AGO to close for 8 months
From the Globe:
Revamp could close AGO for 8 months
VAL ROSS
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
The Art Gallery of Ontario will shut its doors for six to eight months during the final stage of its reconstruction, the AGO said yesterday. This is far longer than the three months originally anticipated, but the Toronto gallery says it is necessary to accommodate the reinstallation of 7,000 art works in 110 galleries. Although no firm dates are set, staff expect that the gallery will close in the late autumn of 2007 and open in mid-2008.
"For members not to cross our doors for eight months seems like a long time," says Kelly McKinley, AGO director of education, "but from our perspective, it's the bare-bones minimum. When we tell our colleagues at the Detroit Institute of Art [also undergoing a massive reinstallation project], they laugh."
The gallery's ambitious, Frank Gehry-designed transformation and expansion, expected to cost $254-million, has already cost it almost a 30-per-cent decline in visitors. About 665,425 people strolled among the paintings and sculptures in 2004-05, but last year only 475,000 visitors found their way past the hoardings to the temporary side entrance to view art amid the occasional rattle of jackhammers.
Still, the public is so far demonstrating its excitement about the project with 2,000 new memberships. "We've built our membership during the construction period," says Linda Milrod, Transformation AGO's senior project manager. Now, she says, the AGO must use the closing period to build excitement.
When the Royal Ontario Museum closed down for 20 months in 1979, it took years to rebuild its visitor levels. For the AGO to build excitement, and more importantly, to retain basic visitor loyalty during its forthcoming period of closing, it is counting on a combination of strategies. It will keep members in touch with the progress of Transformation AGO through the web and is creating a virtual museum. It's involved in co-operative projects with the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and the Woodland Cultural Centre on the Six Nations reserve in Brantford, Ont.
"And we're exploring the use of lectures and public discussions," says Susan Bloch-Nevitte, the AGO's director of public affairs. "If we can't bring people to the building we'll bring the AGO to them." Another project, titled "AGO is a Go" is sending 45 volunteers out to events ranging from Pride Day to Chinese festivals to the Molson Indy "to tell the AGO story -- what we're doing, what we'll look like," Bloch-Nevitte says.
But the stakes are high, not least because the closing announcement ratchets up the tensions in the gallery's current labour dispute, where 260 full- and part-time staff represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union are in a strike position should mediation break down after midnight tonight.
Should picket lines go up around the AGO tomorrow morning, it could dissuade some visitors, would almost certainly slow down progress on the building (many of the construction workers are unionized) and would probably result in the cancellation of the AGO's annual Art in the Park July 1 celebration, which attracts about 10,000 Torontonians each year.
"This announcement certainly puts a premium on issues surrounding job security and layoffs," says Myles Magner, OPSEU campaigns officer. During a lengthy AGO closing in 1992, 244 employees were laid off. Currently, OPSEU is trying to wrest guarantees from the AGO that in the event of inevitable layoffs during the forthcoming dark period, there will be guarantees of recall rights for those full- and part-time staff who wish to return (currently those rights are not available to the part-time staff who make up about half of the OPSEU unit). "And we want fair severance options for folks who decide not to return," Magner says.
However, the AGO has never experienced a strike; hardball down to the wire is the more common pattern, and AGO management remains optimistic that a deal is in sight.
Management is also optimistic about its capacity to create a new AGO amid rubble and racket, even if the public will be protected from those stresses. "We'll be here for our members, even if I have to wear a hard hat," Bloch-Nevitte says.
AoD
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