Calgary First Impressions

Artist’s rendering of the new Remai Art Gallery of Saskatchewan. IMAGE: KPMB ARCHITECTS

The development of the new Remai Art Gallery of Saskatchewan (currently called the Mendel Art Gallery) in Saskatoon got an enormous boost in early June with the announcement of a $30-million grant from the Frank and Ellen Remai Foundation. It’s thought to be the largest philanthropic gift in the city’s history.

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The Sooke Art Show, Sooke, British Columbia, takes over the local arena.

— Richard White

Every summer for the past 25 years, Sooke, B.C., just west of Victoria along the West Coast Highway, transforms its hockey arena into an art gallery and bistro. The juried Sooke Fine Arts Show attracts almost 10,000 visitors,...

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Reece Terris, Ought Apartment, installation (detail), 2008 – 2009. Terris is a winner of a 2011 VIVA Award.

A project called Migrating Landscapes will bring together young Canadian architects and designers to create the exhibition infrastructure — based on the idea of an abstract landscape — for the Canada Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennale in Architecture. A collaboration of the Winnipeg Art Gallery and Winnipeg’s 5468796 Architecture, the project will bring together ideas of cultural memory and the Canadian landscape. Invited architects will each provide a dwelling for the invented landscape, building on the idea of settlement and migration, and how they’ve affected the state of Canada’s physical, social, and cultural environment. Contributors were chosen through a national competition this past summer, and models for the project will be on view in the spring of 2012 at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Rodney Graham, Artist Model Posing for The Old Bugler, Among the Fallen, Battle of Beaune-Roland, 1870 in the Studio of an Unknown Military Painter, Paris 1885, photograph, 2009. Graham was awarded the 2011 Audain Prize.

Conceptual photo-based artist Rodney Graham was awarded the 2011 Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts by the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts. He joined artists Althea Thauberger and Reece Terris, winners of this year’s VIVA Awards, given by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation, in a co-presentation in early May. Graham’s work is in the permanent collection of the VAG, and he was the subject of a solo show, Rodney Graham: A Little Thought, in 2005. His work is also in the collections of galleries including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Centre Georges Pompidou. Terris’ monumental installation, Ought Apartment, took over the main lobby space of the VAG in 2009, and Thauberger’s work in photography, video, and performance focuses on how identities are formed in relation to popular culture. The VIVA Awards are given annually to mid-career artists, as chosen by a jury panel.

Sarah Anne Johnson, Cheerleading Pyramid, C-print, acrylic inks, 2011.

Western artists Sarah Anne Johnson and Charles Stankievech have made it onto the shortlist for the 2011 Sobey Art Award, one of Canada’s foremost prizes in contemporary Canadian Art. Chosen by a jury appointed by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Sobey Art Foundation, the Award is given to Canadian artists under 40, and includes a $50,000 prize for the winner and $5,000 to four finalists. Shortlisted artists are chosen from regions across the country, including the Atlantic provinces, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies and the North, and the West Coast.

Winnipeg-based photographer Sarah Anne Johnson was winner of the Grange Prize, from the Art Gallery of Ontario. A graduate of the University of Manitoba, she is active as a mentor with the Winnipeg arts group Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art. Her photography series are in the collections of galleries including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Stankievech’s site-specific, conceptual “field works” explore landscapes and technology, incorporating curating and teaching into the overall experience of the art. His work has been shown in spaces including the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Xth Biennale of Architecture in Venice. He’s a co-founder of the Yukon School of Visual Arts in Dawson City, and currently splits his time between there and Montreal.

The Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, designed by Arthur Erickson. PHOTO: JAMES CHENG

Architecture Canada and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada have named the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia one of four buildings given the 2011 Prix du XXe Siecle Award for enduring excellence in Canadian architecture. The award is fitting tribute to architect Arthur Erickson (whose Robson Square design in Vancouver was another 2011 winner), who designed the 80,000-square-foot museum on the UBC campus in 1976. “These iconic buildings have stood the test of time and become national landmarks,” says Alex Rankin, Chancellor of the RAIC College of Fellows. “They’re a testament to how architecture can add quality-of-life to society. They are proof positive that architecture matters.”

Designed to house the MOA’s spectacular collection of Pacific Northwest Coast art and artifacts, Erickson’s building sits on wooded cliffs overlooking the Pacific, with soaring ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows in its main gallery space. Other 2011 recipients include the University of Regina’s pre-cast concrete Heating and Cooling Building, designed by Clifford Wiens in 1967, and the modernist Ottawa Train Station, designed in 1966 by John B. Parkin Architects.

Joe Fafard, Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si Do (detail), powder coated steel plate, 2010.

The new Calgary courthouse building is now part of a permanent stampede — fitting for a city still celebrating all things western. The City of Calgary, in partnership with the Calgary Stampede, has installed eight life-size running horses on the grounds at 4 Street and 6 Avenue SW, powder-coated steel structures by Saskatchewan artist Joe Fafard, called Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si Do. The public sculpture is the second installation in this series — the first was installed on Boulevard Champlain in Quebec City last fall, to celebrate a sister-city relationship with Calgary in honour of Quebec’s 400th anniversary.

The historic A.E. Cross photographic studio in Lethbridge has made another significant donation to the archives in that city’s Galt Museum, handing over photo negatives and prints shot between 1972 and 1999. Valued at around $1 million, the collection traces the recent history of Lethbridge, including portraits and commercial photography, and joins a previous donation from the studio, of historic photos dating back to 1924. The studio was established then, by English immigrant Cross, who recorded the history of Lethbridge in commercial commissions, aerial photography, and wedding portraits. Current studio owner Peter Etches turned over close to 300,000 prints and negatives to the Galt.

