Documenting Canadian Art

by Nicholas Kyonka 

The term "starving artist" may be over 200 years old, but that doesn't mean that it's not still as relevant today as it was during Europe's Romantic period. The process of creating art is often long and laboured. The process of selling it is often more difficult still. For some, just finding a way for their art to be seen can become a harrowing chore.  Few people understand this better than Bill Kirby, founder and director of the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art (CCCA).

A non-profit charitable arts organization, the CCCA has been working to promote Canadian artists since its inception in 1995. It has documented important Canadian artists, helped to preserve important artwork and, since 2003, has run the Untitled Art Awards Gala each year for Toronto-based artists. In 1997, Kirby created the CCCA's most valuable asset to artists – The Canadian Art Database.

“It started off when I started to develop a bit of a databank of information I had with me,” says Kirby.  “…I met up with a high school principal, and we decided to set up an operation at the high school [Confederation High School in Nepean, Ont.]. So I actually moved my computer into the high school and met some students. There we set up a small website in early 1997 and we put on 60 artists with 60 images… it’s grown dramatically since then.”

What began with just a few pictures of paintings and sculptures is now a virtual art gallery with over 35,000 images.  It hosts painters, sculptors, writers, printmakers, installation artists, media artists and photographers, among others. They include breathtaking images of Rose-Marie Goulet's 1992 land art exhibit "Monument pour L," three pages of photographs from Toronto's highly-talented photographer Dianne Bos, and detailed images from various installations by artists like Vancouver's Rebecca Belmore, or Montreal's Gisele Amantea.

Each artist has his or her own separate page with a brief bio and the images of all of his or her displayed work. Everything about the page is geared towards helping the artist gain recognition, and the amount of space dedicated to each artist is determined by the artist.

“They decide what to put on, what to take off, and how to re-arrange it,” says Kirby. “It’s really giving them free space within the context of the database to display their work.”

He also says the true value of this database is as a historical reference of the artists’ works and careers. “I’m interested in documenting the careers of artists as opposed to just having three or four images by 5,000 artists.”

For those interested in viewing the development of a specific artist’s career, the “timeline view” is a useful tool. Through this option, one can view a chronologically ordered thumbnail of all works by a single artist. Without leaving the page, the user can then open up specific images on the bottom half of the screen. This option can even be used to open up two images of different pieces by the same artist, and compare them side-by-side.

Although the database was originally intended to help Canadian art students and teachers, Kirby says the website has now developed an international following. “We really have a broad audience: there’s dealers, consultants, writers, critics, government agencies – pretty much anybody who actually is interested in getting information on Canadian art uses the site. By far our largest audience is post-secondary classes, and I would say that the majority of that is at the university level because it’s being used as an online teaching resource in a lot of classrooms.”

“We have a huge, huge audience that’s growing exponentially each year,” Kirby says proudly. “We’re now at 50,000 hits a day on the site and 2000 visits a day. Last year we had almost 15 million hits on the site from 85 different countries.” Kirby says the site has received feedback from international collectors and curators, in addition to teachers and students who visit the page regularly. Over time, he says, the site has become a marketing tool for artists, as well as a learning resource.

A professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) and an artist himself, Ian Carr-Harris has works displayed on the site. Also a member of the CCCA’s board of directors since the spring 2002, Carr-Harris says some of his teaching contemporaries have adapted the database into their teaching methods.

“One of the big problems with teaching [art] is that the available resources are largely American or European,” said the professor of sculpture and installation art. “It’s always been extremely difficult to get students to realize what happens in Canadian visual art. So the CCCA offers a really handy and easy means by which to put student and faculty in touch with the history of Canadian art.”

Rae Johnson is another OCAD professor with artwork displayed on the site. Not only does she use the site during lectures and presentations in class, but she has also discovered another way to use the site to her advantage. “It’s terrific with clients and other various people,” says Johnson. “If anyone’s interested in my work, I can just direct them to the website and they can get a fast overview of my work.”

To add to the other artist listings, images and sounds, the CCCA in 2002 and 2003, designated a section of the database specifically for graphic and advertising designers. With the intention of exposing the important role of graphic design within society, the CCCA developed an online history of Canadian graphic design. This section not only contains images of brochures, billboards and other advertisements but also sound clips and brief video segments.

The CCCA has also added a section to the database for what it calls "art writing,” which focuses specifically on texts related to Canadian arts and artists.  At present, there are 189 writers and 1,280 texts featured in this section of the database.

Although these texts are also meant to provide the writers with some exposure, by focusing on Canadian arts as a theme they can also educate readers about other Canadian artists.

Over the years, the CCCA has continued not only to expand the database but also to make it more accessible to users. Search engines, timelines and artist profiles have all been added, not just to help users navigate the site, but also to help promote the artists themselves. Unlike most large organizations, Kirby, the director, does most of the work himself.

“The CCCA’s kind of a small organization,” says Kirby modestly. “There’s really no staff- there’s no full-time staff. We don’t have an office except we use one every once in a while if we need to. It’s really a collection of me and a few other people who we can bring in when dollars allow me to hire them.”

While Kirby is happy with the work he has accomplished so far, he says there’s still much to be done.  “It’s a very large database and there’s lots of material there, but there’s a long way to go. It’s just scratched the surface really in terms of what’s out there... I’ve just gone up the first half block of a mountain. I really don’t always think of the top of the mountain, I just think of taking the next step.”

So what is the next step for the CCCA? Kirby says he is going to slow down on adding artists and concentrate more on making the site as accessible to users as possible.

“I’m not really that interested in being just a directory of artists. I’m really focusing in on key figures that over the years have developed a good career, and have really contributed to the scene… I have to turn down many, many artists each month, but the project is not intended to be a complete directory of Canadian art at all. It’s really to focus on the scene that is established and has got some history behind it.”