During his two and a half years as director of the National Gallery of Canada, Jean-François Bélisle has stayed largely out of the news — which is perhaps a welcome relief.
He took up the post during a tumultuous time for the museum. An interim director had fired several senior staff members as part of a new strategic plan, following large-scale firings by Sasha Suda after she become the gallery’s youngest director in 2019.
[Read from 2023: Turmoil Engulfs Canadian Art Museums Seeking to Shed Colonial Past]
(Ms. Suda left the gallery after just three years to become director of the Philadelphia Art Museum but was abruptly fired from that post last month. In a lawsuit, Ms. Suda is charging that her dismissal was engineered by a “corrupt and unethical faction” of the museum’s board who resisted her efforts at modernization.)
So, Mr. Bélisle walked into a landmark building with anxious members inside and alienated donors outside.
There have been only 12 directors in the gallery’s 145-year history, so it’s difficult to generalize about their backgrounds. But unlike Ms. Suda, who had been curator of European art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mr. Bélisle had previously spent no time in a senior position at a large gallery. He came to the National Gallery as the executive director of a respected regional museum in Joliette, Quebec.
And while Mr. Bélisle has organized more than 100 exhibitions, much of his career has involved working with foundations that promote Canadian artists and a trade group that promotes the Canadian art market.
I met him at the gallery shortly after the opening of “Winter Count: Embracing the Cold,” the first major exhibition that was entirely under his supervision.
He had a ready answer about how he calmed the waters at the gallery.
“What I found when I arrived was that someone needs to really listen and understand and find collaborative solutions with the people involved and not impose solutions,” he said. “That’s the situation we worked through for the past two years. And it’s an ongoing thing for any type of organizations. You can’t stop listening.”
The exhibition, he said, is an example of that collaboration. Initially, it started as a discussion about pulling together paintings of winter from the gallery’s collection as “a fun little thing to do in a small room upstairs.”
But as curators met, he said, their ambition expanded.
“We saw a potential in the way we have interacted with our northern climate for hundreds of years,” he said. “It has been influenced by so many different inputs and has been a collaborative effort between different people from different parts of the land, the world, the country. What I wanted to do from the beginning is celebrate these differences, highlight them and put them on the wall so you see that, together, they’re like individual notes of music that create a symphony.”
The result is an exhibition of 164 works by historic and contemporary artists in a wide variety of media, including clothing, video, photography, sculpture and even tepee covers. The artists come from around the world — at least the parts of it with cold winters — and works were borrowed from galleries and collections worldwide. The show includes art that has never been publicly displayed before in Canada.
Some of the works are monumental in scale, notably “Dawn Over Riddarfjarden,” a stylized, swirling painting of the water surrounding central Stockholm from 1899 by the Swedish painter Eugene Jansson. Others are intimate; I was particularly struck by Annie Pootoogook’s drawing that captures the joy and excitement of opening gifts on Christmas morning.
Along with two of my colleagues from The Times’s Canada bureau, I was shown around the exhibition by three of its four curators. It was no detached, scholarly tour. They were all keen to talk about works in the show that particularly resonated with them.
“The depth of the exhibition, the size of the exhibition are things that I’m really, really happy with,” Mr. Bélisle told me. “Especially when you think back that this was supposed to be 10 paintings, a little side project in the permanent collection that would have not moved any needle on any meter.”
A personal note: Thank you to all of you who read his newsletter and the many of you who take the time to write to share your perspectives on the news as well as your thoughts on and suggestions for the Canada Letter. All the best for 2026.
Trans Canada
This section was compiled by Vjosa Isai, a reporter based in Toronto.
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Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times. A Windsor, Ontario, native now based in Ottawa, he has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected].
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Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times. A Windsor, Ontario, native now based in Ottawa, he has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected].
The post A Sweeping Look at One Thing That Unites Canada: Winter appeared first on New York Times.
