“Warning: our collection is unfortunately not accessible from our temporary space at Place Ville Marie”.
This warning to visitors appears on the website of the Musée d’art contemporain (MAC), which has been temporarily relocated to Place Ville Marie since the summer of 2021. This is where the exhibitions of this national museum are presented. until its expansion on the Place des Arts site is completed. As for its collection, it is normal that during major works, it is temporarily stored for the obvious purposes of security and conservation.
But as a Radio-Canada report broadcast on May 22 reminded us, this collection will soon be inaccessible for two years, and the situation could last for a long time, an almost total silence surrounding the continuation of this expansion project, which no construction has been confirmed to date despite the unveiling of plans in the spring of 2018. And the pandemic of recent years cannot explain everything, major cultural infrastructure projects, such as the Espace Riopelle of the National Museum of Beaux-Arts du Québec (MNBAQ, also a national museum), being firmly on track.
For several years, therefore, the MAC collection, an essential component of the national collection, will not be accessible to the Quebec public. Similarly, the works that make up the collection will not be available for borrowing by museum institutions and exhibition centers that request them as part of exhibition projects of their own.
In Montreal and Quebec, but also in Joliette, Baie-Saint-Paul, Rimouski, Sherbrooke, etc. — to speak only of Quebec — museums and art centers put on exhibitions whose relevance depends directly on the quality of the works presented. In such a context, access by these institutions to the works of major museums — particularly national museums — is essential.
However, it is striking to note, for some time now, the almost total absence of works from the MAC collection in these exhibitions, although the subjects addressed there lend themselves to their inclusion. Fortunately, works from the MNBAQ collection are strongly present there.
This situation, which has been going on for two years now and which threatens to continue, seems unacceptable to us. It is urgent that the works in the collection of the Musée d’art contemporain become accessible again to institutions wishing to borrow them for exhibition purposes.