TALKING ART TORONTO WITH MIA NIELSEN

Kelly Jazvac, Time Scale (Jacket), 2022 (Galerie Nicolas Robert). Photography courtesy of Art Toronto; part of the fair's Re:connecting exhibition.

Now in its 25th year, Art Toronto – the four-day fair that launches with tonight’s Opening Gala – has evolved into an agile celebration of art ranging from avant garde to impressionist. It offers up a range of galleries local and international, as well as programming including panel discussions and group tours.

Art Toronto has been led by director Mia Nielsen since Spring 2019 – which, as you can imagine, came with a massive learning curve for the former curator at The Drake. But in-person art fairs are back on, and Nielsen is readying herself for what’s sure to be a season more popular than the last. The curator of this year's Focus Exhibition, Rhéanne Chartrand, will be a draw, as will the range of conversations with artists and collectors throughout the weekend.

I had the chance to chat with Nielsen on the precipice of the fair’s launch, and here’s what she had to say about her priorities as the director, why it’s important to her to bring outside curators into the show, and what she curated herself for Art Toronto 2024.

What was your top priority when you came aboard at the fair?

There were a couple of things that I wanted to do, coming from a curatorial background. It was important to me to think of the fair as an exhibition, and to create immersive experiences. I was inspired by the work that Elizabeth Dee does at the Independent Art Fair, in terms of the layout of the space and how someone flows through it and can make connections between the works, very much like in an exhibition setting. I think enriches the whole experience.

I also come from what I think of as a hospitality-adjacent place with my time at The Drake. My love of great hotels and restaurants and hospitality spaces made me also want to put some thought and care into the public areas, whether that's working with different furniture partners or bringing in huge, beautiful plants to create a luxurious and immersive space. I wanted to think about the fair from a curatorial perspective and a high art perspective, and also think about the guest experience.

And tell me about navigating the fair’s programming throughout the pandemic. What your biggest learning from that experience, and in developing more of a digital presence?

There were so many learnings – I get a little bit overwhelmed thinking about it. I've talked about the curatorial aspect and I've talked about guest experience, but another pillar of this job, of course, is that it is a business. And in terms of running a business, it taught me how to be nimble. It taught me how to abandon expectations. You think something's going to go one way, and that you think you have a rhythm. You think you're learning the rhythm of a job, and that is what it's going to be like year to year. And then the entire landscape changes. The entire world changes. And you have to adapt to new circumstances.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this being the 25th anniversary of the show. Generally, as a person, I am reticent to celebrate anniversaries. I think that the expectations, the culture, the ideas explored with anniversaries are often about looking back, which is usually not that interesting to me. I want to think about what it means to be right here, in a moment. Or, what is the future like? Those are my inspiration points. But in terms of the anniversary and the years 1999/2000, it made me think a lot about social media and how, particularly with Instagram, that it has been such an important tool in visual culture. It's amazing because it allows us to connect with artists and galleries and curators and other cultural people from all over the place. I love that.

The pandemic was also an interesting and complicated time because there was an immediacy to art buying. We were stuck in our homes. We weren't spending money on clothes, on travel, and we needed those moments of renewal. For a certain demographic, art buying was the thing you could do. And you could get on your Instagram or you could go on a gallery's website and look at an artist’s online presence, then buy a piece and have it delivered and have that moment of being refreshed.

However, I tried to spin it in a different way too because I still wanted to encourage people to see art in person. Galleries, because they could offer private appointments, were relatively safe spaces. I think that having that moment to look for the opportunities is really something that I learned in the pandemic.

Gio Swaby, Together We Bloom, 2021. (Claire Oliver). Cotton fabric and thread sewn on muslin. 62 inches x 50.5 inches x 1.5 inches. Photography courtesy of Art Toronto; part of the fair's Focus Exhibition.

Let's talk about the Focus Exhibition and the process of working with outside curators for that part of the fair. Why is it exciting to collaborate with someone like Rhéanne Chartrand?

Having a curated section was important to me going into the job because there's so much incredible work that comes out of Canada. It is bananas. And I feel like as a culture, we’re not good at celebrating that. There's so much goodness. And I thought that by bringing in an institutional curator and giving them a space and carte blanche to highlight particular works that are in the fair, that it would create different moments of immersion. Galleries all have their own identity, and that's fantastic; but I feel like audiences can benefit from a true-exhibition style experience like what we see in Focus – of works come together, of visitors being able to make their own connections, and of seeing how a curator frames the work.

This is third edition that we've done of Focus. The first was with Marie-Charlotte Carrier, who was with the Hayward Gallery in London at the time. Kitty Scott from Fogo Island Arts curated the exhibition last year. And Rhéanne’s exhibition is so beautiful and tender and thoughtful. She has this way of working with artists that is very intuitive, though she also brings a lot of conceptual and intellectual rigor. But she's really interested in working with artists like she’s collaborating with another person. You see that in the work, and you see how these works come together in ways that speak to an artists’ upbringing, where they lived, what their personal idea of home is. And it’s a huge show – there are 22 artists featured with works of all media.

Sophia Lapres, Youth is not wasted on me, 2024 (Towards Gallery). Oil on aluminum. 8 x 5 inches x 13.75 inches. Photography courtesy of Art Toronto; part of the fair's Discover Exhibition.

What else is new to Art Toronto this year that you're really excited about? I’m looking forward to Winnie Truong’s installation!

Our Platform Talks. We worked with Emily Butler on that. She’s now based in Vancouver, and she used to curate the Conversations section for Art Basel and also worked at Whitechapel Gallery. She has brought in an interesting perspective with these talks; she put together a panel with artists Rajni Perera and Jake Kimble that looks at how art can be more caring, which I think is wonderful. And I’m really thrilled that Ebony L. Haynes from 52 Walker and Bernard Doucet from the Sobey Art Foundation are going to be talking about centering artists in the development of institutions. Both have done this in vastly different ways.

Additionally, Eva Respini of the Vancouver Art Gallery is our curator in conversation this year with Kitty Scott – we've had such great response to that program that I wanted to expand it. So, this year we're launching Collectors in Conversation! Dr Paul Marks, who is an associate professor of surgery at the University of Toronto and the head orthopedic surgeon for the Toronto Raptors is the collector we're featuring, and he’ll be speaking with Tash Perrin, the deputy director at Christie's. I love bringing in all these people who are deeply involved in visual art but from different perspectives and places.

I have also put together a multi-stage exhibition called Re:connecting. It'll be seen across the show floor. This was kind of in response to, or me thinking about the question of, ‘Where is the fair now in relation to where it came from in that first year, and where are we going?’ And thinking about how the screen has at once expanded and flattened our experiences with art. All of the works I’ve curated, as far as I'm concerned, cannot be captured in a single image. They're too big and too detailed at the same time. You need to experience them with your whole body, and how exciting that is it to be with art and with people – not only feeling it but also deepening your understanding of that work through conversation and community 

You talked a little bit about the future before, but where would you like to see the fair go in years to come?

Like I said, there are so many amazing Canadian artists and so many of our celebrated artists don't have representation in Canada. I'd love for the fair to be more of a homecoming as well as an opportunity for people to from outside of Canada to discover art from a Canadian perspective. That is what we will continue to develop and work on.

Read more about The New Other’s booth at Art Toronto here.

There will be an Opaloma tour at Art Toronto running from 6-7pm on Saturday, October 26th. Tours are free to join with your admission to the fair!

*OPALOMA IS A MEDIA SPONSOR OF ART TORONTO 2024*