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Toronto Board of Ed’s Secret Art Stash

Way back at Malvern Collegiate on Remembrance Day, 1948, long before I was a student there making misguided fashion choices and using too much hair gel, there was a gala concert in the auditorium to dedicate its new World War II memorial.

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As part of the ceremony, an organ was donated to the school, and performing on it that night was a 16 year-old musical prodigy, a student named Glenn Gould.

At some point after he departed to pursue a bigger stage, the organ vanished. Nobody knows what happened to it and nobody knows how long it was missing before someone noticed, but the best theory is that it fell into disrepair and was carted away for scrap during one of the school’s renovations in the 1960s.

I heard this story from my English teacher, Mr. Wood, who had trudged through the school’s vault to show faded and near-forgotten school memorabilia to succeeding generations of indifferent, smarmy kids, all of whom were no doubt wondering, like I did, “What exactly does this have to do with the book we’re reading?”

I was wondering again about that connection was when I joined the media tour of the Toronto District School Board’s collection of art and artifacts on Thursday at a location they prefer I didn’t mention.

The TDSB gets it that students connect to their world through the tangible legacies of another era. But, in truth, the board might have forgotten its own treasures were it not for the damaging of Franklin Carmichael’s painting, Cranberry Lake, in a 2004 flood at Lawrence Park Collegiate.

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That event was the impetus for the Board’s renewed interest in properly preserving its own collection. Conservators have restored Cranberry Lake now, and still looks pretty good. This critic, for one, would have never even noticed.

There are about 7,000 works of art and over a million artifacts in the TDSB trust. Some of these can be found at schools across the city, but the bulk of them are stored at one facility, the location of which the TDSB has made us keep under wraps for security reasons.

One storage room has a pair of early Commodore computers that appear even more obsolete than the ancient typewriters beside them. There are thousands of objects here, including decommissioned trophies, school furniture and shelves of paintings stacked sideways like books.

At the very back of the room, there’s another door to a smaller room. This is where 155 pieces of the really valuable (the most expensive) art is kept. This is the $7 million room where the Group of Sevens, the Emily Carrs and the Norval Morrisseau are kept hanging on sliding metal racks. They’re well loved here in the sanctum, even if only a rare few have seen them lately. There’s no real conservation budget to maintain and restore them as well as their keepers would like.

And the art is not for sale, despite some calls to sell the more valuable works to help fund new textbooks and the re-sodding of football fields.

That was the big announcement yesterday. The collection will stay in the TDSB’s hands for educational purposes.

“We’re constantly trying to figure out how all this art, all of these artifacts, relate to the students’ experience at TDSB,” said archivist Greg McKinnon as media were trotted through the storage space.

“Learning Though Objects,” a report on how the art can benefit students, teachers and the wider community has been circulated among trustees and school board staff.

Ultimately, the collection belongs to the students. Its real value lies precisely in this fact. Along with all the artifacts, it represents the collective memory of the people who grew up in this city and who came through its schools.

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“This collection has grown by what was donated to us for the most part,” said McKinnon. Autumn Scene, the Tom Thomson painting estimated to be worth $1.5 million dollars was originally bought for $25. It hung for years in the principal’s office at Riverdale Collegiate.

“It’s not just the Group of Seven and the Tom Thomson. We’re using those as leverage to build on the 7,000 pieces,” explained McKinnon as he trotted us through the collection. And sure enough we wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for the big-ticket items.

Yes, the TDSB could have chosen to hand some pieces over to the AGO or the McMichael. The argument goes that at least this way, the broader public could enjoy it. But, it would likely be integrated into a larger collection, and have its connection to Toronto schools diluted, save for perhaps a “donated by the TDSB” label.

There were no big-time paintings for Mr. Wood to dig up at Malvern, but those wouldn’t have particularly excited us either (unless we were told their value at auction), but his message was simple: that memory is something more than just a tool for getting good marks on tests. In bureaucratese, this would be called an “objects-based approach” to learning.

Oh yeah, then there’s Malvern’s other war memorial that does still exist, the First World War cenotaph out front (also a donation), which has made headlines in Toronto of late.

The statue’s arm was damaged and had to be amputated when it was moved during another school renovation in 1986. The arm still exists, waiting to be reattached. There’s never been money in the budget to fix it, but thankfully it’s made of granite and will still surely outlast the Toronto Sun’s indignance over the statue’s current condition.

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