From Vancouver Art Gallery in ROM: Visitors disguise themselves as exhibitors using the remaining wine exhibition

In years past, on a busy summer day when there was a sailing ship docked in the port of St. Johns, how many a thousand people could find their way to the Rooms. This year, the Newfoundland and Labrador cultural institution reopens its museum and art gallery June 29 and is delighted to see 150 masked faces a day.

It’s the same story on the other side of the country, where the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) reopened on June 15: happily happy to host 150 or 200 people a day, once hosting more than 1,000 during the summer tourist season.

Public art museums and galleries across the country are gradually reopening, inviting visitors again, but requiring them to book time-bound tickets, wear masks and keep their distance from each other. The public is responding cautiously, confirming polls showing that less than a third of us are willing to turn immediately into art events inside.

So, those who do venture will discover pleasant unfinished spaces.

It’s very luxurious; you can visit and there are not many people, said Daina Augaitis, interim director at VAG, which will allow up to 115 people per hour to enter its galleries, but has yet to fill that capacity.

Museums have been planning for weeks what the reopening might look like. Their immediate challenges are to place tickets on time, understanding how people will flow through their galleries and eliminating practical elements. Further down the line, they have their eyes on budgets that will lack the revenue earned.

You can try the ROM without feeling like you are in a crowded space, promises Josh Basseches, director of the Royal Ontario Museum of Toronto (ROM). If it’s her [a show about] Ancient Egypt or dinosaurs, or floral design, you can make choices that keep you at a distance from others. In Canada’s busiest museum, the public can indulge in 25,000 square feet of space while capacity is captured at 900 at a time and only 2,300 per day, less than half of what a ROM would normally get in a day. compressed wine. There is a one-way street through popular dinosaurs and mineral galleries but the stick cave and practical biodiversity gallery remain closed for now.

At the Ontario Art Gallery (AGO), staff initially thought they should plan a one-way street across the gallery and stop crowds at every gate, but soon realized this would create roadblocks. It should be more like a pinball machine, said director Stephan Jost.

The AGO, which opened to the general public on Thursday after initially greeting only members and holders of the crossing, can accommodate 150 people every 30 minutes and 750 people a day, about a quarter of its normal turnout.

In the short term, COVID-19 budgeting institutions have prepared them for this slow start; in the long run they need not only ticket revenue but also sales in cafes and gift shops to balance books. ROM and VAG, for example, predict a 30 percent drop in revenue. However, the assumption, based in part on the experience of Asian and European museums, is that the visit will gradually increase as people become more comfortable.

Much of what happens from here depends on whether we start to see that kind of attendance, Basseches said in ROM, referring to attendance forecasts to reach half of previous levels later this year. This will still leave a $ 5 million to $ 8 million hole in the museum budget, despite numerous cuts.

In Newfoundland, meanwhile, they’re not sure future arrivals will return.

I do not know when, if ever, we will return to global traffic again, said Kate Wolforth, director of museums and galleries on the Chambers. Currently, the only visitors are Newfoundlanders or Maritimers, as the Atlantic provinces have formed a travel bubble that does not include the rest of the country. The numbers through the door have dropped, but we have been able to reach those other audiences [through digital means], Added Wolforth. For an institution that is on an island in the middle of the Atlantic, a wider audience is something we are always looking for.

The performing arts, which have the most difficult challenges when it comes to distancing, will take a closer look at these experiences to see how quickly comfort levels and cultural tourism can rise. So far, museums can report that they have no problem with masks or distancing.

People have learned to do it in supermarkets, they are used to it and are very respectful, said Susan Fruchter, chief operating officer at ROM.

However, the distance seems paradoxical for museums, who have in recent years sought to bring more diverse people into their buildings and engage them in interactive performances deliberately designed to push the experience beyond contemplation. Now, practical activities, such as touch playback of objects and children’s drawing stations, are gone, and touch screens have been replaced by QR codes calling video on visitors’ phones. Meanwhile, museums should ask if COVID-19 could discourage anyone but the most determined visitors.

Galleries and museums, for many people, are not the first place you will go, but our members have been very enthusiastic, Augaitis said. The VAGs’ solution was to reach out to front line workers, offering them free admission in two opening days. Having that opportunity for the essential workers was so generous. People entered from the suburbs, with families; some had never been to the gallery before and it was a diverse cultural crowd, she said. Similarly, when AGO in Toronto offered free annual passes to front-line employees, 16,000 received the offer.

For museum staff, it is simply good to get people, no matter how small the numbers, back through the doors.

Being closed for four months was negative, not just financially: We exist to be open to the public, Bassworks said. It was a tremendous relief to come back to do what we are here to do.

As museums and art galleries reopen, they are expanding temporary exhibitions that were cut short. Here are some art shows now in sight in Ontario.

The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa reopened July 18 with Abadakone (Continuing Hearth), an impressive study of indigenous art that includes more than 100 works from 40 tribes, ethnicities, and nations. It includes the work of artists Cree, Mikmaq, Maori, Sami and Nenet and provides abundant evidence of an international renaissance of Indigenous expression.

The Ontario Art Gallery in Toronto is now open to members and holders of crossings and extends the invitation to the general public from July 23rd. Diane Arbus is showing: Photographs, 1956-71, a disturbing collection of work by the still controversial young Photographer from York and Illusions: Art of Magic, a likable collection from the multitude of vintage posters from the Montreals McCord Museum.

The Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art has reopened with a series of specific field installations by Carlos Bunga, Shelagh Keeley and Megan Rooney that address post-industrial buildings in the intersection triangle.

The Hamilton Art Gallery has reopened with two exhibitions. Snow Early: Michael Snow, 1947-62 traces the development of one of Canada’s most provocative modernists, and The Artists Dream: Works of French Symbolism investigates strange corners of fin-de-sicle art.

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