No museum can show everything it owns, but Montreal's Musée d'art contemporain may be especially constrained, with only enough display space for 1.5 per cent of its collection. That will change dramatically with the commitment on Friday of $37.7-million by the federal and provincial governments to a project that will double the MAC's exhibition space.
The change will mostly happen within the museum's existing building envelope at the southwest corner of the provincially owned Place des Arts, said museum director John Zeppetelli. Storage facilities in the basement will be converted to exhibition spaces, and the 8,000 works currently held there will be moved off site.
"The idea is to offer visitors an enhanced and more pleasant experience, with many more works on display," Zeppetelli said. "We'll also have a much stronger presence on the street and more educational spaces."
Physical access to the museum will be made easier with new entrances, a redesigned lobby and better connections to Place des Arts and the adjacent Place des Spectacles. "People tell me that they have difficulty finding the door at the moment," Zeppetelli said.
The MAC has been trying to expand for 15 years through a variety of projects that never came to pass. One would have seen a new museum built on the Silo No. 5 site in the Old Port of Montreal; another would have wrought a more drastic reconfiguration of the current site at double the cost of the current project.
The MAC opened in 1965 and moved to its current building in 1992. The original architect was Lamarre Pratte & Associé (now Jodoin Lamarre Pratte), co-designers of a new pavilion for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts that will open in November.
The museum and the province will spend the next year preparing for an architectural competition, Zeppetelli said, with the aim of beginning construction in the fall of 2018. Four galleries at the building's northern end will remain active during construction, with a reopening of the entire renovated building planned for the fall of 2020.
The MAC also needs to raise $7-million as its share of the total renovation budget of $44.7-million. "Our campaign starts now," Zeppetelli said.