Sara Angel pursued her PhD in the Department of Art History from 2012 until 2017, when she successfully defended her thesis, “A Moral Persuasion: The Nazi-Looted Art Recoveries of the Max Stern Art Restitution Project, 2002–2013.” During that time, Angel taught a course on modern art from 1900 to 1950. To her dismay, there were virtually no online resources for Canadian art. She understood that students would increasingly get their information online. “What would my three school-aged kids find if they typed ‘art’ and ‘Canada’ into a search engine?” Angel asked herself. “Would they find information on this country’s art and artists?”
The answer convinced her to act. She channeled her experience in arts journalism (for example, as editor-in-chief of Chatelaine), graphic arts (as editorial director at Bruce Mau Design), and not-for-profit fundraising (including at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery). In 2013 she launched the Art Canada Institute (ACI). She established a website that published expert-authored, audience-friendly content about Canada’s art and its history, the Canadian Online Art Book Project, envisioned as a national library on the country’s leading artists.
For ACI’s inaugural publication, Angel turned to the Department, commissioning Professor Mark Cheetham (now Professor Emeritus) to write Jack Chambers: Life & Work. Today there are more than 70 bilingual, rich, and beautifully illustrated books on the Art Canada Institute website, written by the country’s leading art historians and curators and available free of charge. Last year they were used by over 500,000 readers from over 100 countries.
Angel seeded the original project with $5,000 from the Trudeau Foundation Doctoral Scholarship she received in 2012, and raised $75,000 for ACI’s first year of operation. Since then, the annual budget has grown to $2 million. With a staff of ten, ACI’s programming has expanded beyond the online library and offers Canada’s largest art education program, serving teachers from kindergarten to grade 12. The ACI also runs the Canadian Art Inspiration Student Challenge to cultivate the next generation of artists in Canada, an annual series of public events, a fellowship program to fund emerging art historians, and publishes a weekly newsletter.
The Art Canada Institute has evolved from a one-person start-up into Canada’s most trusted and comprehensive web resource for learning about the nation’s visual culture. Angel’s vision for ACI—an ever-expanding platform that promotes Canada’s artists and redefines public access to art education—exemplifies the kind of public-facing scholarship and institutional entrepreneurship the Department values.