25th Anniversary Interviews: Wendy Ingram from Canadian Art on Vimeo.
Everyone loved her. Sarah laughingly says that when she came back from having her baby, she was struck by the change in the office. No one was irritated or lurking moodily in their cubicle, which Sarah jokingly insists was the norm when she was at the helm. Instead everyone and everything was humming along happily. (As it turned out, Gillian edited the next issue as well, when Sarah left for Vancouver, and guest-edited again for the summer issue of 2000.)
For Sarah, Canadian Art’s 10th anniversary issue was more than simply marking the magazine’s survival for a decade. The magazine had just completed a readership study that showed readers’ average income as being very high. She and advertising sales manager Wendy Ingram put together a package for advertising agencies using this demographic and ad sales soared. “We used that issue as a battering ram,” Sarah says, “to get ourselves into the agencies to try to get new accounts with car and jewellery companies and all that.”
Along the way, Sarah discovered she loved selling, especially when the money that was coming in was keeping Canadian Art alive and kicking. Her biggest sales pitch, however, ended up being to Revenue Canada. Despite fairly healthy ad sales, “We were broke,” she says bluntly. “We had to try to get charitable status and create the foundation or we would not have survived.”
She insists the notion of starting the Canadian Art Foundation came from Michael de Pencier, though he in turn credits her. Whatever. Sarah definitely deserves acknowledgement for pursuing the idea right up to the moment in 1991 when she flew to Ottawa and made her pitch to Revenue Canada. “There were about four of them in the presentation, men and women. We all got sort of overwhelmed. When you’re sincere about caring about something, it’s unmistakable. I thought it would be the most horrifying waste if this opportunity that Key and Maclean Hunter had managed to sustain was going to be wasted because you knew it would be another 20 years before someone had the balls to try again. So we fought hard.”
After her presentation, one of the officials had tears in her eyes, and all of them vowed to do their best. Canadian Art was granted non-profit status soon thereafter. It was a major turning point.
As an educational, non-profit entity, the foundation was empowered to raise funds. Sarah, then publisher Debbie Gibson and the new director of development, Ann Webb, began by dreaming up the Gallery Hop, which took place in the fall of 1996. It was a money-maker from the get-go. Around 250 people attended in the first year, and these days the total is closer to 650.
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Canadian Art, winter 1999 cover, featuring Cornelius Kreighoff |
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