Eva Respini, interim co-director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, is responsible for curation and work on the gallery’s future home, while Sirish Rao assumes other director’s duties.Rachel Pick/The Globe and Mail
Eva Respini thinks art museums should stick to art.
“I really think that museums, we should stay in our lane, which is to support artists, and to give them a platform,” the interim co-director of the Vancouver Art Gallery said in a recent interview. “When I think about my own expertise, it’s not about other things; it’s about art. As the leader of the artistic direction of this museum, that’s where I feel the most comfortable.”
That may sound like a sensible philosophy, but it’s not necessarily a popular one. Art museums have become increasingly committed to decolonization, to the point of activism, and have also been under great pressure to take stands on the war in Gaza. The day before Respini sat down for an interview about the future of the VAG, she hosted artist Nan Goldin during an event where the American photographer and pro-Palestinian activist suggested not only artists, but also institutions themselves, should engage directly with the issue.
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Respini listened respectfully but she seems unlikely to get distracted from pure curatorial concerns as she attempts to build back the VAG. After postponing plans for a new building in 2024 and parting company with executive director Anthony Kiendl last spring, the gallery was forced to lay off almost a third of its staff to balance its budget. As Respini enters her second year in the job she shares with co-director Sirish Rao, the budget is back on track and she has been busy launching a new installation of the VAG’s permanent collection on the third floor of the former courthouse that has been the gallery’s home since 1983.
Respini: “I see what we’re doing now in this building as a rehearsal for our new home: If we’re not relevant now and here, then we won’t be relevant in our new home.”Rachel Pick/The Globe and Mail
The installation provides an accessible stroll through a collection of 20th-century and contemporary Canadian and international art, with a strong emphasis on B.C. artists. There’s a retro salon hanging of classic West Coast landscapes, including works by Jock Macdonald, Arthur Lismer, Edwin Holgate and Anne Savage, that harks back to the style of prewar gallery installations. Similarly, a display devoted to postwar modernism is set up as a living room with paintings hung above mid-century furniture. The displays progress to American pop art and Vancouver’s conceptual photography movement.
Amazingly, it has been 20 years since the VAG devoted a floor to its permanent collection, preferring rotating temporary shows whether they were special exhibitions or smaller offerings drawn from the collection. Respini felt it was time to give it more space.
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“Your collection is your DNA. It’s your meat and potatoes, it’s your bread and butter,” she said. “It’s a reflection of your place. It’s a reflection of your cultural memory. For me, it seemed that we needed to be able to really celebrate that DNA.”
The difficulty in Vancouver is balancing the need to please tourists and school groups who want to see works by Emily Carr or B.C. landscapes, and locals who need the excitement of temporary exhibitions to bring them back to the gallery regularly.
“Temporary shows drive attendance,” Respini said. “There’s always something new and something different. And that’s real. And so we will continue to do that.”
The VAG building, however, lacks the space to accommodate both blockbusters and a long suite of galleries devoted to its permanent collection: It needs a new home. Respini promises that new architectural plans will be unveiled some time this year by the new architects, Vancouver firm Formline and Toronto’s KPMB, who took over after the 2024 fiasco that saw the gallery abandon the increasingly costly plans proposed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron.
“I see what we’re doing now in this building as a rehearsal for our new home: If we’re not relevant now and here, then we won’t be relevant in our new home,” she said, adding the argument for space is driven not merely by the gallery’s requirements but by community needs. “They want space for gathering, they want space for inspiration. They want space for learning. They want space for solace, joy in these uncertain times.”
Will Respini still be in Vancouver when that new building finally opens, an event now ambitiously targeted at 2031?
Along with architectural plans, the VAG will also announce the future of its leadership before the end of the year. Currently, Respini handles curatorial and the new building project, while Rao, who is also the director of the gallery’s Centre for Global Asias and Art of Wellbeing lab, handles day-to-day operations, education programming and government relations. Although this kind of joint management structure is often used in the performing arts, it’s rare in the art museum world where normally a single executive director with strong curatorial credentials runs the show.
Respini said she, Rao and the board agreed to give it a year and then reassess, but she points out that the two executives are doing three jobs.
“We now have a pretty well-oiled machine where we have distinct portfolios, and we continue in our old areas,” she said, adding they work together to make “the really hard and big decisions of stewarding the organization forward.”
VAG board chair Jon Stovell said that the board is pleased with the co-directorship model and is not currently looking for an outside candidate to hire as a single director. “We undertook to them this was not a babysitting job,” he said. “The board has honoured that and they have certainly stepped up.”
Of course, Respini will not speculate what comes next, but she points out that she is used to being peripatetic: The child of an Italian father and Norwegian mother, she had lived in five European countries by the time she was 18, because her father’s career required moving. She only settled in the United States when she went to Columbia University in New York to study art history, before working as a photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art and then as the chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
“Who knows what the future holds?” she said.