There are three new women directors of public galleries in Nova Scotia— Sarah Fillmore, CEO, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; Melanie Colosimo, director of MSVU Art Gallery; and Pamela Edmonds, director of Dalhousie Art Gallery.

All love working with artists, are keen on collaboration, aim for diversity and inclusion and want to broaden their galleries’ in-person and online reach.

The pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 were a rocky time politically and psychologically and included George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter movement, the pre-pandemic #MeToo Movement and the discovery of mass graves of Indigenous children in Canada.

Those events have reverberated throughout art galleries and museums as they seek new ways to talk about art, history and culture and to embrace diverse communities “without throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” says Edmonds.

All three of the new directors highly value their gallery teams and are generally optimistic. Here are their stories and their visions:

Sarah Moore Fillmore:

Sarah Moore Fillmore doesn’t talk about art in terms of acquisition or money or bricks and mortar.

She talks about conversations, community, and connection.

If COVID-19 taught the gallery anything, she says, it was the power of remaining connected to its community through increased, on-line, province-wide programming and the importance of art to people’s mental health.

Even the provincial government’s pause on a new waterfront gallery, originally to open in 2025, has given the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia a chance to reflect and redefine itself, says its new CEO.

Moore Fillmore, a Montreal-born curator educated in museum studies at Harvard University and most recently AGNS interim director, says exciting projects are in development, gallery attendance (49,306 in 2022-23) is expected to reach pre-pandemic levels of 60,000 to 70,000 by year’s end, and Oct. 11th marks the opening of Generations: The Sobey Family & Canadian Art, a show of over 170 artworks.

Meanwhile, the AGNS is stimulating “conversations” of reconciliation through its Indigenous exhibits, giving voice to diverse communities and emerging artists, and running a slew of programs from kids’ education to the ever-expanding Autism Arts to Artful Afternoon for people with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers.

The gallery is in a positive place and its purpose is very clear, says Moore Fillmore, who has held numerous positions at the AGNS including the Sobey Art Award coordinator, curator of collections, and chief curator and deputy director.

“Now, more than ever the gallery has a role to play in helping people see themselves and follow new narratives and find support in various ways.”

Moore Fillmore feels the experience of looking at art can give a sense of solace, be a rallying cry, even a call to action. Visiting her grandmother in New York City as a six-year-old, she experienced joy at her first art exhibit; she was so excited she skipped around and broke her arm.

She recalls later seeing her mother, a medieval historian, talk excitedly to an enthusiastic guard at the MoMA’s display of Miro’s Constellations.

“They were discovering different things, and it was so beautiful and powerful. To see her come alive with an abstraction like that was so fun and you could picture almost anything being possible when you can make sense of those marks on paper.”

The exciting part of being in an art museum is finding the thing that “makes you feel alive, makes you feel connected to something… makes you understand something different about the world or yourself.”

She loves watching people experience Cree artist Kent Monkman’s powerful painting, Miss Chief’s Wet Dream, of clashing European and Indigenous cultures.

The painting “did so much work for us,” says Moore Fillmore, in leading staff and visitors to new ways of talking about the past, of examining the historical collection and of walking towards reconciliation.

The go-to exhibit at the AGNS is the newly refurbished Maud Lewis gallery. “Maud and Miss Chief each play a role in our story. Weirdly they both allow us to look at important issues which is an important piece for us.”

She is hopeful the board and the government can proceed with a new gallery as a platform for artists, an opportunity to safely store the collection, a destination driver, and an economic generator. It will “take its time, and have the shape that it needs to have.”

What she’s excited about, right now, is the role the gallery has to play in a growing, provincial arts eco-system—one that includes Halifax’s Blue Building gallery and Sydney’s Eltuek Arts Centre.

“I really have to keep tipping my hat to the community and the artists working here because they are working so hard, and the work really deserves that attention it is getting.”

Pamela Edmonds:

 Pamela Edmonds is the only Black art gallery director in Atlantic Canada and one of twenty Black directors and curators across Canada.

“That’s a huge difference from even ten years ago,” says the descendant of Black Nova Scotia Loyalists.

Edmonds became director of Dalhousie Art Gallery, where she worked as an assistant in 1998, in 2022. She wants to continue the “incredible” work of previous directors, including Susan Gibson-Garvey and Peter Dykhuis, whom she considers mentors;  increase exhibits by women artists, Indigenous artists and artists of colour and broaden the gallery’s in-person and digital reach.

“I see art as a language and a mode of communication about who we are as people, and we should find a way for it to be a bridge across many different cultures and communities. It brings people together if it’s done right. I feel it can change the world.”