The Kelowna Art Gallery was caught in the crossfire of a recent gang shooting (obviously unusual activity in this central B.C. city) on August 14, when a bullet went through the front window during a regularly scheduled family art session. The shooting erupted across the street, at the entrance to the Delta Hotel, but one stray bullet hit the all-glass front of the Gallery. According to the Kelowna Capital News, Gallery staff level-headedly locked the front doors and moved all the visitors deeper into the exhibition spaces, waiting for the police to respond. Nobody (on Gallery property) was injured.

A group of Vancouver developers plan to bring a new creative edge to the city’s grim downtown Eastside, planning a new living / working complex for artists in the 100 block of East Hastings street. Though there isn’t much to go on now, the plan, called Sequel 138, could be a shot in the arm for the neighbourhood, long over-run with drug culture, though it’s close to the revitalized Simon Fraser University / Woodwards arts building. The developer, Sequel 138 Development Corp., owns the Pantages Theatre and a group of adjacent vacant buildings. The plan, designed by Studio One architects, is to build 79 units of entry-level housing for artists, and employees of neighbourhood not-for-profits. The space will also include a gallery and retail outlet.

The Triangle Gallery of Visual Arts, one of Calgary’s most innovative public gallery spaces, has appointed artist, curator, arts manager (and Galleries West contributor) Jeffrey Spalding to the newly created position of Artistic Director. A prolific presence in the arts across Canada, Spalding will enable the Triangle to build on its capacity for important exhibitions by local, regional, and international artists. Long-time curator and manager Jacek Malec is now Managing Director and Associate Curator at the gallery. Spalding has a long history of involvement with western galleries. He was professor of art, and Director / Curator at the University of Lethbridge from 1982 to 1999, and President of the Glenbow Museum from 2007 to 2009. He has also been Director and Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, visiting professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and President of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. He and Malec have previously collaborated on two Triangle exhibitions, including Patterned After: Pattern, Ornament and Repetition in Modern and Contemporary Art, and Gershon Iskowitz: A Path of Colour.

Marilyn Smith, director of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, was recently presented with the Rozsa Award for Excellence in Arts Management, Alberta’s foremost recognition for directors and administrators in the arts. Presented by the Calgary-based philanthropic organization, the Rozsa Foundation, the prize comes with a cash award and opportunities for mentoring and further professional development at the business schools of the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta. The award was created to match accomplished not-for-profit managers in the arts with foundational professional opportunities in business and management.

With more than 30 years of management experience in the arts, Smith has been director at SAAG since 1999. One of the highlights of her tenure has been the three-year redevelopment of the Gallery’s downtown exhibition space, which opened last year after the addition of 6,000 square feet, and an increase in visitors that added a large boost in revenue.

Jeffrey Spalding is an artist, curator, former museum director, past President of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art and member of the Order of Canada.

By Jeffrey Spalding

Interest in the history of abstract art abounds. We marked the centenary of the birth of fauvism and cubism, as well as Kandinsky’s seminal expressionist inventions. A recent Museum of Modern Art exhibition celebrated the glories of abstract expressionism. In Canada, a resurgence of critical attention upon the topic...

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A.J. Casson, Ontario Farmhouse, oil, c. 1938, 20" x 24". At Mayberry Fine Art's new Toronto location. PHOTO: DAN FAIRCHILD .

The Winnipeg-based Mayberry Fine Art Gallery, known for its collection of historical Canadian paintings, packed up 38 canvases by A.J. Casson and set off for Toronto this past spring. Opening the doors of a Toronto branch of the gallery, they launched with the Casson show, one of the widest-ranging collections of paintings by the Group of Seven master offered in one exhibition.

Most of the works were painted within a five-decade span, from the 1920s to the 1960s (Casson was the longest-lived of the Group of Seven), but the show also includes a few pieces created into the 1970s and 80s. Most are plein-air watercolours and oils. The gallery bought the paintings over the course of two years, from a variety of private collections in Canada and internationally, and most were for sale with prices of $20,000 to $125,000.

Born in 1898, Casson had his first exhibition in 1921 (first showing in 1922 with the Group of Seven). He was known for his landscapes of more populous regions of southern Ontario, and his crisp, stylized landscapes and depictions of the wilderness of the province’s central lake region.

Sudarshan Shetty, History of Loss, Plexiglas, aluminum, steel. Installed as part of the Vancouver Biennale.

Twice the target of thieves, Indian artist Sudarshan Shetty’s sculpture History of Loss was permanently de-installed from the Vancouver Biennale. Originally installed at the King Edward Canada Line station on Cambie Street, the work was Shetty’s Canadian debut, and was originally expected to remain installed until the Biennale finished in June.

It was an enticing work from the beginning — a five-tiered stack of model Volkswagen Beetles encased in Plexiglas, like an oversized Matchbox carrying case. Cast in aluminum and steel from a single mold, and then dropped or damaged to make each model unique, the work is about nostalgia and desire, and the relics created by our engine-driven consumer society.

The work was first targeted last spring, when one of the models was stolen. It was subsequently recovered after an anonymous tip was called in. A second car was stolen in November, and hasn’t been recovered. It was after that second theft that Biennale organizers decided to take the work down — though Shetty hadn’t requested it — to protect it from further potential damage.

Daphne Odjig Canada Post Stamp design.

In February, Hambleton Galleries in Kelowna hosted the unveiling of three new stamps featuring the work of painter Daphne Odjig. Part of the Art Canada series (which also honoured artists including Yousuf Karsh, Homer Watson and Mary Pratt), the three stamps depict acrylic works including Spiritual Renewal (1984), Pow-wow Dancer (1978), and Pow-wow (1969). Each reflects the personal, Woodland-inspired style Odjig has developed over the years (she was born in 1919).

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Katie Ohe and Harry Kiyooka, at their home in Springbank, with their art collection. PHOTO: NEIL COLLINS, BLEED COMMUNICATIONS.

Due west of Calgary, on the furthest outskirts of the city, artists Katie Ohe and Harry Kiyooka have lived and worked together for 31 years on an acreage in Springbank. This spring, they announced that they would be establishing a new place for artists on their property, developing the acreage and two art studios into the Kiyooka Ohe Art Centre (KOAC)...

