by Rina Greer

The Toronto Sculpture Garden has been the site of innovative contemporary sculpture installations since 1981. This small, urban park in the downtown core served as a testing ground for artists to experiment with public space and to address issues of architectural scale, materials and context. It has given some artists their first opportunity to work out-of-doors, to experiment with the challenges of siting work within an urban environment and gave them critical experience for future public art projects. Many, including Susan Schelle, Stacey Spiegel, Brian Scott, Mark Gomes, John McKinnon, Carlo Cesta, Judith Schwarz, Stephen Cruise, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Yvonne Singer, Brian Groombridge, Lisa Neighbour and Warren Quigley, undertook their first public commissions after exhibiting in the Toronto Sculpture Garden.

Located at 115 King Street East, near Church Street and opposite St. James’ Cathedral, the Garden is both a civic and a private initiative. It is a unique partnership between the City of Toronto, which owns and operates it as a city park, and the Louis L. Odette family, who created a non-profit foundation to fund the exhibitions. The City of Toronto has been an active participant in this partnership with Mayors David Crombie and John Sewell having played a significant role in the development of this special city park with privately funded art exhibitions.

Founder Patron

Louis L. Odette is a long time supporter of the arts who has collected painting and sculpture for many years. He has promoted sculpture in the public domain by funding art in public spaces and has spearheaded the development of the L.L. Odette Centre of Sculpture at York University, which opened in 1991.

Search for a Site

It was Lou Odette’s dream to share his passion for art by providing the citizens of Toronto with free access to a specially designed park which would have changing sculpture exhibitions. The idea originated in 1974, when he and his wife visited a restaurant and sculpture garden on the outskirts of Rome, Italy. On their return, he contacted Stephen McLaughlin, then Policy Advisor to City of Toronto Mayor David Crombie, who initiated discussions with the City’s Planning Department staff and with the mayor. The concept was endorsed and Crombie appointed Ken Greenberg, director of the Civic Design Group, to search for an appropriate City owned site.

For the next 5 years, locations were considered in Trinity Square, on Court Street behind the former Adelaide Street Courthouse, at Harbourfront, and near the Bloor and Yonge Streets intersection. In 1979, the site at 115 King Street East became available as part of the general urban improvements in the historic St. Lawrence District. Residential development was approved for Market Square in an adjacent area south of the site which provided mid-block pedestrian access from King Street, through the site to Front Street. Other improvements included the redesign of nearby Berczy Park which included public art in the form of a mural on the west wall of the Flatiron Building created by artist Derek Besant and unveiled in September 1980.

This King Street East site measures 80’ x 100’ and is situated between two of the “City Buildings” built in the Georgian style of the early 1840’s. This row between Church and Market Streets was a prominent feature of King Street, the main street of the city as it developed west of the old Town of York. In 1893, Oak Hall, an outstanding commercial building with a cast iron and glass front, was built on the site. The site was cleared in 1938 for use as a parking lot until it was redesigned as a city park for the Toronto Sculpture Garden.

Council Approval

After the site was selected in mid-1979, Mr. Odette appointed Rina Greer, a public art consultant, as Director of the exhibition space and asked her to prepare the Terms of Reference that would identify the development, mandate, operation and scope of the program for the proposed sculpture garden. On December 5, 1979, City Council approved these Terms and a Feasibility Study for the renewal of a city owned building at 111 King Street East. The Toronto Sculpture Garden was thus formally created and the director assembled the first Art Advisory Board to plan the inaugural exhibition.

Mr. Odette formed the non-profit L.L.O. Sculpture Garden Foundation to fund the annual operating expenses for the Toronto Sculpture Garden. The Foundation provided most of the funding required to develop the site with the balance offset by a generous contribution from the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship & Culture of a one-time $200,000 capital grant.

An agreement was negotiated with the city whereby the Foundation would have a 35-year lease at a nominal rate on the adjacent building at 111 King Street East in return for financing all leasehold improvements required to rehabilitate the building for a restaurant and contemporary commercial use. This work was carried out in 1982-83 by architect Sigmund Rezetnick. The Foundation was permitted to sublet the space to generate revenue which would offset annual operating expenses for the Toronto Sculpture Garden. La Maquette Restaurant has occupied this space since 1983, providing an elegant dining setting overlooking the site and indirectly contributing operating revenue for the sculpture exhibitions. The City of Toronto, through the Department of Parks and Recreation, maintains the site as a park and is responsible for the maintenance and security of the grounds.

The Toronto Sculpture Garden officially opened at 2:30 p.m. on September 11, 1981, some seven years after the idea was first conceived. The three hundred guests at the opening ceremony heard remarks by The Honourable John B. Aird, Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, The Honourable William G. Davis, Premier of Ontario, His Worship Arthur C. Eggleton, Mayor of Toronto and, representing the Toronto Sculpture Garden, Louis L. Odette, Patron, Ted Bieler, Artist and Art Advisory Board Member and Rina Greer, Director. A gala party was held at the King Edward Hotel following the opening ceremony.

Site Design

The TSG was designed by what was then the City of Toronto’s Civic Design Group, a Division of the Department of Planning and Development. A waterfall provides ambient sound and muffles vehicular noise in summer, benches and a low brick retaining wall provide casual seating, and night lighting provides for nearly eighteen hours of public viewing. A wrought iron fence designed by Angelo Garro defines the space and provides security for the works.

