Woman of the Week: Jennifer Winsor

by Sara Mahmood

After earning an MBA at McGill University and a 10-year career in business, Jennifer Winsor needed a change.

“I was challenged but not excited by what I was doing,” she recalls.

When she moved to Vancouver from London, she realized the market in the Canadian city was completely different from that in England. She had two ideas: either she would start a specialty bookshop selling rare first editions or she would start an art gallery.

Her future career made itself clear to Winsor on a trip to Saigon. Winsor immersed herself in the galleries there, stunned by the beautiful artwork and ended up purchasing 15 paintings to bring back home with her. Back in Vancouver, she transformed her apartment into an art gallery for the weekend and sold all of the paintings. She decided she wanted to try managing a real art gallery and 7 months later the Winsor Gallery opened its doors.

It’s a pretty big risk to open an art gallery, but thanks to Winsor’s background in business, she knew how to handle things. She knew what was required to start and maintain a viable business: having a clear understanding of a balance sheet, taking a very conservative approach to growth, and being able to converse with her banker. All these skills helped out with starting the gallery and expanding it over the last few years during the recession.

Despite all her experience in business, Winsor couldn’t have anticipated how much she would come to rely on networking.

“The thing about an art gallery, it’s a bit like running a record label in the ‘70s, you need to have several artists on board for others to join,” Winsor says.

Turning business connections into featured artists depends heavily on timing. Since she started the gallery, Winsor has wanted to represent a group of artists called the Young Romantics who were introduced in the 1985 Vancouver Art Gallery group show. She has now managed to get 3 of those artists on board: Angela Grossman, Charles Rea, and Attila Richard Lukacs. Winsor was able to become friendly with the artists over the years and eventually, when they were unrepresented, she managed to get them to be a part of the Winsor Gallery. Both Grossman and Lukacs have been pretty quiet recently – especially Lukacs, who has been out of the public eye for about 10 years – so Winsor is extremely excited to have these Young Romantics be a part of her gallery.

Working in the art industry also requires a lot of travelling and as Winsor says, “It’s one of those careers that you could work 24 hours a day.” Although the art industry is a male-dominated field, being a woman and having to take care of her daughters hasn’t prevented Winsor from becoming a successful art gallery owner or establishing connections in the art world.

Winsor’s love of art goes beyond selling pieces; she also gives back to the art community through the Winsor Gallery Award. Each year a master’s student at both Emily Carr University and Concordia University receive a bursary to help them finish their final year of school. On occasion, the Winsor Gallery ends up representing the winners as well, as was the case for Vitaly Medvedovsky, who won the award in 2009 and is currently featured in the gallery.

Winsor’s main goal right now is to increase the international footprint of her artists. That means featuring them in art fairs, forming alliances with art galleries in other cities and countries and – you guessed it – even more networking.