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Michael Morris, Untitled, greyscale, gouache on paper, 2009.

Vancouver artists Michael Morris and David Rimmer join six other recipients of the 2011 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, including Calgary-based critic and writer Nancy Tousley, who was honoured with the Outstanding Contribution Award. Given to established artists for distinguished achievement...

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L.L. Fitzgerald, Prairie Homestead, oil on canvas, 1925.

Following on successful festivals that brought art and culture from Canada’s regions to the nation’s capital, this spring Ottawa’s National Arts Centre will host a city-wide celebration of the fine and performing arts of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Prairie Scene (which follows previous years’ festivals including Atlantic Scene, Alberta Scene, Quebec Scene, and BC Scene) will bring more than 100 musicians, performers, literary, visual, and new media artists from the heartland to eastern Ontario.

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After a remarkably quick turn-around, the redevelopment of the Brittania Mine Museum, just south of Squamish, B.C., has taken home a top design award from the Canadian Museum Association. Redeveloped in 2010 with a $15-million investment, the Museum was voted Best in Facility Development and Design at the CMA’s recent national conference. The Museum celebrates the heritage and culture of a mining industry that employed 60,000 people in the area between 1904 and 1974.

The project preserved the Museum’s heritage sites, salvaging many of the existing buildings and reusing materials. A new Visitors’ Centre reflects the West Coast environment, with Douglas fir and copper cladding, re-purposing materials to preserve the heritage site while updating the design. This latest project follows on the 2007 full restoration of the Museum’s Mill Building, a National Historic Site and one of the last gravity-fed concentrator mills left in North America — the spectacular building, lined with more than 14,000 panes of glass, has been the symbol of Brittania for most of its existence.

With a generous new pledge from the W. Garfield Weston Foundation, Canada’s national portrait competition will be able to offer a larger award, beginning this year. A project of the Kingston Arts Council, the biannual Kingston Prize will now be worth $20,000, awarded for the top contemporary portrait by a Canadian artist. Two honourable mentions will receive $2,000 each. The 2011 Kingston Prize will be announced in November, following a preview exhibition of 30 finalists from across the country at the Firehall Theatre in Gananoque, Ontario, and coinciding with an exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. In February, the exhibition will travel to Le Galerie d’art Desjardins in Drummondville, Quebec.

The Vancouver City Council has given tacit approval for development of a site at Georgia and Cambie Streets for the new, purpose-built Vancouver Art Gallery. Responding to a proposal from the gallery to build there on city-owned land (it’s currently a parking lot adjacent to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, and was formerly the site of the Greyhound Bus Depot), the city told gallery trustees the request would be granted conditionally.

VAG trustees will have two years to prove that a capital campaign can raise $300 million in order for the project to go ahead. The project, still in conceptual stages, could potentially also house a concert hall and an office tower. Councillors were interested in the idea of creating a new cultural district in the city’s centre.

Development at the new location, and a new gallery, has been a long, drawn-out process. With the VAG's collection and ambitions far exceeding the gallery’s current building on Hornby Street, trustees turned down a recent proposal from the city to set aside land on False Creek for the project, citing a high water table and potential damage to the building and the collection. The original master plan, established in 2004, called for a building of approximately 320,000 square feet, which would more than double the current space. Though no capital campaign has been officially launched, the gallery has already been pledged $50 million from the province, with another $40 million in pledges from donors and suppliers.

Emily Carr University of Art and Design will double efforts to assist and recognize young Aboriginal artists. With a donation of $20,000 over two years, ECUAD will create a new scholarship program for Aboriginal students, and establish the RBC Emerging Aboriginal Artist Award, an annual cash prize that will recognize one student. Enrolment by Aboriginal students has been rising over the years, and school administrators have been looking for ways to enhance the student experience for them, and make it more secure.

Given only every two years to senior artists in all disciplines, painter and mixed media artist Jane Ash Poitras was given one of two (with writer Robert Kroetsch) 2011 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Awards. The $30,000 award was presented in April in St. Albert, as part of that city’s 150th anniversary celebration. Poitras is the first visual artist to be given the award, which was first presented in 2005.

Born in a Cree community in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta and raised in Edmonton, Poitras graduated with a degree in printmaking from the University of Alberta. She has created a masterful practice in prints and mixed media, bringing elements of history, politics, and Aboriginal culture to all her large-scale, collage-like paintings. She’s had solo shows at galleries including the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec. Poitras is also known for her lectures on art and culture, and is a long-standing sessional instructor at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Native Studies.

Organizers of the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Awards also recognize emerging Alberta artists in all disciplines, with a $10,000 biannual prize. In 2010, the award was given to visual artists including the Bee Kingdom Collective glass designers, and painters David Foy and Jennifer Saleik.

Daniel Barrow, winner of the 2010 Sobey Art Award. PHOTO: NAT GORRY

ARTIST DANIEL BARROW WINS WITH ILLUSTRATED STORYTELLING

Seeing a single drawing from one of Daniel Barrow’s serial works doesn’t do any of it justice. Illustrative and often grotesque, they’re like individual pages of a warped children’s book, or a particularly gruesome issue of Mad magazine. Seen as they’re meant to be experienced, Barrow’s work takes on a new form — a series of highly engrossing animated stories, told through illustration, low-end technology, video and sound. After being previously shortlisted, in 2010 Barrow is the winner of the Sobey Art Award for contemporary Canadian art.

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Outside the newly renovated Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge.

Long a landmark in the centre of the city, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Calgary fell under the spell of a wrecking crew last May, making way for a renovation that would brighten and enlarge the space, and preserve it as one of western Canada’s premier public galleries. Designed by local architecture firms Ferrari Westwood Babits and Savill Group, the new SAAG began the transformation process in 2009. It’s been a short but eventful journey, and when the gallery opened fully again in September after a summer of renovation, the results were abundantly clear.