Art not only defines who we are but points to “who we can be,” she adds.

The 70-year-old gallery is in the basement of the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium.

“People forget we’re here. We can be a unique bridge and hub between the academic and non-academic and an important space for experimental ideas.”

The Secret Codes, the nationally-touring Black Artists Network of Nova Scotia (BANNS) and Vale Quilters Association exhibit by twenty-five Black Nova Scotian artists, broke attendance records this summer. Opening Oct. 5 is The Fairest Order in the World, Nova Scotia’s first exhibit by Cape Breton-born, Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist Sameer Farooq, exploring museums’ colonial histories and ideas of provenance, repatriation and repair— a hot topic in the museum world right now.

Edmonds is also keen to get Nova Scotian art out to the rest of Canada as she works on tours for Farooq and Kim Morgan’s 2022 show, Blood and Breath, Skin and Dust.

Growing up as an English-speaking child in Quebec during Separatist tensions and then as a teen in Dartmouth experiencing racism for her first time, Edmonds felt like an outsider. “I always questioned what it meant to belong to the Canadian narrative.”

When she studied fine art at Concordia University, from which she has a BFA and a Masters in Art History, she went to the library looking for books on Black Canadian and Indigenous artists.

“And there was one, a thesis about Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter (a 1989 cross-Canada exhibit). That was my bible.”

One of the first things she did as director was meet with Moore Fillmore, Colosimo (then at Anna Leonowens), Pam Correll at Saint Mary’s University and Laura Ritchie, then at MSVU Gallery. “We have similar ambitions and collaborating and partnering are a big part of my practice I’d love to see a large-scale project showcasing an exhibition across the city.”

Edmonds’ optimism is tarnished only by the post-pandemic realities of limited arts funding. “This field is notoriously under-resourced in Canada. I’m seeing colleagues moving to the United States and Europe.”

Melanie Colosimo:

Melanie Colosimo, the fourth woman director of MSVU Art Gallery, knows her purpose: to spotlight the Atlantic region and allow its artists to tell their stories.

Colosimo— an artist twice nominated for the Sobey Art Award— admires the foundations set by long-term directors Mary Sparling (1973-1994) and Ingrid Jenkner (1994-2018).

The gallery at MSVU, originally a school for girls and women, opened in 1971 with a primary focus on women’s art.

The mandate hasn’t changed, says Colosimo but it has expanded “to focus not only on women, but on women of diverse backgrounds and to make the gallery more of an accessible and welcoming space.”

The two-floor gallery is now displaying Maroon Town, by male, Jamaican/Nova Scotian artist Tyshan Wright, and is working with curator David Woods on an exhibit about Africville artist Edith Hester Macdonald-Brown, one of Canada’s first recorded Black female painters.

Colosimo plans to keep the Mezzanine space for experimental, community-based and emerging artwork, as well as special projects including an upcoming exhibit by this summer’s Two-Eyed Seeing Camp for high school youth, a partnership between MSVU and Nova Scotia’s First Nations.

“I want to keep highlighting the Atlantic region and emerging Atlantic voices. I want to continue Ingrid’s Prospect Series to give a young artist a first exhibition and I want to bring people into the Atlantic region to see work in the context where it’s made.

“I’m taking the time to learn the exhibition and acquisition history and there is a predominant fine art contemporary and craft overlap and that’ll continue.”

Colosimo grew up outside Moncton and is deeply attached to Atlantic Canada in both her art and life. As a child she drew constantly and loved watching her mother’s crafting group.

“We’d go to Fredericton, and I loved going to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery as a kid.”

As a fine arts student at Mount Allison University she was inspired by its small, collaborative arts community.

As she observed Struts Gallery director John Murchie— “the way he makes room for people and supports people”— she realized she wanted to be an arts administrator and help emerging artists.

As an MFA student at the University of Windsor, she was lonely and nostalgic for Atlantic Canada “and that made its way into my art.”

Her drawings, soft sculptures and installations explore themes of collectivity, power and care and are shaped by the “resourcefulness and legacy of labour in Atlantic Canada,” inspired by a family history of Cape Breton coal miners and Miramichi lumberjacks and paper mill workers.

Colosimo worked for fifteen years at NSCAD University’s Anna Leonowens Art Gallery first as exhibition coordinator then as director/curator. She managed over 200 exhibits and events a year. “Here I have more time to explore collaboration with other galleries and amplify the work and the artists here.

“We’re still under-recognized across Canada— the region, the work that’s made here.”

When she was in conversation at Montreal’s Plural Art Fair in April someone said , “You keep things so secretive out there.”

And Colosimo thought to herself, “No, we don’t.”