On February 21, several notable Vancouver artists, gallery owners, directors, and collectors flocked to New York City's Museum of Modern Art for the opening of a retrospective of the work of Vancouver artist Jeff Wall, which features 40 photographic pieces spanning three decades. On view through May 14, the exhibition will later travel to the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The Vancouver contingent on hand to congratulate Wall included Vancouver Art Gallery director Kathleen Bartels and associate director Paul Larocque; Contemporary Art Society of Vancouver president Jane Irwin; Vancouver artists Henry Mah, Evan Lee, George Vergette, Adam Harrison, and Scott McFarland; and collectors Laing and Kathleen Brown.

Wall has been the darling of the New York media for the past three weeks. Roberta Smith of the New York Times called his work “fascinating to the point of transfixion”, and a feature by Arthur Lubow in the Times' Sunday magazine lauded his career while following him through winter shoots in Vancouver.

The CAS's Irwin sees the MoMA retrospective as a steppingstone for Vancouver as a whole. “The high level of intellectual rigour at the core of many Vancouver artists' work is the legacy of Jeff Wall and his colleagues,” she told the Straight by e-mail . “I imagine curators and collectors from all over the world will pay even closer attention to what is happening in Vancouver because of this exhibition.”

Curated by Peter Galassi (chief curator of photography at MoMA) and Neil Benezra (director of SFMoMA), the exhibition begins with Wall's first work, The Destroyed Room , and from there carries viewers through gritty Vancouver streets and elaborate, studio-fabricated visions. Five photographs in this exhibition are being shown for the first time in North America, including In Front of a Nightclub , oddly recognizable as the exterior of Granville Street's Stone Temple Nightclub, yet entirely re-created in studio, right down to the pieces of gum stuck to the sidewalk.

Two days after the packed MoMA preview, art-world luminaries were once again drawn to see Wall's visually intoxicating pictures, this time at the Marian Goodman Gallery, where a commercial exhibition is running concurrently with MoMA's. Here, the international crowd mingled in a more intimate space, White Cube gallery owner Jay Jopling and former Hollywood heavyweight Michael Ovitz rubbing elbows with Vancouver designer Martha Sturdy and Canadian dealer and gallery owner Monte Clark.