Brendan: I understand that the question does not touch on all the specifics, like the committee structure, governance, etc. Those will all be done if the referendum passes. The question does bind us to spending the proceeds from the endowment specifically on Art. The rest will be hashed out if and only if the question passes.

Cheers,
Elin

That is reassuring to hear!

The referendum question does not discuss how the “AMS Arts Endowment Fund” will be administered, and says that it will be “used to purchase additional art and support other on-campus arts programming and initiatives,” making no explicit mention of the fund going towards the maintenance of the collection.

This lack of clarity in the referendum question itself was the source of my alarm, and I certainly hope that, should the referendum pass, the way you have described the running of the endowment is how it ends up being run!

The plan is to have the money from the endowment be overseen/administered by a committee made up of some professionals (Belkin director, etc), faculty, and students who study art. It could go towards the maintenance of the collection, acquisition of new work, and other funding for student art.

The big issue is not that the collection is a financial drain (the insurance costs are some $9,000), but that the art is not being cared for, and that funding for arts is limited.

Elin

It is incredibly difficult to safely remove any of the works from storage due to the horrific conditions of the boxes the work is stored in. Last year five of the more valuable pieces got upgraded to fancy wooden crates, which was awesome, but the rest of the works are mostly still in boxes that feel like the bottoms could fall out at any moment which makes putting on a show difficult an other uses of the work impossible. It would be fantastic for a canadian art history class for example to be able to come to the gallery after hours and have the art gallery commissioner pull out some work for them to see first hand, as textbook reproductions are always inadequate. This unfortunately is unlikely to happen due to the risk it would impose on the art because of the shitty boxes.

If the referendum passes and works are sold I would urge the ams to put a good chunk of that money (like ten grand at least probably) back into the collection to work towards solving the problem of the works being “expensive to insure and hard to display.” They should do this by consulting professionals at the Belkin or the Vancouver Art Gallery about industry standard storage practices and having new boxes built for all of the work. Maybe even we could upgrade from cardboard to something sturdier like chloroplast.

With better boxes, the collection becomes immensely more accessible, heck, you might even be able to negotiate a better deal on insurance next time the collection is assessed. If the collection is a financial drain with not enough benefit for students, using money from the collection to support student artists or acquire new work, while both awesome activities, are not long term solutions.

If you deaccession work because the collection has problems (as the referendum states) use that money FIRST to fix the problems of the collection! After that, do whatever. First buy boxes.

Bylaw 11(7): “Council shall not dispose of any land, buildings or improvements thereto, or art objects owned by the Society unless such disposition has been authorized by a Resolution of the Society.”

It is a challenging requirement, since the AMS is only so-so at passing referenda. However, this was probably put in to prevent “self-centred hacks who don’t give a shit about art” from dismantling the collection.