Profile
May 2006
The Dreamer
Introducing OCAD's brilliantly loopy new president By Gerald Hannon
Image credit: Derek Shapton
When Sara Diamond was in Deer Park Public School in 1966, journalist Laurier LaPierre came to her class for This Hour Has Seven Days, asking the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up. He heard the usual range of aspiring doctors and lawyers and teachers, but 12-year-old Sara was a touch grand and a little more precise. “I would like to lead an educational institution,” she pronounced, a strangely bureaucratic wish for a young person. The wish came true, though.
Appointed last July, Diamond is the 21st president of the Ontario College of Art and Design, the country’s largest art school, alma mater to such names as Arthur Lismer, Michael Snow and Joanne Tod. It’s her good fortune to take over as the institution is shedding its reputation as the worthy but somewhat moribund dowager of McCaul Street. Granted university status in 2002, and graced in September 2004 by architect Will Alsop’s spirit-lifting, coffee-table-on-chopsticks addition, the school seems poised for flight as well. Diamond is committed to breaking through the age-old division between art and design (“I kicked off a cross-disciplinary task force the moment I landed”) and to making OCAD “a hub of diversity and excitement.” And though it would not be accurate to describe the 52-year-old Diamond as flighty (she has impeccable administrative and teaching cred, with some 14 years at the Banff Centre, a creative think-tank, and has taught in both Canada and the U.S.), she does have flash.
Unlike most artists, Sara Diamond is also good at raising moneyDiamond has invited me to a reception in her office for the first in a series of shows of work from the school. She’s wearing a blue velvet skirt, a ruched green top, an engagingly insane belt made by bad-boy artist Attila Lukacs, and black and turquoise boots that Barbie might wear if Barbie were a dominatrix. Among the attendees is her boyfriend (Tom Donaldson, a young engineer and inventor currently based in London), and since her last long-term relationship (19 years) was with a woman, she will be right at home in this city’s famously polymorphous art scene.
Born in New York, she moved to Toronto with her social worker parents when she was six, and grew up here with that “combination of good humour, irony and survivalism that New York Jews have. Also a cosmopolitanism that didn’t necessarily give us the right table manners but did give an appreciation of art and music.” As a student at SEED (one of Toronto’s alternative public secondary schools), she was immersed in “crafting our own learning experience, asking people to teach us, thinking co-operatively and teaching each other”—an approach that has stayed with her. “I can be tough when I need to be,” she says, “but I’m more interested in generosity as a strategy.”
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- Continue Diamond was also, to begin with, more interested in theatre ...
