The Drake’s art DNA
Art is not an afterthought at the Drake Hotel, thanks to in-house curator Mia Nielsen
One of the first shows Mia Nielsen curated was inside her brother’s shabby Montreal apartment on rue St-Marc. Works of art lined cupboard shelves, while projections coloured and animated the walls.
Decades later, this is what Nielson does for the Drake Hotel and has for the past nine years. It’s not a career you’d typically find working for a hotel, but Nielsen has a knack for defying convention and integrating art in unusual places.
At the Drake, a Luke Painter painting lies between bar shelves; a Tobias Williams video projection is on one of the first walls you see when you walk in.
The Drake breathes art and Nielsen oversees it all: performance and visual art; permanent and temporary exhibits; artist residencies and guest curations. She is a pioneer of the art career in a place that is not an “art space,” part of a movement to bring cultural experiences into everyday life.
Like listening to classical chamber music in a bar or eating burgers before the opera, as Nielsen did recently, the finer things are no longer only for the finer places.
“People . . . don’t necessarily come in here for cultural experience. They come in for a burger, they come in to drink, they have another agenda in mind,” says Nielsen, a bubbly and thoughtful 43-year-old. “I want to bring them out of themselves.”
That starts with a work of art greeting you at each of the Drake’s three properties.
Playful illustrations of naked men and women float among purple and pink mountains ( Pleasure Mountain by Ness Lee) in the Drake Hotel’s vestibule on Queen St. W. Gary Baseman cartoon characters dangle in the Drake 150 restaurant on York St., where a different artist takes over the space every September, and a quiltlike installation, sun piercing through, hangs above your head as you walk into the Drake Devonshire in Prince Edward County.
“That Kirsten Hassenfeld piece at the Devonshire is really special to me. It was important to create that moment of wonder from the moment one opens the door.”
Nielsen grew up in Niagara and was born to Danish parents. Frequent trips to their home country, where she visited with her parents’ artist friends and family members, were influential, she says. “I generally have a really creative family.” Her mother was a “small-town singer” and the family often visited nearby Brock University, which acted as a “kind of cultural outlet for me in a small town.”
She studied photography and new media at York University and, toward the end, started curating by combining the works of her peers. She defied a strike at the university at the time to make sure the grad show she curated would go on.
Amid her first collaborations with the Drake as a freelancer, she curated an exhibit at a museum in Denmark that included a sculpture of a bicycle on its roof. Her curatorial style skews toward photography and strong colours.
You’d be hard pressed to find minimal art at the Drake “because there are so many things that are going on here that anything minimal will be lost to it,” she says, sitting at the bar at the Sky Yard rooftop lounge. Behind her is a mesmerizing mural with doves inside upside-down hearts by U.K. artist Insa called I Would Die 4 U. It was painted this year and becomes a continuous .gif when you look at it with an app on your phone.
Nielsen scouts artwork and artists at art fairs as much as she does on Instagram.
“I don’t know if there is any other job like Mia’s job,” says Susannah Rosenstock, director of Art Toronto, a fall art fair in the city, for which the Drake typically hosts installations or lounges.
“A lot of hotels have artwork, but not a lot of hotels have good artwork,” Rosenstock said, noting most hotels’ art is selected by a decorator. “(The Drake’s) collection is not an afterthought . . . it’s a unique collection that could stand on its own.”
Drake owner Jeff Stober notes it’s something he wanted to happen from the start and grew organically with Nielsen’s work. “It’s sort of an oxymoron: it’s a hotel for locals,” he says, noting the goal is to bring culture to people, for which Nielsen has flair.
“She has a gift at working with unconventional spaces and bringing them to life . . . we don’t have museum or art gallery budgets, so we’ve had to be super smart,” he added, saying Nielsen builds lasting relationships within the art world.
Artist Micah Lexier first worked with Nielsen on printed envelopes for guests to leave tips in. Since then, he’s created murals for the Sky Yard, which he refreshes every two years.
“She’s super easygoing, super supportive, always in a great mood. It’s a real joy to work with Mia,” he said.
“I think she’s just the right combination of smarts and intuition about what the right move is.”
Nielsen says she wants the Drake’s patrons to question what they see, to feel smart but not excluded. Most of the works are commissioned, sitespecific and stray from the (too) political, says Nielsen.
But here and there you’ll find works that are, if not political, statements. She points to a square frame on the wall next to the stairs leading up to the Sky Yard. “I mean, who would put a painting of a tampon in a hotel?” she laughs.
On the same wall, there is a photograph by Laurie Simmons (a renowned New York artist also known for being Lena Dunham’s mother), whose works are often a feminist commentary.
During Pride, the Drake held several events and raised funds for the 519 community centre with thematic photo booths installed at each of its locations, which was Nielsen’s idea.
“It’s important to be a good citizen,” she says.
For Nielsen, that citizenship extends beyond what the Drake does civically and turns inward. As art and hospitality intermingle, so have her work and home life. When her 11year-old son Ian was a toddler, she’d book a hotel room while working evening events, so she could put him to bed herself.
Ian is now a skater with a passion for music, which he shares with Nielsen, but he still hangs out at the Drake like a second home.
“You have to be super duper into it and that’s kind of what gives it — it’s a very family vibe,” says Nielsen, a single parent. She admits to checking emails when everyone else sleeps but sets boundaries, like a no-phone policy during dinnertime.
In many ways, she’s carried over the curation of her youth, born of a lack of curatorial studies that created order in the art world.
“It’s always kind of scrappy, in the sense that I just kind of come in and take space . . . I came up in a time where people just made stuff.”