The expanded and reconfigured SAAG now boasts new classroom and library space with windows onto the park behind it, a multi-media viewing gallery with cutting-edge lighting and sound technology, and a glass-clad atrium entrance that extends the length of the building, bringing a light-filled introduction to gallery visitors as they arrive. Known for showcasing the best of Lethbridge’s remarkably vibrant visual art scene, and giving early support to future art stars including Janet Cardiff and David Hoffos, the gallery re-opened with On Your Marks, a show that fittingly celebrated collaboration among Alberta artists.

Kamloops-based ceramic artist Brendan Lee Satish Tang took home the Winnifred Shantz Award this year from the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario. The $10,000 annual prize is one of the most prestigious awards in Canadian craft, given to an emerging artist in particular to support future study or artists’ residency opportunities.

Shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award this year, Tang’s work has been gaining recognition with a series of exhibitions across Canada, including at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and a recent group show at Toronto’s Gardiner Museum. He’s known for his intricate mix of traditional porcelain techniques with a thoroughly modern sensibility that incorporates robot and manga motifs.

The Medalta Potteries in Medicine Hat can’t get enough of its local history. After preserving its kilns and factory site (an ongoing project), creating gallery and museum space, and building an airy new studio for its ceramics residency program, Medalta broke ground on an archeological dig on the site of its pottery on the bank of the South Saskatchewan River. Once the thriving centre of ceramic manufacturing in Canada (Medicine Hat once produced more than 75 per cent of all the pottery made in Canada) the expansive site holds layers of local history in its grounds.

For the past few months, archeologist Talva Jacobson has been leading the excavation of this industrial site, digging down into the strata of decades of manufacturing history. She expects to excavate through the recent past to an unknown history that predates the factories themselves.

Staff at the Nickle Arts Museum at the University of Calgary will spend the next year packing and cataloguing collections to prepare for a move into University’s new Taylor Family Digital Library building in September 2011. To get ready, they’ve closed their doors and postponed regular public programming for a year. Supported by more than $3 million in grants from the City of Calgary, the Nickle will be front and centre in the new Taylor building, part of an unprecedented, multi-year and multi-million-dollar redevelopment project at the U of C. Along with a regular schedule of temporary art exhibitions, the Nickle maintains growing numismatic and textile collections, and the new space will allow expanded access to the permanent collections.

The Alberta College of Art + Design in Calgary held a shindig in early December to introduce their new president and CEO. Dr. Daniel Doz was most recently dean of the Faculty of Communication & Design at Ryerson University in Toronto, and before that was head of the Division of Architecture and Art at Norwich University in Vermont. Originally from Montreal and a licensed architect who studied at the Universite de Paris, as an academic Doz has conducted research in the areas of film, design, photography and architecture.

In another major move, former Art Gallery of Alberta exec director Tony Luppino has taken over as executive director of the Leighton Arts Centre, just south of Calgary. While at the AGA from 2003 to 2009, Luppino oversaw the funding and construction of the spectacular new gallery space in downtown Edmonton, and prior to that he was on the board of the McMichael Collection in Ontario. Set in the Alberta foothills in the former home of painter A.C. Leighton, the Arts Centre was established in 1970 by Barbara Leighton to provide informal art workshops to children, and continuing art education for emerging Canadian artists. On his appointment, Luppino said “I’ve been intrigued for years by this art centre in the foothills that nurtures practicing artists and inspires art and nature appreciators. The Centre has ambitious plans to build on its unique Alberta heritage inspired by an artist who was way ahead of his time.”

Another historic artists’ home is also getting some new blood. Artist and archival technician Shara Rosko was recently appointed director of the John Snow House in Calgary, a resource centre and archives affiliated with The New Gallery artist-run centre. Following a public launch last fall, the house will also be used as a public venue for multiple creative events.

The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia benefitted twice in recent months from generous donations by the Michael O’Brian Family Foundation. The first gift underwrites the establishment of the Satellite Gallery, a newly renovated space on Seymour Street that brings collaborative exhibitions downtown from MOA and two other public galleries outside the core — the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery at UBC and North Vancouver’s Presentation House. Opened in late October with a show by 1960s-era experimental video artist Glenn Lewis, the Satellite will show exhibitions tangential to programming at the parent galleries, and create opportunities for collaboration for the galleries and their artists.

The Foundation has also given MOA $1 million toward renovation of one of the Museum’s major galleries, and for future acquisitions. The new O’Brian Gallery will be a flexible space designed specifically for exhibitions of small-scale objects and works of art. The new gallery opened in late November with a show of works by Haida artists Charles and Isabella Edenshaw.

Open just over two years, the beautifully designed Squamish Lil-wat Cultural Centre (SLCC) has taken home the Cultural Tourism Award from Canada’s largest tourism management and marketing body, the Tourism Industry Association of Canada. This was the first year an award for cultural tourism was given as part of the annual Tourism Excellence Awards. Commenting on their choice TIAC members cited the Cultural Centre’s commitment to the preservation and promotion of authentic Aboriginal culture and experience as the reason behind the win.

Built in Whistler and designed to evoke a traditional Squamish long house and a Lil’wat pit house, galleries and exhibition halls show traditional and contemporary art and artisan work, and the Centre’s Aboriginal Youth Ambassadors are on hand to engage with visitors in experiential activities. Currently, Centre staff are working on expanding their mandate through a cultural awareness project called the Sea to Sky Cultural Journey.

Winnipeg Art Gallery: Guide to the Collections

— BY Mary-Beth Laviolette

Winnipeg Art Gallery: Guide to the Collections
Editor, Stephen Borys
Winnipeg Art Gallery (Winnipeg) 2010

Books about museum collections tend to dominate coffee tables. As publications, they’re thumbed-through, admired for their big glossy presence and maybe read once in a while. In this sense, Winnipeg Art Gallery: Guide to the Collections is a different kind of book. A little larger than a paperback, with a soft cover and 255 pages, it’s meant to be read and used as a guide. In that respect, this guide to some of the most important and fascinating objects in the holdings of Canada’s first civic art gallery is a gem. It re-affirms the value of collections in general and curators with the expertise to research and understand how art connects to a time and place, and to artists.

