A staple at galas and parties in this town, like any metropolis — one that first started with Hollywood premieres and awards season red carpets and then got cannibalized by the larger social circuit in the 1990s and early 2000s — it has remained generally unchanged: a carpet (sometimes only symbolically red), a “logo wall” (a backdrop name-checking sponsors of an event) and people posing stiffly, sometimes even like lambs to the slaughter.
Which is exactly what made the arrivals at an opening recently at the Bata Shoe Museum seem so very striking: remixing the “step and repeat,” the PR company DMPublic created what it calls a “tunnel walk,” leading into a super buzzy party to mark a new exhibition dubbed “Art/Wear: Sneakers x Artists.” Cool, young celebrants captured in motion in the back of the venerable museum — in effect, turning the guests themselves into performance art.
“The intersection of fashion and sneakers. And movement!” That is how Deanne Moser, the brains behind the PR shop, summed up the concept when coffeeing with me the other day at L’Espresso, near the Bata.
And just one example of what makes Moser such an indispensable part of almost anything that has to do with the art world in Toronto these days. Though she’s been at it for a while — founded her company almost a decade ago — her profile, I find, has never been bigger. Working with any number of institutions and galleries and artists, her fingerprints are all over: from the Art Gallery of Ontario to Luminato to the Toronto Biennale, from Edward Burtynsky to MOCA to Yorkville Murals. Having carved out a niche, a lane, she’s the go-to for anything in the visual space and even as we spoke, she was gearing up to work the opening night brouhaha, this week, of the tent-pole fair Art Toronto.
“Get Deanne!”: the call heard through arty corridors. Her dancing eyes and girlish blond enthusiasm, a constant, too, on the scene — whether it be the CAFAs, the annual fashion awards held last weekend at the Fairmont Royal York, or the opening of Nobu some weeks prior.
Not so shabby for a girl who was born on a farm in Alberta and whose parents literally met at a rodeo (“it was some ‘Yellowstone’ kind of s—t,” she laughs). Who was a theatre nut when younger, but actually studied science at university, but earned a degree in globe-trotting by working as an airline attendant around then (making good use of her passes during that spell, it was a “let’s go to Paris for dinner!” phase in her life).
A job at L’Oreal got her into the PR game, which later led to an internship with Robin Kay (the one-time queen of all things Fashion Week in T.O.), which eventually led to a gig with Kim Newport-Mimran and her brand Pink Tartan.
Recalling that later experience, she shares: “If I had to pinpoint a moment, I would say it was Joe and Kim’s collection. They were the first people I knew who collected art.” An awakening, indeed, as she studied the way the fashion power couple referenced art in fashion, and Moser began connecting the dots in the way art is employed as part of a bigger visual language. Collecting herself, too!
A year spent working in Manhattan for another fashion brand further broadened her outlook, as did some time working in the marketing trenches in the agency world. Though the later experience was valuable, learning the business of things, she was ready to give it up by 2015. “I can’t do Febreze anymore!” she remembers thinking at the time.
Feeling aimless, she took a menial job that would prove to be fateful (like life so often is): working as a waitress at the Drake one summer, she met a big-time art collector, who started introducing her to artists. Eureka! Slowly, she realized she could bridge her worlds. “Because so few know the art language, and I already knew the marketing language, I thought: ‘I can do this!’”
Going on to explain her role as a kind of art-world whisperer, Moser explains: “It’s about the network. I can put buyers into a room. I can put curators, city people, funders, the influencers. The entire ecosystem.”
Whether it is through honing brand sponsorships or doing media outreach, old and new — or just crafting a “tunnel walk” — she adds, “I want to promote Canadian contemporary art to the world so they understand what Canada is. That it’s not just Group of Seven.
“It’s about,” she says, “connecting the dots.”
“Art/Wear: Sneakers x Artists” is at the Bata Shoe Museum, 327 Bloor St. W., until March 23, 2026. See batashoemuseum.ca for tickets.
