‘Hope is our breakfast’: Gallery calling on art lovers to rally behind $75M facility

The Thunder Bay Art Gallery is rallying the region’s art community, hoping to win their hearts and get some help raising the $24 million still needed to complete the gallery’s new waterfront home.

The gallery is asking people across the region to become “community curators.” The new program aims to leverage the passion art lovers have for the gallery to help inform the general public and garner widespread support for the $74.5 million facility.

“Understanding what is compelling about the gallery, what’s compelling about our collection, what’s compelling about the development of the waterfront facility – what it represents,” said executive director Matthew Hills.

“When we are enacting that strategy, looking across the board, we try to key in on intersections of those values and people who can see the merits of this project and give transformatively to it,” he said.

“We think that the best thing that we can possibly do to really win over the hearts and minds of our community, of our province, is to educate the public as best as possible about this building — about what it represents, about what it can do economically and socially — which will, we hope, allow the public to hold these conversations for us on our behalf so that they can be our champions. They can be our what we’re calling our community curators,” said the gallery’s marketing and communications coordinator, Bob Gravelle.

“I can see the hunger in Thunder Bay for something like this, that we’re going to be able to bring something of a massive scale to Thunder Bay, of something of this ambition.”

Although the gallery will be in the city, it serves a region the size of France, said Gravelle. He hopes artists, industry professionals and art aficionados everywhere in Northwestern Ontario will respond the the call to become a “community curator.”

A community curator is anybody who feels strongly enough about the new gallery project to learn more and work with the gallery to educate others though conversations in their social circles and trying to dispel any myths, or bad-faith arguments, about the new gallery, he said.

The gallery asks anyone who is interested to visit their website where an information package is available.

The call out to the public is only one part of a broader strategy, which also includes talking to government, corporate and Indigenous groups. The gallery will leave no stone unturned to meet their goal, said Gravelle. “Honestly, hope is our breakfast.”

“We do get those $50 donations, we get 6-figure donations. To have to set a high bar is a challenge, but it’s definitely a challenge we’re willing to face,” he said.

“We may not be able to piecemeal together tens of thousands of $50 donations, but there’s nothing that we’re not willing to try – no conversation we’re not willing to have in order to, to help get this across the finish line.”

Donations can be made online, by calling the gallery or in person at the current space on Keewatin Street.

The gallery has secured $51 million for the project so far, mostly federal funding. Hills is fully adamant that the remaining funding will be secured, and the hope is to have the gallery open in mid-2027. – tbnewswatch.com

article website here

Remember when $23 million would have been the total price of building something like an art gallery?   Especially if you do not have to buy the land that the facility will be built on?

There is a trend where projects funded by taxpayer dollars fail to remain within the original budget?  Why is that?  Because it is well known that government’s follow the ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’ philosophy when funding projects.  They will throw money at a problem until that problem is resolved.

Governments have limitless access to cash.  If they need more, they just borrow it.

Government debt is waaaaay out of control.  Trillions of dollars.  Not billions. Trillions.  (Federal debt clock here. Ontario debt clock here)

When are people, especially politicians, going to realize that we can no longer afford $75 million art galleries.

Oh, and another question: Where is Sharon Godwin?  Why is the media ignoring the person that created this mess in the first place?