Under the Leadership of Executive Director Jennifer Matotek, Art Windsor-Essex is Headed in the Right Direction
Story by Matthew St. Amand
Photography by Heike Delmore
During the increasingly fraught year of 2020, the Art Gallery of Windsor board determined that after seventy-seven years, various location changes, and a new name fifty years earlier, the gallery, once again, needed a new direction. The board sought a bold leader with the vision to reimagine the gallery’s role in the lives of the people of Essex County.
They found that leader in Jennifer Matotek.
“When the position in Windsor came up, I was working in a public library in Regina, Saskatchewan as the director of the art gallery, director of the film theater they had there, as well as managing the art collection,” Jennifer explains. “After seven years in Saskatchewan, I was eager to return to Ontario.”
She continues: “The AGW was looking for new leadership to engage the public in a different way.
I knew how to present films and art, and how to bring together people from all ages and backgrounds. The board saw the benefit of my background coming from the public library, bringing audiences in, and they felt I could be of help in Windsor.”
Jennifer is no stranger to a challenge. A life in the arts can be very satisfying, but it is never easy.
“I grew up in Grimsby, Ontario,” she says. “My parents are retired teachers and they instilled in me a desire to go wherever my curiosity took me. That gave me a lot of confidence.”
After graduating high school, Jennifer continued her education studying art.
“Many parents, when their kids come to them and say: ‘I want to study art,’ often respond: ‘How will you make money?’ It’s a fair question, but my parents did not ask me that. They knew I would be OK. I studied something I felt very passionate about.”
After discovering the surreal work of Spanish artist, Salvador Dali, while in high school, Jennifer knew what she wanted to do with her life—or, at least, the direction she wanted to go.
“I attended Sheridan College and the University of Toronto in a joint program: Art and Art History,” she says. “At Sheridan, I worked in a studio creating art, and did the academic courses at U of T, learning the art history side.”
After receiving her degree, Jennifer became a video artist.
“I was, essentially, making YouTube videos before YouTube existed,” she says. “I didn’t realize it in the moment, but in creating my work I was acting as a curator, using found images, found sound, taking works of art and putting them together to present a narrative. The transition from making
art to putting art in a space wasn’t a huge leap.”
Her work has been screened in galleries across Canada, including the Art Gallery of Windsor.
During these years, Jennifer worked at Oakville Galleries, in Oakville, as an attendant as well as doing marketing and communications.
“It was there that I realized ‘This is what I love to do,’” she says, “presenting, helping other artists. It’s the job of the museum to connect the artist with the community.”
After working in museums in and around Toronto for fifteen years, a position at the Dunlop Art Gallery and RPL Film Theatre in Regina opened.
“I asked my husband: ‘Are we tired of Toronto?’” Jennifer recalls with a laugh. “And went to Regina for seven years.”
Upon arriving in Windsor in April 2020, one of the first initiatives Jennifer undertook was updating the AGW’s brand. “The Art Gallery of Windsor” had been its moniker since 1969.
“The board did a strategic plan and decided a central goal was moving into the Twenty-first century,” Jennifer recalls, “bringing in different audiences. They just knew, the gallery had to change.”
Jennifer and the brand subcommittee worked with an agency on the gallery’s rebrand in the second year of their strategic plan. Several options were presented and the brand subcommittee chose “Art Windsor-Essex,” which gave it the multi-meaning acronym “AWE.”
“Changing the gallery’s name was a natural response,” Jennifer says. “AWE encompasses the people we serve, from all across the region, even from Detroit. Broadening the name to include Essex encompasses more people, more locales.”
Another initiative Jennifer spearheaded was called “Look Again!” which brought art from the gallery’s collection out into the community—literally. This was a provincially funded program that placed more than fifty weatherproof life-sized reproductions of works from AWE’s collection around Windsor and in downtown Amherstburg.
Jennifer was quoted at the time in local media, saying: “The response has just been so overwhelmingly positive.”
She has also worked on shifting the gallery’s focus from a historical perspective on its art collection, to a more contemporary lens on the gallery’s work.
“We want to be more relevant to people’s lives in the present moment,” Jennifer says. “There is something accessible about art that is made in the time in which you’ve lived. The rebrand has breathed life into our work. We also brought in new furniture, painted our spaces different colours, making sure we’re using every inch of our footprint in the building.”
The changes have been noticed. Galeries Ontario / Ontario Galleries, an essential arts service organization for public art galleries in Ontario, gives awards to the best art exhibitions across the province, each year in categories such as Exhibition of the Year Budget over $50,000, Exhibition of the Year Budget under $10,000 and Innovation in a Collection-Based Exhibition, among others. In the past two years, AWE has been the most-nominated gallery in Ontario.
Moving forward, Jennifer says a new goal for AWE is being apart of the ongoing efforts to improve the city’s core. One way in which AWE will contribute is through its first Night Light festival, which will take over downtown Windsor from September 18 to 20 with two interactive public art installations.
“The goal is really to transform how people see downtown Windsor,” Jennifer recently said to local media. “We’re going to have a number of art activations inside and outside the gallery in different places downtown, and we’re really excited to create this inaugural festival as a way to be a magnet.”
The event is supported by more than $200,000 in funding from the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority.
And recently, Jennifer has accepted a five-year extension on her contract as Executive Director of Art Windsor-Essex.
Reflecting on the gallery’s accomplishments over the past five years, and looking ahead to the next five years, Jennifer shares a favourite quote from Yoko Ono: “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.”
“I think it underscores nicely the work we are doing at AWE,” Jennifer says.
To learn more about AWE, visit them online at www.agw.ca, or in person at Art Windsor-Essex, 401 Riverside Drive West, Windsor.
Published in the Summer 2025 Edition.
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