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The Life and Art of George Fertig

— BY Mary-Beth Laviolette

The Life and Art of George Fertig
By Mona Fertig
Introduction by Peter Such
Mother Tongue Publishing Limited (Salt Spring Island, BC) 2010

The Life of Art of George Fertig is the third book in the Unheralded Artists of BC series founded by Mona Fertig and her husband, Peter Hasse. As the series title suggests, it focuses on artists who never had much of a nod from critics, curators, influential gallerists and the public art institutions that establish a region’s history and its artists of merit through exhibitions, catalogues, collections, and institutional connections. In a 1966 review of Fertig’s work, Ian Wallace wrote that it’s always more difficult to form an opinion about any artist who “is working outside the current styles and is apart from of the main artistic community”. But many years later Roy Kiyooka wrote that he thought Fertig’s “haunting paintings remain memorable in my mind’s eye.”

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The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History

— BY Mary-Beth Laviolette

The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History
By Aldona Jonaitis & Aaron Glass
University of Washington Press (Seattle/London) & Douglas & McIntyre (Vancouver, BC) 2010

Standing tall and instantly recognizable in its connection to the culture of west coast First Nations, the totem pole has more than its share of misinformation attached to it. The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History aims to set the record straight by exploring the object’s rich and varied history within the context of west coast Native culture and the wider public domain of film, advertising, mass media and tourism.

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INVALUABLE CULTURAL ASSETS HAVE EFFECTIVELY BEEN ‘BENCHED’

— BY Jeffrey Spalding

Quietly, without much notice or outcry, our art museums have morphed. Temporary, contemporary programming has gained a dominant upper hand, commandeering the preponderance of exhibition space and institutional resources. Historical programming is on the wane.

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A conceptual drawing of the new Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg.

THE PLUG IN AND THE UNIVERSITY OF WINNIPEG COLLABORATE ON A NEW SPACE

— BY Amy Fung

Opened last fall on the corner of 460 Portage Avenue in Winnipeg, the precedent-setting Plug In Institute embarks on the newest chapter in its 38 years as one of Canada’s major centres of contemporary art. Having played host to everyone from Laurie Anderson to The Royal Art Lodge, to making a significant splash at the 2001 Venice Biennale by presenting Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Paradise Institute, Plug In will finally have a custom-designed facility of its own.

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Bill Reid, Killer Whale, cast bronze jade patina, 1984. Photo: Kenji Nagai.

The Bill Reid Foundation recently uploaded a comprehensive site on Reid’s life and work, bringing his legacy to a wider, global audience. Called theravenscall.ca, it brings together images, essays, and interactive elements tracing the career and philosophy of this master carver and icon of traditional and contemporary Northwest Coast art. A sculptor, carver, and jewellery-maker, Reid was perhaps the best-known Haida artist of his time. Set up on virtualmuseum.ca, The Raven’s Call is an extension of the recently established Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art in Vancouver, and includes comprehensive lesson plans for teachers, new photography, and an animated story illustrated by Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas.

The retail gallery at The Hive in Medicine Hat.

It can be an uphill battle for a smaller centre — a town or small city — to establish itself as a cultural hotspot, particularly when it’s set on an endless prairie, with miles of highway in either direction. But Medicine Hat has an advantage — it’s already a magnet for national and international ceramic artists, home to the Medalta potteries, the Shaw Centre for Contemporary Ceramics, and a highly recognized artist-in-residence program. Add the grand, recently built Esplanade Arts Centre, and artists and gallery-goers have good reason to visit The Gas City.

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Vancouver's East Side Culture Crawl.

— Beverly Cramp

When Jeffrey Boone took over the executive director duties of Vancouver’s Eastside Culture Crawl last April, he joined an organization that had achieved much in its short history. It began in 1995 with a few East Vancouver studios hosting public openings for a day, and had grown to 300 artists in 60 buildings by 2009. More than 10,000 people now visit participating studios over the three-day event.

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Recent Work by Brendan Tang, shortlisted for the 2010 Sobey Art Award.

It’s Sobey Award shortlist time again, and the jury has branched out a bit in 2010, shortlisting an innovative western Canadian ceramic artist for an increasingly high-profile body of work. Kamloops-based (though he spends less and less time at home) Brendan Lee Satish Tang is the nominee for West Coast and Yukon, for his glossy ceramic works that mix past and future. Traditional motifs in delicate porcelain china combine design elements of manga, video games, and high-tech play weaponry. Joining Tang on the shortlist, Winnipeg-based painter Daniel Barrow is nominated representing the prairies and the North (he was a Sobey finalist in 2008 as well). Other shortlistees: Brendan Fernandes in Ontario, Patrick Bernatchez in Quebec, and Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby representing the Atlantic provinces. The Sobey Art Award is given annually by the Sobey Art Foundation to a Canadian artist under 40. The winner, who will be announced on November 18, gets $50,000.

The John Snow House in Calgary, recently acquired by The New Gallery artist run centre.

After receiving a donation of the former home of artist John Snow in 2008, Calgary artist-run centre The New Gallery has been working its way through the process of having the space rezoned, and this summer announced that they’ve successfully achieved their goal. Set to accommodate a small library and archives, along with space for creative collaboration, the two-storey, wood-planked home is in the residential area of Lower Mount Royal, just south of the downtown core. The space complements TNG’s gallery in the downtown Art Central building. Instrumental in the development of visual arts in Calgary, John Snow (1911 – 2004) was best-known as a master printmaker, and had installed a heavy lithograph in the basement of the house. After Snow’s death, the house was bought by local philanthropist Jackie Flanagan, who initially used it for writers as part of the University of Calgary’s Markin-Flanagan writer-in-residence program.

