Charles C. Hill
Contents
Country
Canada
Birth - Death
1945 -
Occupation
Activist
Notable Achievements
Order of Canada
Description
As the Curator of Canadian Art at the country’s National Gallery Centre from 1980-2014, no other individual has played a greater role than Charles Hill in raising the profile of Canada’s art and artists around the world. From historical to contemporary, indigenous to immigrant, Charles Hill has had a great educational influence on the subject.
Born in the nation’s capital of Ottawa, Hill adopted the hippie lifestyle of his youth. This included active involvement in the early LGBTQ rights movement in the country, having come out as gay at age 17. He was the first president of the University of Toronto Homophile Association, was a co-organizer of the first large-scale gay rights demonstration in Canada ‘We Demand’ (1972), and became president of Gays of Ottawa the same year.
These formative years of social activism would lead to a rich professional career in the arts administration world. After obtaining an undergraduate degree in art history and French literature at McGill University in Montreal and a graduate degree in art history from the University of Toronto, Hill joined the National Gallery Centre as an assistant curator in 1972 and became curator in 1980.
His first large-scale installation, Canadian Painting in the Thirties, was mounted in 1975. Other notable exhibits that drew wide praise and acclaim was the 1995 showing The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation, and recently Architects and Artisans: Canadian Art 1890-1918. All exhibitions included accompanying detailed catalogues and historical research material prepared by Charles Hill and his team.
Internationally, Hill organized the exhibit Terre Sauvage: Canadian Landscape Painting and The Group of Seven. This touring exhibit has visited Mexico, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the United Kingdom, and many other countries to great acclaim. The result of these professional and administrative efforts at collecting and showcasing Canada’s rich art history has been the establishment of the country’s cornerstone collection at the National Gallery Centre. Hill has had responsibilities that included acquisitions, collections care, exhibition, and scholarly contribution to the subject matter of Canadian art. He is the author of four authoritative books that accompanied his various exhibitions. He cites these works as the high points of his career at the art gallery – as he points out, these are the content that remain when the art on the walls is gone.
In this sense, Hill regards the key to his success as his ability to relate art to society at large. Hill argues that theory can become too divorced from the object itself, so he put his attention to that object in relation to the world around the artist. He analyzes how art both reflects and influences contemporary values – an appropriate mission, perhaps, for the creation of a national collection that should reflect the country’s psyche, behaviour, and individuality in a global context.
In his exhibitions, the challenge for Hill is to find a structure from something that itself may not have a structured history. Not all artists create pieces along the lines of a grand societal theme, for instance. This, of course, is the challenge of all curators. His renown and respect shows that this challenge has been adeptly handled by Hill. Today, Canadian artists are known around the world and both the appreciation and study of indigenous Canadian art are growing rapidly.
For his life’s work and dedication to Canadian art, Hill was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2001. His portrait hangs in the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives, a visual honour that reflects Charles Hill’s enormous contribution to raising the profile of the visual art of Canada.
See Also
Further Reading/Research
- http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/art-and-architecture/curators-departure-from-the-national-gallery-of-canada-bittersweet/article20987419/?page=all
- http://www.macleans.ca/culture/the-national-gallerys-surprising-1890-1918-show-a-q-a-with-the-curator/
- http://dailyxtra.com/ottawa/news/charlie-hill-from-protest-the-order-canada-5026
