Wait till next year, again

by James Adams
Toronto Globe and Mail
August 8, 2006

Saskatoon's Mendel Art Gallery is eager to start its expansion, JAMES ADAMS writes, but requests for government funds keep falling through the cracks

Saskatchewan, in the first decades of the last century, was known far and wide as "next year country" -- a pithy encapsulation of the province's long history of unrequited dreams and frustrated ambitions.

So these days, no one in Saskatchewan's largest city, Saskatoon, will be too surprised if someone describes the local Mendel Art Gallery as "next year's gallery."

After all, it's clear that the Mendel won't become "this year's gallery."

Hopes were high that a planned $18-million expansion would begin by this fall -- especially since the centennials of Saskatchewan as a province and Saskatoon as a city arrived in 2005 and 2006, respectively. Two years ago, the city-owned gallery marked 40 years as the anchor in Saskatoon's cultural life by unveiling plans to renovate its building on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River.

Included was a much-needed doubling of the Mendel's size to more than 16,500 square feet.

While the gallery's permanent collection began with a gift of 13 paintings by Lawren Harris, David Milne, Emily Carr and others from Fred S. Mendel, the German-born founder of Intercontinental Packers, that collection now includes more than 5,000 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and works of sculpture.

And things looked good last November, when then-Heritage Minister Liza Frulla named Saskatoon one of five "cultural capitals of Canada" for 2006, earmarking up to $2-million in federal aid for sundry projects in the city of 205,000.

Alas, the bulldozers are on hold until next year at least, possibly later -- the result of a lack of financial assistance from Ottawa and Regina. True, Saskatoon's civic government pledged $4.5-million last year to the Mendel's capital campaign. (The city already covers the non-profit gallery's annual operating budget of $2.5-million, which allows for free admission 364 days a year. Last year the Mendel had 184,000 visitors.) And the federal government's Cultural Spaces program has kicked in almost $450,000 toward architectural and construction drawings. Another $1.5-million has been pledged by various individuals, foundations and corporations, meaning that by early this year, the gallery had 30 per cent of its expansion funding accounted for.

But then, in one five-week stretch in the spring, the plans of Mendel director Terry Graff and his supporters were dealt two major blows -- what Graff calls "strange treatment" -- which they're still trying to recover from as well as understand. The first landed March 24 when Western Economic Diversification Minister Carol Skelton (also the Conservative MP for Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar) announced that she was rejecting the Mendel's application for $7.5-million from the $10.5-million allotted to Saskatoon from the Canada Celebrates Saskatchewan program. The second came in early April, when Saskatchewan's department of Culture, Youth and Recreation refused Graff's formal request for the province to match Saskatoon's $4.5-million investment.

"If we'd gotten the okay, we would have been ready to start construction . . . this fall," Graff said in a recent interview. "As it stands, we've lost at least a year. All we can continue to do is work with government and be hopeful that we find a champion in government who sees the Mendel as a priority. In particular, we need the province to speak on our behalf, even if it's a conditional commitment."

As with most cultural capital campaigns in Canada, had either the province or the new Harper government come through, it would have sent a strong signal to potential donors of the seriousness of the Mendel's ambitions. "People are reluctant to hand over cash when the project isn't a go," Graff notes. "We really need government support to mobilize the private sector."

It's no secret that gallery backers are hoping for some help from one of Saskatoon's most famous former residents, Joni Mitchell -- not least because the renovation includes plans for something called the Joni Mitchell Café, "a unique, multisensory space of image, word and sound." The singer-songwriter-poet-artist spent some of her earliest years in the city, and, though born in Fort MacLeod, Alta., and living in Los Angeles, she still describes Saskatoon as her hometown.

Last year, Mitchell was honoured at the Lieutenant-Governor's Centennial Gala in the city, while in 2000 the Mendel hosted the first ever retrospective of her visual art. Four years later, the Mendel's president was calling Mitchell "Saskatoon's first lady" and naming her honorary co-chair of the gallery's capital campaign. More recently, Mitchell's parents, Bill and Myrtle Anderson, loaned the Mendel a potpourri of drawings, photographs, writings and memorabilia (including bowling trophies) for an exhibition called The Amazing Childhood of Joni Mitchell.

