A painting by Group of Seven artist A. J. Casson is returned to storage at the National Gallery in Ottawa in 1950.The Canadian Press
Don LePan is a novelist, book publisher and painter. A collection of his artwork, The Skyscraper and the City, was published in 2025.
The MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina has a far more impressive permanent collection than do the public art galleries in most cities its size. As you’d expect, the collection has a range of pieces by Ronald Bloore and other members of the “Regina Five” from the 1960s, and significant paintings by the outstanding Saskatchewan landscape artist Dorothy Knowles. But the collection also includes work by a wide range of outstanding Canadian artists from all eras: Takao Tanabe is included, as are Alex Colville, Joyce Wieland, David Milne, Prudence Heward, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Lawren Harris, and mid-20th-century abstract artists Jack Bush, Jack Shadbolt and Agnes Martin. Some of the finest paintings by early Canadian landscape artist Homer Watson are part of the collection. And that’s just the Canadian side of things. Works by Andrea del Sarto, Irene Parenti Duclos, Eugène Delacroix, Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Dégas, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol are all part of the collection, too.
How many of those works were on display when I visited in early March? None. Other than a special exhibition of works (“Death Boat and other Stories: The Kampelmacher Memorial Collection of Indigenous Art”), there was nothing whatsoever on display from the permanent collection. The rest of the space was devoted to two large special exhibitions: a selection of photographic and conceptual art by Plains Cree artist Joi T. Arcand, and a selection of work (again, primarily photographic and conceptual) by recipients of the 2025 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.
I have no desire to criticize anything in the three exhibits on display. The background to the Arcand exhibit is interesting, and so are some of the pieces; particularly striking is an installation piece of a wooden chair inside a field of wheat inside the bare wooden frame of a farm building. Jin-me Yoon’s images of herself in front of iconic Canadian landscapes (part of the Governor General’s Awards winners exhibition) are striking too, and, in the “Death Boat” exhibition of Indigenous art, Ananaisie Alikatuktuk’s 1976 stonecut of the Inuit sea goddess Taleelayu and her family is quite wonderful. There are good things on display at the Mackenzie.
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But a public gallery with a large permanent collection should surely be making an effort to represent the full range of our artistic heritage – and a full range of genres. Like many other public galleries across Canada, the MacKenzie has chosen not to do that. Canada’s Indigenous heritage is of vital importance, and it should always find expression in our public galleries. But so, too, is our heritage of European art and of art influenced by the traditions the European settlers brought with them. Implicitly, the MacKenzie suggests that the only heritage of great value in Canada is that of Canada’s Indigenous peoples.
Implicitly, too, the MacKenzie suggests that there is little value to the genres that for centuries were accorded pride of place in our heritage: painting (and in particular, oil painting), works on paper (whether watercolours or prints), and sculpture. Photographic art and video art, together with installations and other forms of conceptual art, now dominate much of the art scene. They should surely be represented in any public gallery, but they are not everything. Bonnard, Gauguin, Munch, Picasso, David Milne, A.Y. Jackson, Dorothy Knowles – to have all that wealth hidden away in your vaults and not show any of it? It’s an extraordinary imbalance.
It’s not as if the gallery is short of space; a visitor can’t help but be struck by the amount of empty wall space in the foyer and hallways. It would be easy to display a modest selection of works from the permanent collection without reducing one bit the amount of space devoted to the other exhibitions.
I’ve had very similar experiences elsewhere; in public galleries across Canada, our artistic heritage (with the notable exception of Indigenous art) is often all tucked away in the vaults; modern photographic art, video art, and installation and conceptual art are what’s on display.
There are some in the art world who might suggest that there is a hint of the philistine, or even of the reactionary in anyone who still wants to see work by the Impressionists, or Alex Colville, or the Group of Seven, or Andrea del Sarto. But most of us who would like to see a broader representation of our art heritage on display do not want to push out the contemporary art and the Indigenous art; we would like to see it on display together with Indigenous works, and together with various sorts of contemporary art.
You can, of course, find work by artists such as Lawren Harris and Arthur Lismer and A.Y. Jackson in the MacKenzie Art Gallery, in the same part of the gallery in which they are to be found in every gallery across Canada: reproduced on postcards and teacups in the gallery shop. It seems crazy, but people still buy this stuff, in whatever form. It would be great if they could see the real thing as well as the postcards and the teacups.