The mid-August resignation of BC Arts Council chair Jane Danzo has given arts and culture groups in the province more fuel to fight what has become an increasingly devastating funding environment. In her resignation letter, made public, Danzo cites the BC government's rejection of a proposal to restore funding to 2008 levels (cuts had stripped about two thirds from an already small budget), and the stress of having to watch arts organizations across the province struggle to stay solvent.

She also points out the redirection of $30 million into a government-mandated Legacy Fund to underwrite BC Spirit Festivals, designed to further the awareness sparked by the 2010 Winter Olympics. "I would have suggested that the money be directed to sustaining the work of the artists and organizations that made the Cultural Olympiad possible — that to me would be a legacy," she told the Globe and Mail.

The planning team at Saskatoon's Mendel Art Gallery has chosen Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects, with Smith Carter Architects and Engineers for the proposed $51-million purpose-built gallery at the city's River Landing development. Rebranded the Art Gallery of Saskatchewan, the new building will adjoin the Remai Arts Centre on the bank of the South Saskatchewan River. KPMB bid for the project with 14 other firms, and was chosen in part for its experience with cultural and institutional projects, including the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, and Manitoba Hydro Place in Winnipeg, which won the 2010 National Urban Design Award from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

Vancouver-based installation artist Brian Jungen was named the winner of the $25,000 Gershon-Iskowitz Prize, administered by the Art Gallery of Ontario. Best-known for converting the synthetic symbols of contemporary culture into traditional Aboriginal and organic forms, Jungen has just finished a high-profile solo show at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. His work continues to rise in recognition internationally — particularly with shows at the Vancouver Art Gallery and at London’s Tate Modern. Given annually to an established Canadian artist to further their art practice, the prize is managed by the AGO and the Iskowitz Foundation, named after Canadian painter Gershon Iskowitz.

Haida artist Robert Davidson took home a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts earlier this year, and now he’s been named winner of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Audain Prize, the largest visual art award in British Columbia. The prize, given annually by an independent jury, awards $30,000 to a BC artist in mid-career. Presented by the VAG and given by the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Prize recognizes Davidson’s work as a master carver, painter, printmaker, and jeweler. Closely involved in the contemporary revisioning of traditional Haida motifs and techniques, Davidson was recently commissioned by the VAG to create a large-scale transformation panel called Killer Whale Transforming into a Thunderbird.

The Canada Council, already charged with a multitude of cultural prize-giving opportunities, has been awarded directorship of a new prize in the arts and cultural sector. A government-appointed panel has been convened to advise on the parameters of the Council’s new Canada Prizes for the Arts and Creativity, which will presumably join the Governor General’s Awards and countless smaller prizes, already overseen by the Council. Further details are expected to be announced before the end of 2010.

Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art + Design will expand with a move to a new multi-purpose campus east of downtown, called the Great Northern Way Campus. Built for an innovative, high-tech partnership between ECUAD, the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and the British Columbia Institute of Technology, the new campus is home to the new Centre for Digital Media and the popular Masters in Digital Media program. Now ECUAD will have its own campus on the site, which was designed as a mixed-use district.

Fabric Art by Barbara Heller.

Thank you for including a photo of one of my tapestries in the “fabric arts” article accompanying the Judy Chicago piece (Fall 2009). Now to my quibbles, both of which swirl around definitions. What I do is woven tapestry, not stitchery. Tapestry is a weft-faced weave with a design made by the use of discontinuous threads. And then the British use the term for needlepoint and the Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidery, so it becomes very confusing. Also, as an umbrella term, “fabric arts” is outdated. Fibre arts is a more inclusive term and can encompass weaving, surface design (another relatively new term) felting, installations, paper, stitching, wearable art, and so on.

— Barbara Heller, Vancouver

Galleries West welcomes your letters to the editor. Write to us at editor@gallerieswest.ca. Letters may be edited for length and content.

The Blockbuster Effect feature story was published in Spring 2010.

Thank you for your intelligent, well-considered article The Blockbuster Effect (Spring 2010). However, having created the Warhol performance at the Glenbow for its 2002 Pop Revolution exhibition, and expanding upon it for both the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2004 and for The Factory Project in Montreal in 2008, I must point out that this program involved far more than simply playing a “mascot.” The structured theatre performance I developed helped to contextualize Warhol’s life within a narrative I would like to think was engaging, accessible and creative for museum visitors, as well as enhancing their ability to understand the works in the exhibition.

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This letter is in regards to some errors in the review of The Works Art & Design Festival (Fall 2009). The first has to do with the scope of the festival, described as “Northern Alberta’s biggest art festival”. With over 200,000 visitors, more than 500 participating visual artists, and 18 contributing arts organizations, The Works is justifiably the largest outdoor, free art and design festival in North America. Second, in relation to the layout of the main festival site, the review suggests that art is hard to come by on Sir Winston Churchill Square. In 2009, exhibits and installations could be found on The Works giant gateways at the South and North entrances, on the east lawn of the site, inside the Works Gallery in the centre of The Art Market, and in The Works Big Tent, a 45' x 90' outdoor weatherproof venue, which held two major festival exhibits and saw 10,000 visitors in 13 days. There were also demonstrations, workshops and events throughout the festival, including the MADE Street Furniture Competition, The Portable Festival of Portable Art, and Raku firing demonstrations for the 2009 HEAT theme.

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In February, Amber-Dawn Bear Robe was appointed director of Urban Shaman in Winnipeg, an artist-run centre with a focus on contemporary Aboriginal art — installation, film and video, photography, and painting. Originally from Siksika, Alberta, Bear Robe is finishing an MA in art history at the University of Arizona. She studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design, and completed curatorial internships at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Glenbow Museum, and the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre.

At the Kelowna Art Gallery, new executive director Nataley Nagy arrives in the Okanagan from her role as executive director of the Textile Museum of Canada, in Toronto. With previous directorships at the SAW Gallery in Ottawa, and the Art Gallery of Windsor, Nagy is a graduate of the Getty Museum Leadership Institute. She was instrumental in an expansion at the Art Gallery of Windsor, and in raising the profile of the Textile Museum.

