Sobey family donates $2 million to National Gallery to support Venice Biennale (with video)
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For the first time the National Gallery will name one of its interior spaces after a donor — or in this case, a family of donors — and it’ll do it again at least two more times in the next few months.
At a news conference on Tuesday the Sobey family, which runs a grocery empire from the small town of Stellarton, Nova Scotia, donated $2 million to the National Gallery. That brings the family’s total gifts to the gallery over two decades to $4.2 million. The latest donation will support the Canadian program at the Venice Biennale, which, as a release notes, “is the most important recurring international gathering of the contemporary art community.”
In return, the gallery has broken with tradition and will name exhibition space B105, in the contemporary galleries, after the family — a practice that is common in other galleries around the world. The change is “way overdue” said gallery director Marc Mayer, and the process has been in development since discussions began at the board level five years ago.
The change is likely a necessary response to a funding squeeze at the gallery, which has seen the federal allotment that makes up the largest portion of its annual budget frozen for several years now.
Thomas d’Aquino, chair of the National Gallery Foundation, said that unlike major American galleries, Canada’s National Gallery is largely publicly funded and so had no history of large, private gifts of money, until the foundation was created in 1997. Using naming rights as an incentive “is a whole new chapter for us, a new chapter of support,” d’Aquino said. “If prominent families make gestures of this kind . . . others will follow.”
Two more large donations, and the spaces named for the donors, will be announced soon, he said. He wouldn’t share details, but he did say that the donation required to get one’s name on any of the gallery’s several dozen spaces is “in the range of $2 million and up, in the range of $4 million or $5 million.” How much to get one’s name on the Great Hall? That figure isn’t public, d’Aquino said, but “it’s several multiples of the four or five (million) that we’re talking about.”
The Sobeys have a long relationship with the gallery. Donald Sobey was chair of the board of trustees until 2008. In 2012, Marsha Sobey, the daughter-in-law of Donald’s brother David Sobey, was appointed as a trustee. In 2009 the Donald R. Sobey Foundation donated $500,000 to the Donald and Beth Sobey Chief Curator’s Research Endowment, which to that point brought the family’s support of the gallery to $2.2 million.
In 2012, Donald and Beth Sobey donated a prominent work of art to the gallery, Michel de Broin’s Majestic, the huge, outdoor sculpture that is made of metal lamp posts that were torn up by Hurricane Katrina. The cost of the piece was not publicly released, as per gallery policy.
The latest $2-million gift from the Donald R. Sobey Foundation will kickstart the new Canadian Artists in Venice Endowment, to support the Canadian program at the biennale. D’Aquino said the goal is to get the Venice fund to $15 million, at which point it will be sustainable.
All of this comes as a relief to gallery administrators, as finding the funding to support the Venice exhibitions has been a cause of tension at the cash-strapped gallery since it assumed the key administrative roles for Canada at the biennale several years ago. (The Canada Council for the Arts has continued to play a role in supporting the Canadian artists.) With secure funding for Venice from the endowment, the gallery can focus on funding other programs.
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Correction: An earlier version of this story identified Marsha Sobey as Donald Sobey’s daughter-in-law. This current version of the story has been corrected.
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