OTTAWA (CBC) - One month after federal funding to support touring art exhibitions ended, a group of patrons of the National Gallery of Canada have donated $650,000 toward a touring fund for the Ottawa gallery.

Part of the donation also will go toward buying Running Horses, a sculpture by Saskatchewan's Joe Fafard for the gallery's permanent collection.

In 2007, the federal Conservatives announced it would cut its transportation assistance service that supported travelling exhibits. The funding ended March 31.

The gallery has created the On Tour Endowment Fund with the donation to help support travelling shows.

The National Gallery, home to an important collection of historical and contemporary art, organizes and participates in many cross-Canada tours of art.

The announcement of the purchase of Running Horses coincides with the final weekend of the show Joe Fafard at the NGC, a show that will continue touring for the next 18 months.

Running Horses is a laser-cut steel and bronze sculpture of horses running in the wind.

"This is the latest piece in the show and I just finished it just two weeks before the show opened," Fafard told CBC News.

"It was a piece I had begun eight years earlier. I developed it in a certain direction at that time and then abandoned it. I decided to redo the piece for myself so that I could lend it to the show. When I started it, I saw a whole new change that I didn't expect and I just followed that change."

Fafard said his new creative impulse was to add a variety of colours to the work and have each horse seem to be in a different stage of movement.

"That becomes the action of dappled light on the horses and the horses are in different states - one is galloping the others are trotting. The whole effect is one of total movement," he said.

Fafard said he was pleased the gallery had added Running Horses to its collection.

"For me it's like finding a really good home for one of my children. I'm really happy about that," he said.

"This piece in particular, because it's so huge, it's almost like is a piece that an institution can look after and care for and put it in the public domain."

Two of the donors are anonymous and the others are:

- Michael Audain and Yoshiko Karasawa of Vancouver.

- Laurent and Claire Beaudoin of Montreal.

- Dominic and Pearl D'Alessandro of Toronto.

- Thomas and Susan d'Aquino of Ottawa.

- André and France Desmarais of Montreal.

- N. Murray and Heather Edwards of Calgary.

- Fred and Elizabeth Fountain of Halifax.

- Hartley and Heather Richardson of Winnipeg.

- Nancy Richardson of Ottawa.

- Donald and Beth Sobey of Stellarton, N.S.

- William and Jean Teron of Ottawa.

The Fafard show has had 36,000 visitors since it opened in Ottawa and also was one of the most popular shows ever at the MacKenzie Gallery in Regina.

It will tour to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

With files from Kate Porter

LIKE IT?  LET OTHERS KNOW