada’s 150th anniversary and the 50th anniversary of Expo 67.”
Set for the Toronto waterfront, and unfolding in partnership with the United Nations Development Program, the fest will explore the intersection of design, architecture, innovation and technology. Titled EDIT: Expo for Design Innovation and Technology, and consisting of both installations and talks, Levy suggests thinking of the initiative as “TED meets Venice Biennale.”
It’s a boffo project by any determination, but it comes courtesy of the woman who personally lured Pharrell Williams to guest-curate a show at the DX. His This is Not a Toy exhibition, held in 2014, was avant-garde in that no Canadian museum had hitherto worked with a pop icon in a cultural capacity.
A “non-purist,” Levy firmly believes that “creativity doesn’t reside in silos . . . and, in the past decade, we have seen the exciting results of interdisciplinary design, where designers, engineers and social scientists join together to make our everyday lives better, from ergonomic furniture to health-tracking gadgets, or solve infrastructural problems.” For Levy — who came to the museum after co-founding Toronto’s tentpole Interior Design Show — the cultural and the commercial naturally knot.
Asked to elaborate, she says, “The pieces in our permanent collection are furniture items and small household appliances that were designed by people for commercial purposes and, in many cases, for large manufacturers.
“However, they also help tell our history . . . i.e., our emphasis on natural resources, industrialization, the changing responsibilities and roles of women in society . . . from World War II to present day.”
Exhibit A: a recent exhibition that Jeanne Beker guest-curated for the museum on fashion, which aimed to tell a political and social story on identity and image through the lens of style.
Redefining culture requires both grit and savvy marketing. On that latter front, Levy has done a skilful job in getting the DX more talked about than ever and attracting social ringleaders in town. Influencers such as Victoria Webster, Rana Florida, Colette van den Thillart and Raymond Girard have taken to “the small institution with big aspira- tion,” as Levy calls it.
On a curatorial level, it also requires a running waterfall of inspiration. Ask Levy to talk about design she’s been struck by and she’s off.
“On a micro level, I almost always fall for when a designer disrupts traditional techniques by giving it a contemporary spin, like the skull and crossbone ceramic plates that Studio Job did several years ago for Royal Tichelaar, the oldest ceramic manufacturer in the Netherlands,” she says.
Up next? The annual “Dinner by Design” fundraiser, presented by Monogram and the DX, Jan. 19 and 20. A celebration of tablescapes — one that prompted a write-up in the Wall Street Journal last year — it puts paid to the typical “rubber chicken dinner.”
“When else do you have an opportunity to dine alongside some of Canada’s top designers eating food by celebrity chefs within magical and otherworldly spaces?” Levy asks.