At the National Gallery of Canada, art in—and for—a time of crisis
Paul Wells: How Canada's national gallery and its director, Alexandra Suda, have been working to 'keep the doors open' to new art and new realities
December 22, 2020
Suda, director of the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa on Dec. 17, 2020 (Justin Tang for Maclean's Magazine)
Somebody once said anecdotes are the only evidence. I wanted to write about Alexandra “Sasha” Suda, the director of the National Gallery of Canada. I wanted to contrast the difference between the year she expected—her first full calendar year running the nation’s flagship visual-arts institution—and the year she wound up having instead, which in many ways was the same gong show we all lived through. But first I asked her about a big orange painting she’d shown on her Instagram account. She took me upstairs, to one of the gallery’s largest display rooms.