In February of 2005, an anonymous source donated the Black Star photography collection to Ryerson University. The collection, which consists of approximately 92,000 historic photo-journalistic prints, remains the single largest gift of cultural property ever made to a Canadian university.
Seven years later, Ryerson has announced the grand opening of the
Ryerson Image Centre (RIC), the gallery created in honour of the historic donation. Located in Ryerson's new
Image Art Building, the RIC will be a free and accessible public gallery.
"The Black Star Collection is the raison d'être for the Ryerson Image Centre," says RIC director Doina Popescu. "These are the images that appeared in the major magazines and newspapers of the 20th century, gracing the pages of such publications as Life magazine, Fortune, The New York Times, Time and Newsweek, to name but a few. It's important to celebrate this remarkable collection in the launch exhibition of the Ryerson Image Centre, so we invited eight of Canada's pre-eminent artists to create work inspired by the collection."
The RIC's inaugural exhibit,
Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection, will open to the public during this year's
Nuit Blanche Festival (the night of September 29), Toronto's annual all night contemporary art event.
"I think that it is fitting to launch a major new arts facility in downtown Toronto.... on Scotiabank Nuit Blanche," says Popescu, who, along with Peggy Gale also co-curated the gallery's first exhibit. "It's a night dedicated to the arts and to the enjoyment of the arts by the diverse, broad, general public of Toronto. Our gallery is both a university gallery and a public gallery committed to engaging both the diverse academic communities and the interested general public across this great city."
Archival Dialogues features the work of major Canadian contemporary artists, including Stephen Andrews, Christina Battle and Michael Snow, each of whom created new work inspired by the Black Star Collection.
Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Doina Popescu, Director, Ryerson Image Centre