Glocal, at the Urban Screen site, part of the Surrey Art Gallery.

While the popular sculpture show around the Vancouver Biennale is in full force, artists and curators in the lower mainland are looking for other ways to express themselves outdoors, moving their work in 2-D onto large, open spaces. Following on the success of the O Zhang show at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite space, the region has opened two new outdoor exhibition spaces, for projection and static art. In a partnership between the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, CBC, and JJ Bean (world’s greatest coffee place), Other Sights for Artists’ Projects debuts the first piece, Eric Deis’ Last Chance at the site, called THE WALL. The work looms over CBC Plaza in downtown Vancouver, an architecturally scaled photograph of a little house and a large condo building, evidence of a true-life stand-off between a resolute homeowner and the city’s inexorable construction frenzy.

A little further from downtown, the Surrey Art Gallery has launched an outdoor projection space for a rotating series of works. The venue, the 96-foot-wide Urban Screen, on the side of Surrey’s Chuck Bailey Recreation Centre, debuted with the screening of Glocal, a projection-based work created in the Gallery’s Tech Lab, using open source software, digital photography, and social networks. The summer show, July 3 to September 12, Checking in with your hotspots, examines the relationship between humans and traffic.

As part of its 125th anniversary celebration, Parks Canada will embark on a Totem Tour, travelling back to Haida Gwaii with a historic 130-year-old totem pole. Carved in the late 1800s in Masset, on the Queen Charlotte Islands, the Raven Totem Pole was acquired by the Grand Trunk Railway in 1915, and transported to the train station in Jasper townsite, Jasper National Park. It stood there, part of the scenery, until 2009, when it was taken to Vancouver for restoration. This summer, the pole will be part of the Totem Train Experience, with Parks Canada and Via Rail bringing the totem on a viewing tour through Calgary and Edmonton, and back to Haida Gwaii, where it will be returned to the Haida people on June 21, National Aboriginal Day. In the meantime, master carvers in Haida Gwaii are carving a new totem for Jasper, which will be installed in the Park this summer, with the finishing decorative touches added on-site.

Giant replicas of spindle whorls for weaving, inside the exhibition hall at the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre.

Among the trendy condos and hotel resorts at Whistler village is a cedar and glass complex built into a landscaped hillside, housing the cultural and historical treasures of two First Nations groups, the Squamish and the Lil’wat. “The two nations have overlapping territory in the Whistler area, and there were on-going disputes,” says operations coordinator Josh Anderson. “In the end, we decided to build a centre together.” He adds that combining two First Nations groups under one roof is a unique concept.

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Yue Minjun, A-maze-ing Laughter, patinated bronze. Located at Morton Park (Triangle), Vancouver.

INTERNATIONAL SHOW EXPANDS BEYOND SCULPTURE

With most of the monumental public sculptures in place around the city, the Vancouver Biennale is set to move into phase two, which will fill spaces with new media and performance art. The second Biennale (the first, in 2005 - 2007, resulted in the city acquiring five important pieces of public sculpture) the scope of the show has expanded well beyond its original mandate, and has become more interactive and widespread.

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Moon Nibbler: The Art of Pat Strakowski, By Andrew Oko/Photography by John W. Heintz, Frontenac House Ltd.

Moon Nibbler: The Art of Pat Strakowski
By Andrew Oko/Photography by John W. Heintz, Frontenac House Ltd

The first thing often said about Pat Strakowski’s highly personal, myth-laden sculpture is that it dwells somewhere in the realm of folk or outsider art. But as curator and art historian Andrew Oko shows in this colourful book about the Calgary-born artist, appearances can be deceiving. This is a fascinating example of an artist who has reaped the rewards of a family heritage rich in the folkloric traditions of Ukraine.

Strakowski is also an original, making fanciful creatures out of the most elementary of materials — papier-mé— painted and sometimes exuberantly embellished with fabric, beads, small trinkets and found objects. I enjoyed Oko’s insights into Strakowski’s work, but wondered if there could have been room for some discussion about where it fits in the context of contemporary Canadian art. Perhaps that mainstream is still too narrow a channel for the likes of her.

— Mary-Beth Laviolette

The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman, LeRoy Jensen, By Eve Lazarus, Claudia Cornwall, and Wendy Newbold Patterson, Mother Tongue Publishing.

The Life & Art Of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman, Leroy Jensen
By Eve Lazarus, Claudia Cornwall, and Wendy Newbold Patterson
Mother Tongue Publishing

From the series The Unheralded Artists of B.C., this second volume highlights the careers of three artists who emerged in the 1950s and ‘60s. Only one, the Hungarian-born Frank Molnar, is still alive today. Mid-century modernists — LeRoy Jensen belonged to the Victoria-based Limners group — who were overtaken by the stampede of contemporary art trends, they share a similar place in the creative history of B.C. The very definition of “artist” changed irrevocably in their time.

In his perceptive introduction, Max Wyman describes them as “three examples of bloody-minded, damn-the-torpedoes creative individualism”. This insular paradigm, without any regard to the ongoing discourse on art, is less admired and less noticed by critics, curators, academics and large public institutions. Still, this handsome book, filled with artwork and photographs, is part of a commendable effort to address the “absences” and “others” that exist in every community, region and place.

— Mary-Beth Laviolette

Artist Jeff Chiba Stearns, winner of a 2010 Emily Award from Emily Carr University, Vancouver.

