On the surface, Dan Donovan seems like your average Catholic priest. Polite and soft-spoken, Fr. Donovan lives in a small apartment at St. Michael’s College, where he is a popular lecturer of the Christianity and Culture course and a faithful celebrant of daily mass at St. Basil’s church.
But for over 20 years, this simple priest has lived an intriguing double life as an art aficionado. Donovan has amassed a collection of almost 150 works of contemporary religious art, and has turned several buildings on the St. Mike’s campus into his own public gallery.
This collection does more than display religious-minded artwork, however: the pieces are carefully chosen and arranged to highlight the transformative power of art and religion.
“I think of the works as signs of the human spirit,” Donovan explains, “especially as the spirit reaches out beyond the ordinary and everyday to what I think of as the Mystery which surrounds and permeates and gives depth and meaning to our lives.”
To the uninitiated, the works scattered throughout Odette and Carr Halls do not seem like parts of a thematically unified whole. In their rush to get to class, students often speed past the art without a second glance, and seemingly miss the message. But Donovan thinks otherwise.
“When students walk by the art, something is happening, even when they’re not aware of it,” he says.
In Carr Hall, a building with lots of student traffic, Donovan saw an opportunity to present powerful artwork that was less outwardly religious in tone.
“I would see students sitting on the ground, waiting for a class to begin, and staring at the blank wall. So I thought, why not put some art there?” he recalls.
The series of 15 eclectic photographs currently adorning the walls are more accessible than, say, the abstract paintings found in Odette, and students can often be seen studying them before class.
Donovan didn’t set out to become a priestly curator, but fate paints with mysterious colours. His involvement with visual art began with two Jakob Steinhardt woodcuts he purchased as souvenirs during his graduate theological studies in Germany. Donovan went on to further studies in Rome, and made repeat visits to top art museums across Europe.
“Unconsciously, I was educating myself about the history of Western art,” he remembers. These visits also helped him learn by osmosis the finer points of organizing artwork within a gallery, skills he would later put to use.
When Donovan purchased a bronze sculpture in the late 1980s to display at St. Mike’s-it still sits at its original home near Bay and St. Joseph Streets-he thought of it as a one-time donation to the college. But as so often happens, this small foray into modern religious art spawned the large project that continues today. Donovan soon became a regular at museums and galleries throughout the GTA. As his personal collection of mostly Canadian artwork began to fill his small apartment, he conceived the plan that would put the collection on display for his colleagues and students to enjoy.
By happy coincidence, the college was renovating Odette Hall-the oldest U of T building still in continuous use-in the mid-’90s, and Donovan’s contemporary collection matched the modernist interior architecture of the new hall.
“The building is a vessel for the art,” says Donovan, since the classic exterior and modern interior reflect the ageless themes expressed with contemporary sensibilities in the artwork.
The relationship between curator and college is an essential one, for without the venue for exhibition, the collection would lose its instructive raison d’être. As Donovan says, “If I couldn’t show it, I wouldn’t have collected it.”
And shown it he has, to over 4000 staff, students, alumni, artists, and guests over the past ten years. Sharing the art through guided tours is a part of the experience that Donovan has found quite gratifying.
“Real collecting involves connecting; it involves developing relationships and revealing meaning,” he says.
Jane Wilson attended a small tour with fellow St. Mike’s alumni, and came away quite impressed.
“It was a pleasure to walk through the collection and hear Fr. Donovan’s insight and passion as collector and curator. It isn’t often these days that you hear someone speak, with a combined theological, academic, and artistic view, about suffering, hope, and mystery,” Wilson says.
Fellow alum Loretta Scagnetto enjoyed the effort involved in viewing the collection.
“Usually when I go to an art gallery I wait and see if the painting will affect me in some way,” Scagnetto explains. “But with this collection I found myself wondering what I brought to the art, and taking a more active role in the viewing.”
That the collection is free for perusal all year long allows for repeat visits that aren’t often an option at pricey or foreign galleries. A companion booklet, “Through the sign, the spirit speaks,” available to visitors who tour the collection, offers additional background on the exhibit’s diverse works.
Though he enjoys leading the tours, Donovan most enjoys the many relationships he’s cultivated with dealers, other aficionados, and the artists themselves.
“Every Saturday afternoon I am assured of several great conversations,” he says of his travels to galleries and art shows, adding that the chance to “think other thoughts” is a welcome break from the academic realm.
Donovan continues his efforts at artistic outreach by sitting on the OCAD board of directors, and he routinely grants tours to students and staff from the design college, many of whom have been inspired by the collection to further pursue their own efforts in religious artwork.
Despite the outward focus of the collection, Donovan hasn’t neglected his own enjoyment of the art. His office is a richly decorated mini-trove of artistic treasures-meticulously arranged, of course-that makes it just another leg of the tour.
“I feel more at home here than I do in my apartment,” Donovan admits, adding that the art provides a “comforting presence,” not a distraction, when he’s there.
Donovan is at a loss when asked if he has a favourite work by the European masters that would look just perfect in his collection. But his silence tells of the deep attachment he has to all the works he chooses-a work parachuted into the collection wouldn’t fit with the unified whole he presents.
“This is a Canadian contemporary collection grown from personal experience,” he explains.
This spring, many viewers in Ontario will be able to tour the collection virtually-OMNI Television will broadcast a six-part miniseries profiling the collection, an idea conceived after a Rogers executive toured the exhibit. In a situation that all TV writers would envy, Donovan wrote, narrated, and set the thematic tone for each episode.
But this foray into the spotlight hasn’t turned Donovan into another Sister Wendy, the ever-popular nun who has her own miniseries on art history.
Like the famed composer J.S. Bach, who signed each of his manuscripts “Soli Deo Gloria” (to the glory of God alone), Fr. Donovan maintains his unique collection as a way to “open faith to culture, and perhaps even culture to faith.” At its heart, the collection is an expression of one man’s understanding of the divine, and our campus community is the better for having it.
Guided tours of the Donovan Collection are available on weekdays and can be arranged through Fr. Donovan at [email protected]. See utoronto.ca/stmikes for more information.
