Diana Nemiroff, director of the Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG), said the most important thing early in her career was taking risks — it appears to have paid off.
Nemiroff won the lifetime achievement award Sept. 30 at the Ontario Association of Art Galleries (OAAG).
A former curator at the National Gallery of Canada (NGC), Nemiroff was nominated for the award by Sandra Dyck, the curator at the CUAG.
Nemiroff has expanded the CUAG’s publications program, enhanced its funding profile and purchased important works, Dyck said in an email.
Nemiroff said the award was well-timed because she plans to retire in June 2012. She worked as a curator with the NGC from 1983 to 2005. During this time, she said the gallery began to collect work from Canadian aboriginal artists, which before then had been the domain of the Canadian Museum of Civilization.
Nemiroff described this as both her “biggest risk” and the decision that had the greatest payback.
“Symbolically, to be excluded, even if it’s only by appearance, from the [NGC], is to be excluded from the nation’s art history, and that’s completely unacceptable,” she said. “So it was terribly important to a lot of people that we [did] this, and that we [did] it right.”
“Crossings,” which examined work of artists who were living outside of their countries of origin, was her favourite exhibition with the NGC, she said.
“I felt that it was an exhibition that was enormously relevant to our times,” she said. “In terms of the quality of the exhibition, I was very happy with it. It was a big, broad, ambitious exhibition that included some of the best artists working internationally today, as well as some really important Canadian artists.”
Nemiroff said coming to the CUAG had its own benefits, such as the chance to work on a more local and community level.
“What the award does is to give a name to something that is a very real part of working in a place like this,” she said. “You’re much more connected to your colleagues and to the problems on the ground.”
