The National Gallery of Canada (NGC) in Ottawa has received a gift of 24 contemporary artworks from Bob Rennie, one of the country’s leading art collectors, and his family.
The donated works include 17 works by Christopher Williams, two works by Kerry James Marshall, four by Brian Jungen, and one by Jin-me Yoon. With this gift, the Rennie family has now given the museum 284 works since 2012.
“This gift follows one of the core missions of the collection,” Bob Rennie, who has appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list each year since 2015, said in a statement. “Any work leaving the Rennie Collection must go to a better home and with a better custodian than ours.”
NGC director and CEO Jean-François Bélisle called the donation “a landmark and deeply inspiring gift” in a statement, adding that “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 works entrusted to us today are powerful, ambitious, and define our time.”
The works by Williams are the first ones by the artist to enter the NGC’s collection, and they range from photographs to large-scale installations. The Yoon work is entitled Souvenirs of the Self (1991–2001) and consists of “six postcard-style photographs in which Yoon poses at iconic tourist sites in Banff, Alberta, a national park and popular tourist resort,” per a release.
The Jungen works include a 2001 example from his acclaimed “Prototypes” series, in which the artist fashions Nike Air Jordan sneakers to resemble masks from the Indigenous cultures of the Northwest Coast of Canada, as well as Michael (2003), an assemblage made from Air Jordan shoe boxes.
Kerry James Marshall, Wake, 2003–25, installation view, “Kerry James Marshall: Collected Works,” 2018, Rennie Museum, Vancouver.
Photo Blaine Campbell/©Kerry James Marshall/Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York/National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift of the Rennie Foundation, Vancouver, 2025
One of the Marshall works is the installation Wake (2003–25), which is currently on view at the artist’s traveling survey at the Kunsthaus Zurich that debuted at the Royal Academy in London last fall. The work depicts a black-painted sailboat that has been adorned with medallions of descendants of the first Africans brought to colony of Jamestown in 1619, including a self-portrait of Marshall.
In his statement, Rennie added, “I would like to remind us all that the two works by Kerry James Marshall document an important period in history and a narrative that must not be forgotten. These are voices that must be preserved for future generations. They show us when the seeds of slavery were planted, bearing the fruit of the racism that continues to this day.”
