Many in the Niagara arts community have been voicing increasing concern this past week about Brock University’s new plans for Rodman Hall, announced April 2.

“I’m quite appalled,” says Debra Attenborough, who worked in education programs at Rodman Hall in the 1980s and 1990s and is now executive director of the Niagara Falls Art Gallery. “There doesn’t seem to be a lot of listening at the university level to the community.”

Attenborough notes that Rodman Hall has functioned as an art gallery for nearly 60 years, with a collection encompassing the likes of Henry Moore, Henri Matisse, Emily Carr, the Group of Seven, and Painters Eleven. In the 1980s and 90s, the Class A gallery hosted exhibitions on the Surrealists and other key movements.

Brock University’s new plans for Rodman Hall would see its collection moved to a suitable storage unit in the university’s School of Fine and Performing Arts, and its heritage building and grounds managed by a private company with only the “potential to include a dedicated art gallery space.” The university also promises 2,000 square feet of new gallery space in the School of Fine and Performing Arts building, and a new 7,000-square-foot creative hub downtown, but hasn’t yet detailed how that will happen or be funded.

“We believe Brock has underestimated the complexities, costs and risks of moving the public art museum function and collection to the [School of Fine Art],” says Rodman Hall Alliance member Rebecca Cann. “The end result will be the loss of the only professional art museum in St. Catharines, one of only two in Niagara.”