Art Gallery of Sudbury caught up in Laurentian University financial tangle | Canada Voices

Sudbury’s Bell Mansion is a gracious heritage building from 1907, made of local granite and set on ample grounds in a pleasant residential neighbourhood on the edge of downtown. For more than 50 years it housed a public art gallery, offering moments of culture and calm in the midst of the Northern Ontario mining town.

But the Art Gallery of Sudbury was forced out of the aging building because of structural problems two years ago and now the mansion is being sold by the debt-laden Laurentian University – despite protests from artists who believe the university doesn’t have the right.

“This is an unfair situation for the people of Sudbury,” said Joshua Schwebel, a Montreal artist and activist who has written an open letter protesting the sale and circulated it in the Canadian cultural community as part of an artist’s project analyzing the relationship between art and capitalism. “People feel extremely upset at the university because of how much it has taken from the culture to save its own back.”

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Laurentian is in the final stages of paying off debts after it sought protection from creditors in 2022, but Schwebel disputes its right to sell this particular building, which was donated to the university in 1967 to be used as an art gallery. The university, which received an offer from an unidentified buyer at the end of August, has said it can’t afford the repairs the building requires.

Meanwhile, the gallery, which has distanced itself from the letter campaign, has been reduced to modest quarters, three adjoining storefronts downtown where it organizes temporary exhibitions, as well as offsite and online. The 2,500 artworks stored at the mansion were moved last spring to the university archives. These include a collection of historic Canadian art claimed by the university featuring works by the Group of Seven and the gallery’s own collection of more recent Northern art. The gallery hopes to move into a new municipal facility in 2027, where it will share a building with the Greater Sudbury Public Library.

The gallery and the mansion have a long history of community involvement. After a fire in the 1950s gutted the interior of what was once the private home of lumber baron William Bell, local citizens banded together to restore the mansion as a centennial project. In 1967, the Sudbury District Chamber of Commerce sold Laurentian the building for $1 on the understanding it would be an art centre.

In 1981, donor Barbara Annie McDonald bequeathed two other properties to the university, stipulating that the proceeds from their sale were to be used to buy art and maintain the gallery. However, in a period of government cutbacks in 1995, the university withdrew funding from the gallery, and the community rallied again, finally establishing the AGS as an independent institution in 1997.

Part of today’s problems for the AGS stem from the way an insolvency arrangement intended for large corporations sideswiped a small regional gallery, and from the unusual arrangement the gallery had with the university, which now claims title to all the art in the collection acquired before the gallery became independent in 1997.

During Laurentian’s 2022 proceedings under the federal Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA), the gallery was told it had no standing and its lawyer warned it to withdraw its claim for fear it would receive an immediate judgment it could not negotiate.

“It isn’t fair but we learned the process at best is rough justice,” gallery director Demetra Christakos said, referring to the CCAA insolvency process. “It’s an anomaly in the Canadian university system … It is governed by forms and relationships that come from corporate Canada, from the private sector.” (In 2024, the federal government passed legislation to prevent other publicly funded universities from using the CCAA, which is intended for corporations with more than $5-million in debt, citing the inappropriate use in Laurentian’s case.)

The gallery was forced to agree to a settlement, allowing that the university could sell the Bell Mansion and acknowledging it didn’t own the pre-1990s art collection nor the B.A. McDonald funds. On the other hand, the gallery did not acknowledge that the university owned that art, and it hopes it might eventually negotiate access to a collection Christakos believes Laurentian only holds in trust.

Although Christakos has distanced the gallery from the letter campaign, Schwebel also believes the historic art represents a trust and he is planning to ask the Public Guardian and Trustee of Ontario, who oversees charities and some estates, to intervene. The open letter he released in August, which has been signed by several hundred Canadian artists and Sudbury residents, argues any proceeds from the sale of the Bell Mansion must be used to promote public appreciation of art and the remainder of the McDonald funds should be recovered from the university.

