New reign

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This article was published 23/04/2023 (871 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Andy Warhol showed how memorable a symbol could be, whether it was a Campbell’s soup can or an image of Marilyn Monroe.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery will auction off prints by the famed pop artist that can be interpreted as symbols of British colonialism and will use the funds to purchase works by those who have struggled against colonization: First Nations and Métis artists.

Four silkscreen portraits of Queen Elizabeth, which Warhol created in 1985 for his Reigning Queens series of prints and which were donated to the gallery 25 years ago, will be auctioned in Toronto June 8.

Cowley Abbott auctioneers estimate the works will sell for between $700,000 and $900,000 and WAG-Qaumajuq will earmark the money raised for an endowment fund to purchase art that will add diversity to its artworks and address calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

“While the WAG has in its 30,000-object collection over 14,000 Inuit pieces, only about one per cent of our entire collection is First Nations or Métis art,” says Stephen Borys, WAG-Qaumajuq’s director and chief executive officer.

“One of the TRC’s calls to action is to build up this collection so that it is more reflective and more relevant today, and more responsive to the community, and this is certainly one way to do it.”

Borys says a committee of curators and appraisers has studied WAG-Qaumajuq’s permanent collection and realized selling the four Warhol prints now would give the gallery the most bang for the buck.

“I love the Warhols personally — I think they’re great works — but they have a significant value right now,” Borys says. “I feel, if you look at our investment and our portfolio, we would be better served to apply some of those funds from the sale to acquire works that are even more relevant and impactful today, particularly in Winnipeg.”

The gallery will retain its other Warhol prints, which include ones of hockey great Wayne Gretzky and ballet star Karen Kain.

Silkscreen prints are fragile and must be displayed under low-light conditions and stored in similar fashion to preserve their quality, another reason the Warhols were chosen.

Borys has seen opportunities to purchase works by Indigenous artists go by the wayside because the gallery didn’t have the money to buy them. The fund would help address that.

“The best way we can support artists, be they Canadian, be they non-Indigenous, be they Indigenous, is to share their work with the public and acquire their work,” Borys says. “That is literally money in their pockets.”

The Warhol prints will be the first of several from the gallery’s collection it will sell in the next two years, and later “deaccessionings” — a regular occurrence for art galleries — will go toward bolstering its collection of Canadian contemporary art.

“We are continuing to identify works of art in our collection, particularly where there’s considerable depth, overlap, over-representation or even redundancy,” Borys says.

Cowley Abbott, which is donating the sales commission of the Warhol sale to the WAG-Qaumajuq endowment fund, will sell a few dozen artworks from other collectors at its June 8 auction besides WAG-Qaumajuq’s Warhol prints, and some of those have a Manitoba connection.

They include Siblings, a 1983 acrylic painting by Daphne Odjig, who founded the New Warehouse Gallery in Winnipeg, the first Indigenous-owned art gallery in Canada.

It will be joined by Still Life, 1925, by Manitoba Group of Seven painter Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald; Man on the Bridge by Winnipeg artist Ivan Eyre and several paintings by William Kurelek, who grew up near Stonewall and graduated from the University of Manitoba before becoming one of Canada’s highest-regarded artists.

Alan.Small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @AlanDSmall