U.S. tariffs are throwing Canadian art sales into trade-war chaos

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Toronto art dealer Miriam Shiell decided this month not to send a Henry Moore sculpture to New York for potential buyers to scope out. Would it be hit by tariffs crossing the border? She didn’t know, and she didn’t want to take the risk.

For decades, art freely flowed across the Canada-U.S. border, but that ended once U.S. President Donald Trump began his second term last year. Now, 50-per-cent tariffs imposed Aug. 22 on Canadian products entering the U.S. cover a massive range of artwork, from paintings to sculptures to “collages and similar decorative plaques.”

The new tariffs are cutting off a significant portion of Canadian art sales, according to artists, galleries, dealers, shippers and consultants, leaving them frustrated and confused. The result is the shrinking of a market that showcases homegrown ingenuity at the same moment Prime Minister Mark Carney is intensely pitching investing in Canada.

Everyone in the art market stands to lose income as both buyers and sellers wait out what they hope will be temporary trade measures, as turned out to be the case with the previous round of art tariffs last year.

Ms. Shiell had endless questions about the tariffs. Moore might have been British, but the sculpture would have arrived from Canada. “Is the definition of it that the artist has to be Canadian or the art has to be made in Canada?” she said. “It was just easier at this point to wait for clarity.” She added: “It may come in a few weeks, or not at all. It may mean there’s no sale.”

Art dealers, galleries face slowdowns as tariff threats sow confusion in North American market

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in an e-mail Tuesday that the most recent round of tariffs covers goods with Canada as their country of origin. In other words, Duncan Links, who oversees many cross-border shipments as the logistics manager of Museumpros Art Services in Toronto, said that with proper customs documentation, artworks should only face these tariffs if they were made in Canada.

Even then, it depends on who ships the art. Some multinational shipping companies automatically required tariff payments on all art during last year’s trade barbs, said Mackenzie Sinclair, executive director of the Art Dealers Association of Canada. That doesn’t bode well for artists and sellers hoping to get their works over the border with some kind of tariff exemption around their places of origin.

Jennifer Lefort, a Gatineau artist who paints large-scale colour works with gestural abstraction, has sold between 60 and 80 per cent of her work in the U.S. in recent years. Since Mr. Trump’s tariffs started adding a 50-per-cent markup, “It’s been absolute radio silence from that customer base.” The consequences will almost certainly spill over into Canada’s already spread-thin grant programs, she added, with more visual artists likely rushing to apply for the same often-stagnant pools of money.

Canadian Artists’ Representation/Le Front des artistes canadiens, better known as CARFAC, is already pushing Carney’s government to create emergency funding and other relief for artists. “This problem shouldn’t be on artists to fix,” said Jenna Faye Powell, CARFAC’s national interim executive director. “Artists are researching and adapting their practices and businesses to the best of their ability, but individual entrepreneurship and resilience cannot solve broader trade barriers, increased costs and border disruptions.”

U.S.’s latest tariffs on Canadian goods come into effect

Many in the art market point out that artworks are specific items that buyers deliberately seek out from their creators, as opposed to commodities made in countries with domestic alternatives.

One of the biggest annual U.S. art shows, the Armory Show in New York, is scheduled for later this month. Many of the seven Canadian galleries set to exhibit sent their artwork across the border ahead of time to dodge the tariffs.

Hugues Charbonneau, the founding director of his namesake Montreal gallery, shipped early. “As gallerists, our job is to adapt,” he said. “In contemporary art, if you don’t like adaptation and change, you’re not in the right field.”

The Blouin Division gallery, with locations in Montreal and Toronto, managed to get its works, including pieces by Wanda Koop and Tammi Campbell, into the U.S. a few days before Aug. 19, when the tariffs were initially scheduled to take effect.

Up next would normally be Miami’s art fairs in December – but it’s both too late to ship art there and too early to know whether tariffs might be in place, given the fluidity of Mr. Trump’s trade temperament. “We will have to think about it,” director Dominique Toutant said: He has a lot of relationships with buyers and consultants there he wants to maintain.

Opinion: Canada should lower pointless tariffs on goods from countries other than the U.S.

The cottage industry of shipping and logistics companies that cater to Canadian art experienced a major influx of calls from artists and exhibitors after Mr. Trump first announced the tariffs in July. “I’ve seen the most impacts on independent artists,” said Museumpros’s Links. “They have a lousy calculation to make,” he added. “They’re cancelling shipments because it’s a tall order to ask someone to eat 50 per cent of the value.”

The team at the artist-run transportation service Artverb in Toronto was already well aware of the consequences after last year’s tariff round. “If it’s anything more than 10 per cent, people are not paying it,” founder Ryan Barrett said by phone from New York on a delivery trip. The company has already seen a 20-per-cent dip in shipments over the past few weeks.

There are concerns about some artwork coming into Canada, too – specifically photographs, which Ottawa has included in its list of items facing countertariffs. Some institutions, such as Toronto’s Stephen Bulger Gallery, focus exclusively on the medium. Mr. Bulger has already contacted government officials asking them to reconsider what he hopes is an oversight in tariff implementation. (Asked about this, the Finance Department declined to speculate on any future tariff moves.)

“An American collector wanted my help dispersing a collection for them, but it’s all American material; I can’t work with it,” Mr. Bulger said. “It puts me at a disadvantage.”