A group of Canadian artists is mounting a public campaign to save the proposed Portrait Gallery of Canada.
Major artists including Vera Frenkel, Arnaud Maggs and Michael Snow have drafted an e-mail letter to Canadians urging them to ask the federal government not to kill the project.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives recently launched a review of the Portrait Gallery project, which is proposed for the historic site of the former American embassy in Ottawa.
The review will delay work on the $45-million project. The gallery, first announced by former heritage minister Sheila Copps in 2001, was originally estimated to cost $22 million and the doors were to open in 2005. The tentative opening date now has been set for 2008.
The Portrait Gallery, being co-ordinated by Library and Archives Canada, has already collected more than one million drawings, paintings and photographs.
Artists are worried it will be killed by the federal government in an effort to save money.
"It's amazing to me that there would be any question about a portrait gallery," Frenkel told CBC Online.
"The way we see and record each other is so revealing and is a collective portrait of the psyche of the nation."
Gallery 'exciting and intelligent'
The letter is circulating via e-mail. Peggy Gale, Spring Hurlbut, Michael Mitchell, Gabor Szilasi and Joanne Tod are among those who have added their names.
It calls the Portrait Gallery "one of the most exciting and intelligent things to happen in Canada in many years."
It urges Canadians to contact Harper and Heritage Minister Bev Oda directly to express their support for a portrait gallery.
The Portrait Gallery "establishes and reaffirms our history. It captures our imagination. It reminds us of our past. There is nothing like portraits to do exactly that," it says.
The Beaux Arts-style embassy has already been gutted and an architect's plan to redesign it has been approved.
Ottawa has a National Gallery that showcases a range of art but no portrait gallery, similar to Britain's National Portrait Gallery, to show historic and contemporary Canadian faces.
Frenkel says the gallery would be an extraordinary draw for tourists, in the same way Britain's Portrait Gallery draws visitors.
It also would be a way of showing both Canadian history and the perceptions of Canadian artists, she said.
"You can see so much by the way an artist shoots or paints other human beings. The way we view people through portraits is a special thread in our history."
