Bob Rennie donates $22.8-million worth of contemporary art to National Gallery of Canada

Vancouver art collector Bob Rennie and his family have donated $22.8-million worth of contemporary art to the National Gallery of Canada, the gallery announced Monday.

Rennie picked the gallery in Ottawa because he felt it has the resources to conserve and curate the art, and that a national institution was best placed to lend to regional institutions in Canada as well as making international loans.

“I looked at them as the right custodian,” Rennie said in an interview.

A prominent international collector, he has given the gallery 61 works by such renowned artists as the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, the Palestinian-British installation artist Mona Hatoum and the American conceptual artist Dan Graham, who died in 2022. The donation also includes a career-spanning collection of 40 works by the Vancouver artist Rodney Graham, who also died in 2022 and was known for his large-scale photographic lightboxes.

“This is transformational for us,” said National Gallery director Jean-François Bélisle. “It has been a dialogue about what do we want to add to the collection. His collection is a lot bigger than what he is donating to us right now. Not everything is on the table, but everything can be talked about: We really shaped this in terms of what would most benefit the national collection.”

Bélisle added that the gift includes works that the gallery could never afford to buy and allows the gallery not only to lend to Canadian institutions but to enter into loan agreements with international institutions.

For example, the U.S. National Gallery of Art in Washington is interested in borrowing one highlight of the gift: The American Library is a room-sized installation of 6,600 books wrapped in colourful African fabrics and bearing the names of notable American immigrants and Black Americans affected by the Great Migration. The piece was created by the British artist Yinka Shonibare, who explores the colonial relationships between Europe and Africa, and is known for his use of the bright Dutch-wax textiles once imported to Africa from the Netherlands.

“He could have given this collection to anyone in the world,” Bélisle said.

The gallery, which already has one space named for the Rennie family, will name at least one more, as Rennie continues to discuss donating more of the collection.

“If you give to the National Gallery, you give to all galleries,” he said. “If the National Gallery has them, the Art Gallery of Alberta doesn’t need to buy them.”

Rennie serves as chair of the collections committee at Washington’s National Gallery of Art and previously served on committees at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Tate Modern in London. A collector with international reach, he was unlikely to make the gift to his local art museum: Rennie has been a vocal critic of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s ambitious plans for a new building (now cancelled), saying it made bricks and mortar the priority instead of art.

Unusually, the gift comes with no stipulation as to how or when it will be exhibited: Rennie said donors’ requirements that their art be on permanent display tie a gallery’s hands.

“I don’t know if there is enough discussion about this,” he said, noting the pattern of donors’ onerous requirements that he has witnessed in the U.S. “You give one Monet; you want it displayed at all times. Everybody does that and you have no museum.”

However, the gift does come with the expectation the National Gallery has the resources to lend the work. Rennie, who also gave about $12-million worth of art to the gallery in 2017 and has now donated a total of 260 works, has not endowed the gift with any cash contribution but has covered the costs associated with evaluating it and shipping it to Ottawa, Bélisle said.

The $22.8-million figure is the evaluation approved by the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board, the organization that can issue Rennie with a tax receipt for that amount.

Rennie added that he prefers to fund on a project basis, paying for catalogues and shipping when lending his art. For example, he has lent work and funded the catalogue for a coming exhibition devoted to the Black American artist Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy in London.

The son of a Vancouver brewery truck driver and a homemaker, Rennie first bought a work of art at age 17 when he purchased a signed Norman Rockwell reproduction and had to borrow money from a neighbour to cover the shipping. He launched a highly successful career marketing real estate in Vancouver in his 20s, eventually becoming the city’s “condo king,” and began collecting in earnest.

“At what point are you a collector? When the works are stacked against the walls,” he said.

His collection includes about 4,000 works by more than 400 artists. In the 1990s he preferred works that included text; in the 2000s, he began to specialize in works that dealt with social justice and artistic appropriation. Starting in 2009, he showed some of the collection in a private museum installed in the Wing Sang, the oldest building in Vancouver’s Chinatown, but closed that project in 2022 and helped the Chinese community buy the building to create the new Chinese Canadian Museum.

He has collected Canadian works in depth, including by B.C. artists Ian Wallace and Brian Jungen, but said he doesn’t want to marginalize their work by placing it in a narrow national context.

“It is a Canadian collection, it’s just not full of Canadian art,” he said. Similarly, he does not intentionally buy female artists but has 173 of them in the collection.

Aged 69, he has three adult children by his ex-wife Mieko Izumi while another former partner, Carey Fouks, continues to oversee the art collection. Rennie has promised the family he will resolve the future of the collection by the time he turns 75. His plan is to donate art up to the $50-million mark with no stipulation that the National Gallery must show it or can’t sell it.

“Will I roll over in my grave if they deaccession it? No. You have to trust someone if you marry them,” he said. “Instead of my grandchildren saying, ‘That’s Bob’s museum,’ they can say Bob did something for the country.”