According to Executive Director Janna Smith, County Arts was expecting a lot of people for its 40th anniversary celebration, the Hotel Confidential installation that took over the Annex Building at The Royal Hotel.

Maybe 500.

But over double that number, 1,052 in total, toured the exhibit, which started in the Barlow Room “lobby” and rose into five hotel rooms, featuring an in-house radio station and a series of curated exhibits engaging with the ideas, dreams, and realities of a functioning hotel.

It was an enormous success, at once a museum-quality aesthetic experience and a crowd pleaser.

“I spent the entire weekend onsite, and was struck by the range of people who showed up, including families with young kids, longtime residents, and newcomers from across the County,” said Ms. Smith.

“What moved me most was the sense of curiosity they brought with them. People weren’t just attending; they were eager to immerse themselves in the experience, to become part of the exhibition. You could really feel the excitement.

“The artists felt it too. Many told me how impressed they were by the community’s openness and enthusiasm. Visitors really engaged with the work, asked thoughtful questions, and embraced the conceptual ideas behind it.”

Going Forward

The number one question now is whether County Arts and The Royal will be able to do it again.

“It’s hard to imagine any other hotel in any other place just doing something like that.”

There are many moving parts, first among them what Stacey Sproule, who curated the show alongside Christina Zeidler, calls the “amazing generosity” of The Royal Hotel. “They just handed us the keys and let us do what we wanted — for four days. It was an enormous act of trust.

“It was the collaboration of a lifetime,” says the hotel’s General Manager, Sol Korngold, who accepted Ms. Sproule’s invitation to partner on the project months ago.

“Of course I said yes,” he says now, clear on the value of the project, while noting its demands in terms of both the hotel’s resources and its complexity.

 “And then it suddenly became a medley of meetings, a lot of coordination and blocking off the rooms — those were blocked off in the booking calendar months and months and months ago.”

“There’s an opportunity cost there for us. But we have a program of giving generously, and to the arts in particular.

“We think they make this the very special place that it is and we have a stake, a business stake, in creating a vibrant, flourishing culture that brings people here again and again.”

The Royal contributed staff, made pizza, poured wine, and hosted a bustling party of art goers opening night.

“The hotel was jammed all weekend. All the rooms were booked, and the party in the parlour went until 11:30 in the evening — that is 3am Toronto time,” he laughs. 

“I heard also from Luso Bites, from Russ & Co, the entire street was lit up all weekend.

“That’s what I like to hear. An event like this floats all the boats. We want to do it again and again, do more with it, expand it.”

Money Matters

Nonetheless, finding a sustainable business model is crucial. The installation’s co-curators, Ms. Zeidler and Ms. Sproule, donated their time and expertise over six jam-packed, full-time weeks to pull the event together. 

Ms. Zeidler, the force behind the revitalization of Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel in the early 2000s, and who went on to manage it for 20 years, was a guiding light behind the installation.

At the Gladstone, she staged Come Up to My Room, which invited rotating artists to transform individual hotel rooms into art installations. 

“That project just spun off into its own thing,” she says mildly. In fact, it snowballed into DesignT0, which this year will see 1000 different installations across the city.

“Like Nuit Blanche, another example of how this can work, an initial concept offers a structure for myriad different interpretations, allowing a festival to grow organically.”

Ms. Zeidler sees room for a collaborative installation across the County in April next year. This year’s success was the proof. 

“It takes so much effort, it takes a village, to create a template or a structure that represents what is possible and ways to do it. That is what this initial run was about.”

Now real fundraising must begin. Artists must be paid properly, not to mention fed, transported, and billeted. A dedicated, paid project manager is vital. A corps of volunteers is needed to run things on-site, for which Ms. Zeidler suggests the success of TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival, offers an example.

“You need to grow slowly and put supports in place, so the community is really involved from the very beginning.

“One of the best things about the show was that it was in a hotel, already at once intriguing and familiar, and it was free. People who might not be drawn by a contemporary art exhibit think, ‘what’s the risk?’ And they come, and they find they resonate with what the artists are thinking about — family heirlooms, or room keys.”

Still, free admission also exacts a price. The budget was “a shoestring.”

“We kept it intimate, to ensure the level of the exhibits was high, what I would call museum-level quality,” notes Ms. Zeidler. “We didn’t want to make it too big because we wanted to make it excellent.

“That’s an expensive proposition: high-quality, high-impact, curatorial-level care. That is the base. The scale of the ambition behind the show, that is what we wanted to put on display, because that is what, hopefully, will attract funding.”

Ms. Sproule notes County Arts received a generous, $40k grant this year from the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund (OCAF) largely on the strength of the Hotel Confidential project.

“In general, funding is always an issue with arts organizations in Ontario, and ours in particular,” she said. “Having consistent, stable funding is always a barrier to our doing the things we want to do.”

“That’s the thing with art,” says Ms. Zeidler. “Everyone wants it, everyone knows how valuable it is, but nobody wants to pay for it. 

“Everyone walked away thrilled, everyone wants to do it again, but we need to be realistic about what something like this costs.”  

Interested in helping County Arts fund a second iteration of Hotel Confidential? Contact Janna Smith: [email protected]