The National Gallery of Canada (NGC) in Ottawa revealed on Wednesday (11 March) that it has received a donation of 24 contemporary works from the Vancouver real-estate developer and philanthropist Bob Rennie and his family. The donated works are by four artists: Kerry James Marshall and Christopher Williams from the US, and Brian Jungen and Jin-me Yoon from Canada.
“Any work leaving the Rennie Collection must go to a better home and with a better custodian than ours,” Rennie said of this latest gift in a statement. This brings to 284 the number of works donated by the Rennie family to the NGC since 2012, when Rennie gave the gallery Jungen’s work Court (2004), an installation of sewing tables that form a basketball court.
Kerry James Marshall, Wake, 2003-25. Gift of the Rennie Foundation, Vancouver, 2025. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Installation view, Kerry James Marshall: Collected Works, Rennie Museum, Vancouver, 2018. © Kerry James Marshall, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Blaine Campbell
“Bob Rennie’s clarity of vision and long-standing commitment to artists at pivotal moments in their careers have helped shape one of the most significant collections of contemporary art in Canada,” the NGC’s director and chief executive, Jean-François Bélisle, said in a statement. “Canadians across the country will encounter these works, reflect on them, and see themselves and the world anew through them.”
The gifted works include two by Marshall—one of the most critically acclaimed American artists of his generation—including the installation Wake (2003-25), which focuses on the transatlantic trade of enslaved peoples. It features a black model sailboat decorated with medallions of the descendants of the first Africans brought to Jamestown in August 1619.
Christopher Williams, Supplement '13 (Mixed Typologies) #1, 2013. Gift of the Rennie Foundation, Vancouver, 2025. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © Christopher Williams. Photo: David Kühne / Courtesy David Zwirner and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
The 17 donated works by the photo-conceptualist Williams are the first to enter the NGC’s collection. They range from individual photographs to large-scale photographic installations that touch on the transformative nature of consumer culture.
Yoon, the recipient of the 2025 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts—one of Canada’s most prestigious prizes for contemporary art—is represented in the donation by his piece Souvenirs of the Self (1991-2001), which is made up of postcard-like photographs of the artist posing at tourist sites in the Banff National Park in Alberta.
Jin-me Yoon, Souvenirs of the Self (detail), 1991-2001. Gift of the Rennie Foundation, Vancouver, 2025. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Installation view, The 2025 Governor General's in Visual and Media Arts Awards Exhibition, presented and supported by Canada Council for the Arts, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Mackenzie Art Gallery, 2025. © Jin-me Yoon. Photo: Carey Shaw, Courtesy the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina
The donation includes four works by Jungen, who is known for his works that meld Indigenous traditions and processes with contemporary consumer goods. One of them, Prototype for New Understanding #10 (2001), consists of Nike Air Jordan sneakers fashioned into a sculpture resembling traditional Northwest Coast Indigenous masks. The donated work Michael (2003), meanwhile, makes use of Air Jordan shoe boxes.
This week’s donation of 24 works follows another impactful gift Rennie made to the gallery in 2017, which involved works by Jungen as well as the Vancouver artists Ian Wallace, Rodney Graham, Damien Moppet and Geoffrey Farmer. That donation, said to be worth C$12m ($8.8m), was described by the NGC’s director at the time, Marc Mayer, as “by volume and value, the largest single gift of contemporary art in the history of the gallery”.
