The Gift of Art | Bader Celebrations
Museums and galleries are evolving, and, with the help of our philanthropic partners, Queen’s is going to help shape their future.
In 2020, Bader Philanthropies, Inc. honoured Drs. Alfred and Isabel Bader’s love of Queen’s with a transformative $40-million (USD) lead gift to expand and reimagine the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.
Over the next few years, the gift will create a new home for the Agnes, as well as the Department of Art History & Art Conservation.
The gift also creates opportunity – a chance to redefine the way museums are run, exhibitions are made, and the way artists, historians, and conservators are trained.
“Agnes Reimagined ensures we will emerge as the largest public university-affiliated gallery in the country and a sector-defining champion of museological change,” says Agnes Director and Curator Emelie Chhangur.
The investment from the Bader family will play a role in training the next generation of artists and scholars to focus on the transformative power of art to create more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable worlds.
In Agnes Reimagined, Western and Indigenous approaches and knowledge sit side by side as equals to foster mutual understanding. Under Chhangur’s leadership, it will also advance social justice and the work of decolonization through exhibitions, research, programs, teaching, and collecting.
New state-of-the art exhibition spaces will allow for new forms of presentation across different artistic media and enable more curatorial experimentation. There will also be dedicated places for artistic and social events to engage the community, as well as Indigenous self-determination spaces.
“The gift from Bader Philanthropies is a truly visionary gift,” says Chhangur. “Museum practice comes from a very Western framework. It’s quintessentially colonial. The future of art in the current context of Canada must reckon with this. So to be proposing a transformation of the standard way museums operate by incorporating an Indigenized, equity-based lens means that we’re paving the way for the future and a reimagined social and civic role of the 21st- century museum.”
