Seeds Gallery—a non-profit commercial gallery that shows and sells art by Nova Scotia College of Arts and Design students and alumni—has been given a year to blossom into a self-sustaining flower, or be weed whacked.
“We’ve been told that we need to break even. That means we need to double our sales in a year, which for any young business is virtually impossible,” says Natalie Boterman, who has been the gallery’s manager since 2011. “In my mind, we’re being set up to fail.”
Seeds opened in 2007 after more than a decade as an independent, student-operated summer pop-up shop. After the students’ union’s initial founding, the university partnered to help out, covering deficits and rent. The non-profit gallery offers 60 percent of artwork sales to the artist, with the other 40 going to operating costs. “Seeds really is the face of NSCAD—of what an art community is producing here in Nova Scotia,” she says.
Derrick Dixon, a fourth-year NSCAD student working part-time in the gallery, thinks the gallery has put hundreds of thousands of dollars in the pockets of the school’s students, and teaches skills that are only optional in the curriculum.
“You learn about speaking about your artwork, you learn about preparing your artwork to be sold,” he says. “It’s a great opportunity.”
But Boterman says she got a call two weeks ago from NSCAD’s vice-president of finance and administration, Sharon Johnson-Legere, saying the school would no longer cover the gallery’s deficits.
Since opening, Seeds has never broken even, but the news comes just one year after the university asked Seeds to move from behind the Anna Leonowens Gallery on the Duke Street campus to Marginal Road. Boterman says that move was an autonomous decision on the part of the university’s administration, despite protests from the gallery employees, its advisory board, and a lengthy report by St. Mary’s University business students.
“It has been moved here against everyone’s better judgment,” she says. “Seeds, now, is really out of the way.” While she’s seen higher traffic, she’s seen worse sales, she says, and suggests that while the move was justified as a way to tap into the cruise ship market, that isn’t the gallery’s main demographic.
“People on those ships are usually buying tickets at extreme discounts,” she says. “They’re not going to come in here and buy $700 paintings; they want things that are knick-knacky.”
Boterman says formal numbers aren’t available for their still-incomplete fiscal year, and the Marginal Road gallery has only been open for a year. However, she says despite going over their budget’s proposed sales of $60,000, they’re looking at a deficit of $60,000, because their rent was covered when Seeds operated on NSCAD’s Granville campus. With NSCAD’s continued support, Boterman says that would “very easily” become self-sustaining in “a few years.”
“It takes about five to ten years for businesses to break even,” she adds.
This decision comes on the heels of a report by Howard Windsor, commissioned as a condition by the province in exchange for $2.4 million to cover its deficit for the year. According to the report, NSCAD loses more than 10 per cent of its annual budget every year, and owes about $19 million overall. The report also asks the university to “initiate a review of its programs and curriculum and a space utilization study of the three NSCAD sites.”
Johnson-Legere was unavailable for comment, but Marilyn Smulders, the school’s director of communications, says this decision is not final and is merely in the proposal and examination stage. “We’re working towards creating a sustainability plan to present to the government by Mar. 31—we have to get rid of this deficit,” she says. “Everything is being examined, including Seeds Gallery.”
“Things like [Seeds] are being looked at because it’s not core programming, and we have to protect the quality of programs at NSCAD...that’s the priority.”
Boterman understands the university faces difficult financial prospects—“Everyone seems to be, like, ‘really, this is another thing that’s happening?’“—but she simply wants to have a real shot at making the gallery that carries the school’s name on its door sustainable, without the ultimatum. “The support has to come from the administration,” she says. “If we can come up with a plan and say it’ll be sustainable in this time, we can do that. We just need to be given the opportunity to prove that.”
And while Dixon hopes the administration changes its mind as well—“I don’t think they’re really looking at where they need to be looking to trim the fat,” he says—he also hopes students, faculty and alumni all show their support, too. “It’s not just the administration’s responsibility to show everybody what a special place it is,” he says. “Any kind of support the gallery can get is wonderful.”