However, Christakos says the letter tends to confuse the trusts with the gallery, an independent organization. On Aug. 27, the gallery issued a statement requesting that Schwebel not use the gallery’s name in his communications.

Christakos said there has been no official occupancy agreement with the university since 2004 and that the gallery, as a smaller institution, was wary of what the university might put down on paper and simply operated on an unofficial understanding that it could stay in the Bell Mansion and steward both art collections. She said the McDonald funds were never transferred to the gallery and because Laurentian had folded them into its general revenues, the gallery lost them to the CCAA process. In recent years, the university did provide a few in-kind services at the Bell Mansion, such as lawn mowing and snow clearing, as well as insuring its share of the art.

Although the McDonald funds were supposed to cover upkeep, the gallery’s former home was in poor shape and the AGS already had plans to move into a new municipal facility currently under construction when staff were forced out of the old building in October, 2023, on a moment’s notice. An engineer brought in by the university to examine a chimney reported that a wall supporting a central staircase might be about to collapse.

This left the gallery homeless: Under the terms of its settlement with the university, it had been permitted to stay until 2025 and the new building project, which had been cancelled by the city of Sudbury earlier in 2023 but was later restarted, would not be ready until 2027. Squeezed into the storefronts, the gallery is still trying to raise the $1.5-million it is expected to contribute to a glass-and-stone facility to be shared with the library and designed by Teeple Architects with Two Row Architect and Yallowega Architecture. The gallery inside will be named the Franklin Carmichael Art Gallery of Sudbury in recognition of a donation from Mary Mastin, the daughter of the Group of Seven painter, who died in 2012.

The university declined to provide an official for interviews and would not identify the buyer nor the closing date on the offer for the mansion, which was confirmed to The Globe by real estate agent Tanya VandenBerg. A representative did say that the gallery’s share of the collection, those works acquired after the 1990s deal, will eventually move to the new building, while plans for the earlier share, which a judge ruled to be the property of the university, are still being developed. That share features 20th-century Canadian and Indigenous art, including works by the Group of Seven, a diptych by Woodlands School artist Daphne Odjig and a large body of work by the Toronto artist Frederick Hagan.

But even if the gallery has dropped any claim to the Bell Mansion, not everybody agrees that the university can be said to own a building it was given for a specific public purpose.

“It was given in trust to Laurentian; it is best to leave it as a community place,” said Gaëtane Pharand, a regular gallery visitor and signatory of the open letter who recently retired from running a francophone women’s shelter in the city. “It’s very disheartening that when push comes to shove, the reaction is to get rid of it. … Could Laurentian not have thought of some way of preserving something?”

“Bottom line: it’s a community space,” agreed Dunstan Topp, a local artist and lifelong visitor to the gallery, adding that Sudbury lacks both heritage buildings and cultural spaces.

Topp, who has often worked as an art handler at the gallery, led the team that transported the collections to storage at the university’s archives. He felt the job – more than 2,000 artworks were moved in the space of eight days last May and June – was too rushed to be safe for the art.

However, Christakos says she is satisfied that the current storage is much safer than the Bell Mansion, and said the university was helpful in providing it. It is also providing space for the gallery’s educational programs.

Her complaint about Schwebel’s campaign is that the Montreal artist, after contacting her as a researcher interested in the gallery’s situation, got hired by Topp to help move the art, which she sees as a conflict of interest not identified to her at the time. Schwebel video recorded parts of the move – he says this was to protect the art handlers should any art have been damaged – but complied when asked to stop.

“Being on the crew offered an opportunity for me to gain further knowledge and advance my research, but it wasn’t in the pursuit of any massive deception,” Schwebel said in an e-mail, adding he never attempted to hide his identity.

Schwebel plans to send the open letter to the Public Guardian later this month. Meanwhile, people in Sudbury are waiting to hear who has bought the Bell Mansion, hoping that it will be preserved as a public space.