Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said Monday that Cheryl Hickman would take over as Canada Council for the Arts chair when Jesse Wente’s five-year term ends in July.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The Canada Council for the Arts has named Newfoundland and Labrador opera veteran Cheryl Hickman as its next chair.
Hickman is the general and artistic director of Opera on the Avalon in St. John’s and has been on the board of Canada Council since 2017. Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said Monday that Hickman will take over from Jesse Wente, the Anishinaabe film programmer, author and journalist, when his five-year term ends in July.
She will helm the Crown corporation’s board as it reckons with surging demand and, for the first time in years, decreasing budgets. Though the Liberal government effectively doubled its funding since taking power in 2015, topping out at $366-million in 2023, director and chief executive officer Michelle Chawla said last February that the funding body would lower its spending over the next three fiscal years as part of government-wide cutbacks.
Artists across disciplines, meanwhile, have in recent years struggled with higher costs and lower incomes after COVID-19 lockdowns and subsequent rising inflation and interest rates.
Applications to the Canada Council’s Explore and Create program, which offers grants for artists to develop new works, tripled between 2017 and 2023 to 6,750, resulting in only 16.6 per cent of applicants getting grants in its fall 2023 competition. Some people and groups who historically received funding from the council have in the past year said their latest applications were unexpectedly denied.
St-Onge said in a news release that Hickman will bring “vast knowledge, experience and passion” as chair of the council.
Hickman holds music degrees from the University of Toronto and New York’s Juilliard School. She is a soprano who has performed with the New York City Opera and the Canadian Opera Company, among others.
She founded Opera on the Avalon in 2009, positioning it as a beacon for conversation about the role of opera in contemporary society. She established Opera on the Avalon’s Creation Investment Fund to help commission new works. During the pandemic lockdowns, she developed digital opera programming and established an emergency fund for artists.