Here is the article from yesterday's Globe:
Old Montreal
Museum in a silo? Now that's a plan
By SARAH MILROY
Tuesday, December 13, 2005 Page R1
A new museum of modern art in Montreal? Last week, the dream project of Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal director Marc Mayer came another step closer to reality with the federal Port Authority of Montreal short-listing the Montreal museum and its partner, developer Groupe Gueymard, as one of three applicants for a dramatic heritage conversion project in the Montreal port.
The museum's project, titled Silo No. 5: Musée d'art moderne, imagines the revamping of three historic grain silos on the western edge of Old Montreal, a project that would include a luxury-condo complex and a museum devoted to modern and contemporary art with a special emphasis on the emergence of abstraction in Quebec. The proposed museum would be housed on the 10th and 11th floors of a concrete grain elevator built in 1957 by C. D. Howe and Co. and would showcase the permanent collection of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.
Currently, that museum, located at Place des Arts in downtown Montreal, can show only 1.5 per cent of its art collections. In its new satellite location, the museum would exhibit 10 per cent, opening up more space in the downtown location for changing exhibitions and touring shows. Total costs of completing the project will come in "well under $100-million," says Mayer, who plans to minimize costs and enhance atmospherics by leaving much of the residual industrial machinery in place on the site and making few major structural changes.
Mayer took the reins at the Musée d'art contemporain just over a year ago (a Canadian, he came to the Montreal position from his role as deputy director for art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York) and he admits it was a scramble for the museum to get its foot in the door with a silo proposal last June. An initial list of six applicants was whittled down to the current three, and Mayer's is the only proposal with a substantial cultural component.
"The site is of great historical significance," Mayer says, a place where one can see evidence of Montreal's historic past as a major port, still active today. "The silo offers views of the St. Lawrence that are spectacular. You can look down at the entrance to the Lachine Canal. And you can also see towards the city."
In addition to the revenues from the condo development and the projected ticket sales for the museum, the development would include a number of rentable event locations that look out over the city. "We are convinced this is going to be financially self-sufficient," says Mayer. "I mean, it's as if they composed the skyline for this view. You can see the whole city from here."
For a museum devoted to modern and contemporary art, the site has special resonance, he says. "You can look at the history of modern art as being either against or for industrialization." The two, he says, go hand in hand. "We are going to leave as much of the original industrial equipment in the buildings as possible, so that we can make that point dramatically. We want to be able to tell the story of the industrialization of Canada and the modernization of Canadian culture at the same time and in the same place."
The displays would focus on the collection's strengths, which include, Mayer says, the world's largest collection of paintings by Quebec abstractionist Paul-Emile Borduas, and other Quebec giants (Jean-Paul Riopelle, Guido Molinari, Yves Gaucher, Jacques Hurtubise, Claude Tousignant), as well as a strong selection of installation-art works made over the past 20 years by international figures such as Gary Hill, Bill Viola, Louise Bourgeois and Ann Hamilton.
"There have been three great stories in the history of Canadian art," Mayer says. "There is the Group of Seven in Toronto. There's the development of abstraction in Quebec. And there's the emergence of photo-conceptualism in Vancouver. The Montreal modernist painters were the first to insist upon the international aspirations of Canadian art. We want this to be a pantheon to them, to celebrate the freedom of expression that we have enjoyed ever since."
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I think one of the ideas floated around was to use it as a sort of water treatment facility.
GB
