Alumni Award winner David Liss makes waves here and abroad

robert winters

David Liss’s relentless energy is leaving an increasingly deep imprint as he helps define how our country’s culture is seen abroad.

Liss, a graduate of Concordia’s undergraduate Fine Arts program, is the high-voltage director of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), a pillar of the edgy art scene emerging on Toronto’s Queen St. West.

In a presentation before a Concordia Alumni Association event at MOCCA in November, Liss said, “Art remains the last refuge for a truly liberated imagination and spirit. This implies a responsibility for art that is quite daunting and vast, particularly in this globalized era of information and communication.”

At the event, jointly organized by the Fine Arts alumni chapter and the Toronto chapter, Liss was given an Artistic Achievement Award for his role in developing awareness of Canadian art.

He has just returned from Madrid, where he coordinated Canada’s participation in the ARCO 06 art fair. The Canadian embassy “was quite excited by the impact we had,” he said in a recent interview.

His role at ARCO included speaking at a symposium and curating a project with six artists represented by three Canadian galleries. It included work by high-profile Concordia MFA graduate Alexandre Castonguay, represented by Pierre-François Ouellette’s Montreal gallery.

Besides Spain, Liss and MOCCA have organized art projects in recent years in China, the United States, France, Germany, Italy and Taiwan. Liss also likes to bring international artists to Canada to do their work here.

Since 1995 he has organized, produced and/or curated more than 100 solo and group exhibitions of contemporary Canadian and international art, in addition to overseeing related publications, educational programs and special events.

Concordia art instructor Holly King, who has work in MOCCA’s current exhibition of art from its permanent collection, describes Liss as having “a vivid imagination and the energy to pursue his sometimes unusual directions in curating.”

Liss credits what he learned at Concordia for his success, especially his apprenticeship with Sandra Paikowsky, who w as director of the Concordia Art Gallery, forerunner of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery. “What I learned at Concordia from Sandra, followed by Ellen Gallery Director Karen Antaki, really set the stage for my art career,” Liss said.

In 1995, he moved on to the gallery of the Saidye Bronfman Centre, where he showed an entire generation of Montreal artists whose work was being ignored by the larger institutions.

While at the Saidye, Liss organized two major shows in unused downtown Montreal retail spaces, called Artifice, in 1996 and 1998. Some of the artists highlighted by the Artifice shows, in such high-traffic areas as Ste. Catherine St., Les Cours Mont-Royal and Peel St., saw their careers take off.

When Liss looks into the future, he sees a great potential for MOCCA, including, a new building for the gallery by the time the current lease expires in 10 years.

However, much of the money he raises goes towards art and artists — because it’s art that changes things, not bricks and mortar.