Peter Herrndorf is an arts turn-around artist. His latest triumph is revitalizing Ottawa’s national Arts Center. And he didn’t do it by playing safe. “The trouble was that as money got tighter through the nineties, people [within the NAC] became risk-averse, and this is an organization where you want the sensibility to be exactly the opposite. We’re going through a fascinating experiment. We’re trying to take an organization and say it will play an important national role, not in rhetorical terms, but in its ability to support arts organizations in different regions and to build communities and have this organization raise funding across the country.”