A new publication by NACDI co-founders Jeffrey Brison and Lynda Jessup, titled “Canada: Art d’aujourd’hui: The Art of Diplomacy in the Wake of ‘Vive le Québec libre.’” has just been released in the Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue d'études canadiennes (2025, Volume 59, Issue 2, pp. 189–221). It is now available and can be accessed here.
Abstract: In 1967 the National Gallery of Canada mounted a major exhibition of Canadian art to circulate internationally as part of Canada’s Centennial celebrations. The project – a contemporary art show – was solicited by the Department of External Affairs (now Global Affairs Canada) in connection with the 1965 cultural agreement between Canada and France, and was scheduled to open at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris in the fall of Canada’s centennial year. Bringing together the government’s foreign policy interest in the European Francophonie with the gallery’s established investment in representing Canada at the major centres of Western art, the exhibition serves as a case study of the way in which culture and diplomacy interact in practice. As the first state-sponsored exhibition of Canadian art to come out of a cultural agreement, the exhibition stands at a highwater mark in External Affairs’ growing interest in the use of exhibitions in its information and cultural work, which had taken root in wartime and grown in the postwar period with the increasing importance of culture in international relations. The move to instrumentalize the exhibition as part of Canada’s cultural agreement with France signaled a federal government turn toward cultural approaches to foreign policy that heralded the adoption of this exhibition type to advance Canada’s international cultural relations in a domain of activity dominated to date by the gallery’s fine art interests.
“Canada: Art d’aujourd’hui” is the most recent in a series of articles that explore the history of Canada’s use of art exhibitions in advancing its foreign policy initiatives and global orientations. This article follows “Terre Sauvage: Globalizing Landscapes and the Group of Seven” and “Cold War ‘Cultural Safaris’: Canadian Art, Cultural Diplomacy, and the Asian Commonwealth Tour” (Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes, 56: 3 [2022]) and 58: 1 [2024], respectively; and Brison, Jessup, and Sarah EK Smith, “The Art of Diplomacy.” (in Jonathan Vickery, Stuart MacDonald, and Nicholas J. Cull, Understanding Cultural Diplomacy and International Cultural Relations, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025).
New article by NACDI co-founders Jeffrey Brison and Lynda Jessup examines Canada's 1967 exhibition Canada: Art d’aujourd’hui as a landmark case of art, cultural diplomacy, and foreign policy in practice.