The design for the site was conceived to accommodate the original mandate of group exhibitions of individual works. It featured a limestone gravel ground with concrete footings and splayed steps to accommodate a change in grade. As the mandate shifted from group to solo exhibitions and/or installations, and as artists began to respond more directly to the site, the physical characteristics of the space were gradually simplified and altered. In time, gravel areas were replaced with grass, footings for pedestals were removed, concrete steps were eliminated and the site was re-graded. These changes provide a more neutral field for the work and allow greater flexibility for installations.

A City of Toronto Park

Once the TSG opened, the former parking lot became a city park and jurisdiction for its maintenance was transferred to the Department of Parks and Recreation under the leadership of Herb Pirk, Commissioner from 1983 to 1996. His interest and enthusiasm for the program ensured its smooth operation and provided for full cooperation from his staff. The department continues to provide essential support under the guidance of Don Bennett, Director of Maintenance and longtime Art Advisory Board member.

Art Advisory Board

Exhibitions are planned by the Art Advisory Board, chaired by the TSG Director, which is composed of artists, curators, architects, collectors and other arts professionals. The Board meets three times a year to review specific proposals for the site and to select work. To date, some thirty-eight individuals, whose names appear chronologically at the beginning of this book, have served on the Board over the years on a volunteer basis for a three-year term, renewable once. Almost all the artist members first had an exhibition in the TSG and contribute the benefit of their experience of having produced work for the site. The vision and commitment of the Art Advisory Board has provided the shape and scope of the exhibition programming for the Toronto Sculpture Garden.

Exhibition Mandate

The early mandate identified group exhibitions of existing work. This provided many artists with the opportunity to exhibit in an outdoor space and introduced the public to the many aesthetics of contemporary work. The first two exhibitions were selected by the Art Advisory Board with that philosophy in mind. The mandate shifted to existing works by one artist in the third exhibit by Louis Stokes and then to solo exhibitions of commissioned site-specific work beginning with the fourth exhibit by Lee Paquette.

The evolution in the mandate was influenced by several factors. It became quickly apparent that there was not an infinite number of existing works that would be suitable for outdoor display and that it would be difficult to continue large group shows for an indefinite period. Group shows also tended to focus the attention on the site rather than on the art, especially since the works were selected for formal rather than conceptual reasons and the exhibitions lacked curatorial focus. The greatest impact on the exhibition mandate was the change, evidenced internationally, as sculpture moved from being a point object on a pedestal to a work of many parts whose installation became a variable influenced by site and context. Most exhibitions in the TSG have been solo shows with artists creating new work specifically for the site, although guest curators have been invited by the Board, from time to time, to mount group shows of new or existing work.

Student Competitions were initiated in 1987 to give art students an opportunity to address the issues of making art for a public space. For seven years, students from universities and art schools across Canada competed by designing work specifically for the Toronto Sculpture Garden. Each school selected a winner to receive an Odette Scholarship Award. All winning drawings and maquettes were sent to Toronto for public exhibition (the first year at the Olga Korper Gallery and subsequent years in the Rotunda at City Hall). The Art Advisory Board of the TSG then selected a finalist, who received an additional award. After each three years, one student was selected from among the finalists for a summer exhibition in the Garden. The exhibitions by Douglas Buis, from York University, and Charles Courville, from the University of Guelph, were a result of this process.

Artists at Work

Part of what makes the TSG distinctive is the revelation of the process of fabricating and installing the work, and this may require weeks of preparation in the park by an artist. For example, in October 1985, Andreas Gehr’s piece took eight hundred hours of on-site construction to build. Artists have discovered that members of the public stop to ask questions, make comments or observe the art-making process. Because the exhibits are mounted for either two, four or six month periods, the site can be visited many times and the work can be experienced in daylight and nighttime and as the seasons change.

Although the majority of artists who have exhibited in the Toronto Sculpture Garden live and work in Ontario, the Art Advisory Board is not restricted to selecting artists from within the province. To date, several artists from Russia, England and the United States have produced work for the Garden, as well as five artists from Quebec and three from British Columbia.

Artists have made site-specific or site-sensitive work that reflects the TSG’s location in the city opposite a cathedral, adjacent to a restaurant and near a thriving market and residential area. They have responded to its place in the history of the development of the city and its location in the heart of a commercial and business district and have commented on its reality as a man-made piece of nature surrounded by buildings. The chronology in this book reflects artists’ increasing sensitivity to site and context and parallels current practices in contemporary art.

Fifteenth Anniversary

To celebrate the Toronto Sculpture Garden’s fifteenth anniversary, an exhibition Work/Site: 15 Years in the Toronto Sculpture Garden, was mounted at the Art Gallery of Ontario during the summer of 1997. At the opening ceremony, Mayor Barbara Hall spoke of the Garden’s contribution to the cultural life of the city and its role in bringing sculpture to the daily life of its citizens. The exhibit displayed a time line of photographs documenting the exhibitions of 58 artists in 37 exhibitions, and featured maquettes, working drawings, installation photographs and fragments from the actual exhibitions.

This book is a record of the early years of exhibitions in the Toronto Sculpture Garden. Barbara Fischer’s essay examines the development of the aesthetic of making sculpture within this century and discusses the exhibitions within this context, while the text by Ihor Holubizky positions the Garden within the local scene and the development of public art in Toronto since 1967.

Toronto Sculpture Garden is a tribute to the vision of founder patron Louis Odette, the commitment of the Art Advisory Board and the energy and creativity of the artists who have transformed this site into a significant venue for contemporary art.