‘A place where you could feel culture’ says art history grad Kitty Scott of her days in Montreal

As a seasoned curator, Kitty Scott, BFA 90, knows the same object can mean different things to different viewers.

“Art doesn’t have an answer,” she says. “It has a rich openness.”

In a similar way, cities carry different meanings for each resident.

“For me, Montreal was a place where you could feel culture,” says Scott of the city where she spent her early adulthood. “It’s filled with museums and living artists. The arts community had a lot of international connections, and the rich Quebecois culture runs through it all.”

As an art history student at Concordia, Scott gained “a great foundation” in her chosen field.

Besides building a knowledge base through her classwork, she also took an entry-level job at one of Concordia’s campus galleries and started establishing a reputation for herself by writing for Montreal-based publications.

One day, the multidisciplinary creator Barbara Steinman, LLD 15, visited Concordia to talk about artist-run centres.

“That was the first time it really hit me that artists live among us,” says Scott, who subsequently started volunteering at the artist-owned exhibition space that is now called La Centrale galerie Powerhouse.

“The idea that you could involve yourself in a living artistic culture was one of the first steps towards the place where I’ve ended up.”

Other steps along Scott’s way included a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art in England, a visual-arts directorship at the Banff Centre in Alberta, a contemporary-art curatorship at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the chief curatorship at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, where she was the first woman to serve in that role.

Today, Scott is an independent curator for private clients, as well as a strategic advisor for Fogo Island Arts, a program based out of a small island of the coast of her home province of Newfoundland.

The program includes exhibitions, publications and artist residencies.

“It is a beautiful idea that people from all over the world are invited to come to Fogo Island to practice,” Scott says. “While they’re there, they learn about the deep history of a specific place and a unique community who relied on fishing to make a living.”

While on Fogo Island each visiting artist gives a public presentation, performance or workshop for the residents of the island.

Having moved between several cities herself, Scott appreciates the specific characteristics of different places and the way that art can bring them into conversation with each other.

“We can come to the same art object from different parts of the world, with different languages, perspectives and belief systems,” she explains. “And the object gives us a common ground for exchanging ideas. That’s something I first learned at Concordia, and it’s one of the reasons why I love to do this work.”

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