68 CANADIAN A RT • SPRING 2016 canadianart.ca 69
TORONTOIn 1976 , while still in her 20s, Chantal
Pontbriand took her first-ever museum job working in
programming and education at the Montreal Museum
of Fine Arts. It wasn’t to last terribly long. “At the time,
the education department was run by a very nice woman,
but it was all about guided tours,” Pontbriand, now 64,
said recently. “Even then, it felt a bit dépassé.”
She would know. Just outside its doors, Pontbriand
had her hands full with perhaps the most au courant
thing going in Canadian culture in that very moment:
the first, fiery throes of Parachute, the avant-garde journal
she had co-founded with René Blouin in 1975 and would
go on to build into an international hub of art and ideas,
right up until it stopped publishing in 2007.
By 1979 , Pontbriand had said goodbye to the tidy path
of full-time museum employment, choosing instead the
churn of a living culture and its cross-fertilized chaos.
So it might be with some surprise that she found herself
in Toronto last fall, presiding over the newly named
Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto-Canada (previously
the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art) as its first-
ever CEO. This, though, is anything but tidy.
“We are essentially starting from zero,” effused
Pontbriand one unseasonably warm late-November day
last fall. “There’s an opportunity now to build a real
contemporary art museum—a 21st-century museum.
And this is going to be it.”
Tucked into the Sterling Social, an unvarnished cafe
space— cracked walls, rough floors, a certain, deliberate
lack of care—at the crook of Bloor Street West and
Sterling Road, Pontbriand, with her poker-straight, jet-
black hair and long wool coat, cuts an imposing figure.
She worries, mildly astounded, at the unintentional
impact this museum might have on her new hometown’s
ever-gentrifying core. “Why hasn’t Toronto come up
with a scheme to better accommodate artists? It’s really
problematic,” she says.
A certain conviviality, coloured by a sensitivity to
inclusive, public gestures, has ever been a Pontbriand
trademark, and her version of the museum, she insists, will
be marked by the same. The museum’s blank slate provides
that opportunity. Its old building on Queen Street WestFACES
Chantal Pontbriand at the Tower
Automotive building, Toronto,
December 2015
PHOTO GEORGE WHITESIDECHANTAL PONTBRIAND
STARTING
FROM ZERO
BY MURRAY WHYTEFaces MOCCA_Sp16_16TS_LR.indd 69 02/04/16 4:10 PM