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Success Stories
Remarkable fine art collection from the Musée d'art de Joliette
When Montreal art collector Maurice Forget called France Gascon of le Musée d’art de Joliettte back in 1995 with an offer to donate his impressive collection of modern and contemporary Canadian art valued at over $1 million, she says it was like a fairy tale come true.
“The donation was a perfect addition to our collection,” says Gascon, Director of the mid-size museum in Quebec’s Lanaudière region, 60 kilometers northeast of Montreal. Gascon says the depth and variety of the Forget donation, almost 400 works by 247 artists in disciplines ranging from painting and sculpture to photography, print works and installations, make it very representative of modern and contemporary art in Canada, and particularly in Quebec, between 1940 and 1995.
After accepting the donation, museum staff worked for two years to produce a comprehensive catalogue of the Forget collection, followed by a highly successful public exhibition. The next challenge, says Gascon, was to make the collection available to art lovers beyond Joliette. “This meant finding a way to digitize the exhibition catalogue so that it could be displayed on the Internet.”
With this goal in mind, Gascon turned to Robert Roy, a librarian at the local Cégep and Director of Connexion/Lanaudière, a community-based organization promoting the use of new information technology among youth in the Lanaudière region.
After successfully completing a competitive application process, Roy received funding from the Canada's Digital Collections (CDC) program. He hired five young people from the region to digitize the 170 page Forget collection catalogue and to create the Donation Maurice Forget Web site. This new product would allow people across Canada to discover the collection's beauty and rich artistic heritage.
For Roy, the collaborative initiative is one in a series of local projects he has coordinated through the Canada’s Digital Collections program.
For project youth leader Michel Lefebvre, the creation of the Donation Maurice Forget Web site was an opportunity to put his art and multimedia training to use in new and creative ways. “The chances to work with content like this are really rare,” says Lefebvre, who says he was given “carte blanche” by the museum to adapt the Forget Donation catalogue’s 370 art images and accompanying critical essays to an electronic format.
Lefebvre’s goal during the three-month project was to make the Web site as transparent and user-friendly as possible. This meant providing site visitors with navigational options including an alphabetical listing of artists and key thematic areas that would allow them to discover the collection in their own way. “We wanted to give people the freedom of pure navigation,” emphasizes Lefebvre, “the ability to get lost and found in these works at the same time, much as you would if you were visiting the collection in-person.”
Museum Director France Gascon says she was impressed with the Web site’s ease of navigation as well as the superior quality of the newly digitized art images. “I was particularly pleased with the balance that Michel achieved between images and text,” says Gascon, noting that Lefebvre put in many extra hours carefully editing and simplifying the catalogue’s lengthy critical essays to make them suitable for internet readers.
Since its launch, the electronic version of the catalogue has earned rave reviews from artists, art historians and the general public. “I think the digitized catalogue is even more valuable than the original print version,” remarks Gascon. She explains that, for financial reasons, colour reproduction in the print catalogue is limited to 40 works. “The Web site, on the other hand, offers visitors colour images of every piece in the collection at the click of the cursor,” she says. “This is exactly what we were looking for.”
Connexion/Lanaudière’s Robert Roy says the project’s conversion of local cultural content for presentation on the information highway is a source of great pride for the people of Joliette. He adds that the Forget project and similar CDC initiatives are putting the spotlight on the extraordinary talents of young people in the region, while helping them to gain the skills and experience they need to develop careers in the multimedia industry.
Michel Lefebvre, now an award-winning multimedia author with his own company in Montreal, credits the CDC program for giving his career a boost. “The program gave me the opportunity to learn new skills, develop exciting projects and gain experience that has really helped me to move ahead.”
Visit the Canada's Digital Collections World Wide Web Site at http://collections.ic.gc.ca
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