FRIDAY NIGHT FORUM BY DAVID BALE


Starr Power


Creating a Jewish museum and cultural centre for the 21st century


You might say she’s the right person at the right place at the right time. Lori Starr stud- ied art history, is steeped in Jewish culture, views museums as educators, and was piv- otal in the development of the J.Paul Getty Center and the Skirball Cultural Centre, both in Los Angeles, Calif., and considered among North America’s premier institutions. Now she is at the helm as Toronto is about to build Canada’s most ambitious complex of Jewish culture. Starr’s emphasis has never been art for art’s sake; it’s been about bringing people together. “My first paper I wrote as a young museum educator,” she recalls, “was about the museum as a town square.” A town square is what she is helping to


create at the newly envisioned Sherman Campus, the ravine complex that formerly held the Bathurst JCC, Posluns Teatre and Koffler Gallery. Right now, it holds the Lipa Green building and new Prosserman JCC, but the rest of the huge tract of land is like an


Photography courtesy Koffler Centre of the Arts


empty palette, waiting to be filled in with an artist’s creative touch. What is the vision for the Sherman campus? It will be a unique destination. Tere is no model for this — a campus that brings to- gether so many aspects of life, including health, fitness, social services, philanthropy, human welfare, early childhood education, and Jewish learning with history, heritage, and cutting edge contemporary arts and culture. All on a magnificent natural ravine. Phase one is complete. Tat is the Lipa


Green Conference Centre at one end, with new offices for Jewish Family & Child Service and other social agencies, and the Donald Gales family pavilion. Phase two will be the rest of the campus: health and fitness facil- ity for the Prosserman JCC and a new Jewish Museum of Canada, which will house a re- envisioned Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre and include exhibits that introduce people to the Jewish people. Tere will be a


Top: Lori Starr, executive director of the Koffler Centre of the Arts and vice- president for culture, UJA Federation


terrific sit-down café, a newly re-envisioned Leah Posluns Teatre and the new Koffler Centre of the Arts with 40,000 square feet of exhibition space. What did you bring to this project that you are particularly proud of? An idea about how the heritage and history component could be re-envisioned to work synergistically with the art component. I was asked to form a process, to envision how you can take all of your assets and make them assets that the public could engage with and how the larger public could learn from it. From that process, this concept for the Jew- ish Museum of Canada emerged, the notion of being proud of what we have and creating new portals to it. Tere seems to be an increased importance placed on the Koffler. Why is that? We know from studies done in the last six years about Jewish connectivity and iden- tity that arts and culture are a very powerful


Winter 2011 friday night 11


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