The Nationwide Gallery of Canada (NGC) in Ottawa revealed on Wednesday (11 March) that it has obtained a donation of 24 modern works from the Vancouver real-estate developer and philanthropist Bob Rennie and his household. The donated works are by 4 artists: Kerry James Marshall and Christopher Williams from the US, and Brian Jungen and Jin-me Yoon from Canada.
“Any work leaving the Rennie Assortment should go to a greater residence and with a greater custodian than ours,” Rennie mentioned of this newest present in an announcement. This brings to 284 the variety of works donated by the Rennie household to the NGC since 2012, when Rennie gave the gallery Jungen’s work Court docket (2004), an set up of stitching tables that kind a basketball courtroom.
Kerry James Marshall, Wake, 2003-25. Reward of the Rennie Basis, Vancouver, 2025. Nationwide Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Set up view, Kerry James Marshall: Collected Works, Rennie Museum, Vancouver, 2018. © Kerry James Marshall, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Picture: Blaine Campbell
“Bob Rennie’s readability of imaginative and prescient and long-standing dedication to artists at pivotal moments of their careers have helped form some of the important collections of latest artwork in Canada,” the NGC’s director and chief government, Jean-François Bélisle, mentioned in an announcement. “Canadians throughout the nation will encounter these works, replicate on them, and see themselves and the world anew via them.”
The gifted works embrace two by Marshall—some of the critically acclaimed American artists of his era—together with the set up Wake (2003-25), which focuses on the transatlantic commerce of enslaved peoples. It incorporates a black mannequin sailboat embellished with medallions of the descendants of the primary Africans dropped at Jamestown in August 1619.
Christopher Williams, Complement ’13 (Combined Typologies) #1, 2013. Reward of the Rennie Basis, Vancouver, 2025. Nationwide Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © Christopher Williams. Picture: David Kühne / Courtesy David Zwirner and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
The 17 donated works by the photo-conceptualist Williams are the primary to enter the NGC’s assortment. They vary from particular person pictures to large-scale photographic installations that contact on the transformative nature of client tradition.
Yoon, the recipient of the 2025 Governor Normal’s Award in Visible and Media Arts—one among Canada’s most prestigious prizes for modern artwork—is represented within the donation by his piece Souvenirs of the Self (1991-2001), which is made up of postcard-like pictures of the artist posing at vacationer websites within the Banff Nationwide Park in Alberta.
Jin-me Yoon, Souvenirs of the Self (element), 1991-2001. Reward of the Rennie Basis, Vancouver, 2025. Nationwide Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Set up view, The 2025 Governor Normal’s in Visible and Media Arts Awards Exhibition, introduced and supported by Canada Council for the Arts, the Nationwide Gallery of Canada, and the Mackenzie Artwork Gallery, 2025. © Jin-me Yoon. Picture: Carey Shaw, Courtesy the MacKenzie Artwork Gallery, Regina
The donation contains 4 works by Jungen, who is thought for his works that meld Indigenous traditions and processes with modern client items. Certainly one of them, Prototype for New Understanding #10 (2001), consists of Nike Air Jordan sneakers normal right into a sculpture resembling conventional Northwest Coast Indigenous masks. The donated work Michael (2003), in the meantime, makes use of Air Jordan shoe bins.
This week’s donation of 24 works follows one other impactful present Rennie made to the gallery in 2017, which concerned works by Jungen in addition to the Vancouver artists Ian Wallace, Rodney Graham, Damien Moppet and Geoffrey Farmer. That donation, mentioned to be price C$12m ($8.8m), was described by the NGC’s director on the time, Marc Mayer, as “by quantity and worth, the biggest single present of latest artwork within the historical past of the gallery”.
