Major Bob Rennie donation sends 40 Rodney Graham works to National Gallery of Canada
Vancouver businessman and philanthropist gifts $22.8 million in art to the Ottawa landmark
Bob Rennie. Photo courtesy National Gallery of Canada
Rodney Graham, A Partial Overview of My Brief Modernist Career (2006–2009), 2006–09. Installation view of Rodney Graham: Collected Works at the Rennie Museum in Vancouver, 2014. Gift of the Rennie Foundation, Vancouver, 2024. © Estate of Rodney Graham. Photo by Blaine Campbell. Photo courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada
FORTY WORKS BY celebrated B.C. artist Rodney Graham are set to head to Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada, as Vancouver real-estate businessman and art collector Bob Rennie, along with The Rennie Family, has made a $22.8-million gift to the facility.
Announced yesterday, the donation spans 61 artworks, bringing Rennie and his family’s gifts to the National Gallery to more than $35 million, adding up to 260-plus artworks since 2012. The philanthropist had previously gifted the facility a $13-million donation in 2017 to mark Canada’s 150th anniversary—which was then the largest private donation to the gallery.
This donation includes four decades of Graham’s work, including major installations, lightboxes, paintings, and rare early pieces. Born in Abbotsford, Graham, who died in 2022, emerged from the 1970s’ photoconceptual movement in this city—the internationally celebrated “Vancouver School”. He explored a range of media, designing the chandelier called Torqued Chandelier Release that hangs as public art under the Granville Street Bridge.
The gift also includes three works by Chinese dissident contemporary artist Ai Weiwei; British artist Yinka Shonibare’s The American Library (La bibliothèque américaine), a full-room installation of 6,600 books celebrating the Americas’ diverse immigrant population; 10 works by British-Palestinian multimedia and installation artist Mona Hatoum; and pieces by late American visual artist Dan Graham. Hatoum created a series of videos during residencies at the Western Front in Vancouver, while Dan Graham was a creative colleague of Vancouver-based artists such as Rodney Graham and Ian Wallace.
Yinka Shonibare, The American Library (La bibliothèque américaine), 2018. Installation view of When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, 2019–2020. Donation from the Rennie Foundation, Vancouver, 2024. © Yinka Shonibare. Photo by ICA, Boston/Charles Mayer. Photo courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada
Rennie has been collecting art for more than 50 years and has put the collection together with Carey Fouks.
Rennie said he chose the National Gallery as a home for the works mainly for the level of conservation and exhibition networks it offered.
“We have always thought about custodianship, which is about making sure that artists are seen and their voices are heard beyond their life and beyond my life,” he said in the announcement yesterday. “This is foundational to the collection. The National Gallery of Canada shares our values and our intentions. Values of preservation, conservation and allowing the works to travel to museums and venues, which are not only across Canada but within the broad reach of relationships the Gallery has cultivated across the world.”
The National Gallery intends to make the collections available to museums across Canada and the world. 
Related Articles