Since hearing the bad news, Graff has been trying to meet with politicians of all stripes. "The fear now is of getting left behind," he says. "Culture and heritage tend to get their day in the sun when they're hooked to big celebrations like centennials, and those windows are closing."

It's true culture wasn't entirely "left behind" when government money was handed out in the spring. For example, Persephone Theatre -- Saskatoon's primary drama venue for over 30 years -- received $2.5-million from the Canada Celebrates Saskatchewan fund toward a new $11-million home in River Landing. That's a south-side district that various levels of government have been eager to develop as a major cultural destination. Indeed, last fall, just a few months after Western Diversification officials intimated they'd like to see centennial money forwarded to River Landing projects, the city suggested to the Mendel that it might wish to join Persephone at the site.

However, in October, the Mendel board quashed any suggestion that the gallery leave its current home on Spadina Crescent East. The board, supported by Fred Mendel's 87-year-old daughter Eva, argued that the gallery was too far along in its renewal plans, having already hired Saskatoon's Kindrachuk Agrey Architecture to prepare working drawings for the revamp of the Mendel's modernist home.

When Western Diversification announced it wouldn't back the Mendel, speculation ran rampant that the gallery's failure was the result of it not playing ball with the River Landing scheme. Requests by Mendel representatives to meet with Western Diversification's Carol Skelton so far haven't borne fruit, leading the gallery to wonder if it might have better luck applying to Canadian Heritage's more modest Cultural Spaces Canada program.

In the meantime, Graff has met with local MLAs and, in mid-July, he had a joint session with Saskatchewan's culture minister, Glenn Hagel, deputy minister Barbara MacLean and Saskatoon mayor Donald Atkinson. The Mendel had applied directly to Hagel's ministry for the $4.5-million in matching money it wanted, saying it had been told that was the best route to follow. But in April, the gallery was told that was a mistake: It should have applied to the civic government, which in February had received $6-million from the province earmarked precisely for infrastructure projects. The city, for its part, replied that it already has pledged the Mendel $4.5-million. Now it was the province's turn.

In an interview, Dawn Martin, executive director of Saskatchewan Culture, Youth and Recreation, noted that, unlike in other provinces, her department lacks a dedicated infrastructure program. If a cultural institution like the Mendel gets capital assistance from the province, it's usually because it's seen as a priority within its overall infrastructure program of highways and buildings. "We've asked [the Mendel] to send us something directly" for consideration in the 2007-2008 fiscal year, she said. And while "the Mendel is an important institution in this province, there are no guarantees" it will receive direct provincial aid.

Still, Graff has described his July meeting as "very, very positive," so perhaps he's hoping for some of the $25-million surplus that the province expects to report next spring.

For the moment, though, Graff is fretting about his permanent collection, and especially the original Mendel gift. While, at 41, the Mendel's exterior still looks unabashedly contemporary, "the environmental controls aren't state-of-the-art at all," he says. Paintings are warping and cracking, among them the large untitled mountainscape by Group of Seven founder Lawren Harris donated by Fred Mendel. Graff recently hired a Vancouver appraiser to evaluate the fair market value of all 13 works in the Mendel donation. That tally should be available later this month, but he's already been told that the Harris is worth at least $2-million -- a reflection of the buoyant resale market for the artist, whose Baffin Island canvas sold for almost $2.5-million at auction in 2001, the second highest amount ever paid for a Canadian painting.

Amazingly, in 1965, Mendel spent just $7,000 for both the Harris painting and a large gouache by another Group of Seven member, Franz Johnston. Another bargain, it turns out, was Jean-Paul Lemieux's Le bois de St. Antoine. Mendel paid only $600 for it in 1960; in May this year, a Lemieux canvas sold at auction in Toronto for more than $425,000.