Jeff Chiba Stearns, who created a short animated film about his life in to-do lists, will receive an Emily Award from Vancouver’s Emily Carr University at this year’s convocation in May. Awarded annually to a distinguished alumnus, the Emily honours emerging artists who have reached important milestones early in their careers. A 2001 graduate of the Bachelor of Media Arts program, specializing in Film Animation, Stearns tells the story of his life before and after graduation in the film Yellow Sticky Notes. It’s a fast-paced, six-minute whirl through dreams, reality, the mundane and the monumental, with detours into politics and world events, all told in the margins of to-do lists. Based in Kelowna and Vancouver, Stearns’ film, which has screened at more than 70 international film festivals, was one of the first shorts acquired by Youtube’s Screening Room, where it has since attracted more than 1.2 million hits.

Vistas: Artists on the Canadian Pacific Railway, Roger Boulet with an essay by Terry Fenton, Glenbow Museum.

Vistas: Artists on the Canadian Pacific Railway
Roger Boulet with an essay by Terry Fenton
Glenbow Museum

Before the Group of Seven, painters and photographers from the Canadian Pacific Railway artist pass program defined Canada’s art, and its emerging sense of itself. The program began in 1888, so they may be Canada’s first school.

“Canadian artists of the time...attempted to give life to a poetic expression they perceived in the landscape,” writes curator Roger Boulet. The CPR had its own corporate agenda, there was the smudge of imperialism and colonialism, and the fact that the artists, schooled in picturesque tradition, were kind of old-fashioned. But despite all these insights, there was still a concerted and substantial body of work made along this “new highway to the Orient”.

Published in conjunction with the Vistas exhibition last year at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, the book takes a journey through scenic western Canada. A large portion of the trip concerns the treacherous mountain views of Alberta and B.C., making Vistas particularly insightful into the early history of Canadian mountain art. Contributor Terry Fenton takes an engaging look at the mountains’ first painters (the Chinese) and why large-scale painting of this type declined in the late 19th century. Generously illustrated and beautifully designed, Vistas sets a new standard in the study and appreciation of this largely overlooked accomplishment.

— Mary-Beth Laviolette

Sculptor Robert Davidson. Photo: Martin Lipman, Canada Council for the Arts.

In 1969, Robert Davidson carved and raised the first totem in 90 years on Haida Gwaii. It was a monumental achievement, setting the course for his life as an artist — as a painter, printmaker, jewellery designer, and carver of masks and totems. This year, Davidson’s work was honoured by the Canada Council for the Arts. He was awarded a 2010 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Descended from a family of great carvers, and taught by his father and uncle, Davidson began carving at the age of 13, and in the late 1960s worked briefly in the studio of Bill Reid before leaving to study at the Vancouver School of Art. His work is found in public collections, including those of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Davidson was among eight recipients of 2010 GGs, including Andre Forcier, Rita Letendre, Tom Sherman, Gabor Szilasi, Claude Tousignant, Ilona Thorkilsson, and Terry Ryan, who was honoured for his work as the long-time director of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, and Dorset Fine Arts in Toronto.

Hand-woven bridge banners for the Bridge Works project, Calgary.

A Calgary-based public art project has repurposed an older Calgary-based public art project, resulting in one of the first instances of recycled materials put to use in outdoor banners. Bridge Works is a series of wholly handmade decorative banners on bridges over the Bow River, made by artists Marci Simkulet and Stefanie Wong. Using different repurposed materials, including recycled material from older bridge banners, the artwork incorporates textile techniques including knitting, felt-making and weaving. The work is commissioned by the City of Calgary’s Urban Design and Heritage Group, and is designed around specific historic and design contexts of each bridge. Simkulet is a Calgary-based graduate of the Alberta College of Art and Design, who has created works that knit unusual materials like copper and handmade paper. Wong, also an ACAD grad, works in textiles as well as wood, video, and stop-motion animation.

The Little White Schoolhouse, in St. Albert.

The city of St. Albert, Alberta has embarked on a project to restore a historic schoolhouse to transform it into a public educational and art space. Originally known as the Father Jan School, the Little White Schoolhouse was built in 1946 to accommodate growing post-World War II families. Its compact design was typical of prairie schoolhouses at the time, and is one of the few schools remaining from the era, which spurred the idea of the restoration. Though regular classes ended in the late 1980s, the school has been home to some continuing education classes, and once the $640,000 restoration is complete in 2011, it will host regular classes and public events.

Marcus Bowcott, Porcelain Blue Humvee, Bush Dynasty Vase series, ceramic stoneware.

Contemporary Canadian craft received a gift of sorts during the 6th Cheongju International Craft Biennale — works from Canada were showcased in a special exhibition and program devoted to Canadian artists. This was no small matter. It was an invitation from a country with its own well-developed crafts tradition stretching back over a 5,000 year period, its artists honoured with a special title for outstanding contribution to Korean craft, and an official website (Korea.net) devoted to its craft heritage.

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Alex Kisilevich, Untitled (legs), from the series …and then you die, digital chromogenic print, 2009.

There’s a quiet, somewhat macabre sense of what’s left behind in the photographs of Alex Kisilevich, winner of the 2009 BMO 1st Art! Competition for the best art students in the country. The winning image, called Untitled (Legs), is a photograph of old fashioned prosthetic legs propped on a bench in a strangely ornate room. It’s from a series Kisilevich created called “…and then you die.” A student at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Kisilevich was chosen from a field of students nominated by deans and instructors of post-secondary visual art programs from across Canada. Each institution nominates three students, and the BMO jury chooses one national winner, and one winner from each province and territory. Other 2009 winners included Andy Yang from the Alberta College of Art & Design, Michael Macri from the University of British Columbia, Quppa Jaw from Nunavut Arctic College, and Suzanne Hale from the Klondike Institute of Arts and Culture in Dawson City.

Artist Arthur Vickers with the Leadership Desk presented to B.C. premier Gordon Campbell.

Vancouver Island-based artist Arthur Vickers has spent the past three and a half years deciding how to make the most of an old-growth cedar pulled from a burn pile and reclaimed. His description of working with the wood involves several months of waiting for the right inspiration, and the spirit of the tree to reveal itself to him. In the end, Vickers created a piece of furniture fit for a prince or a politician — in this case Gordon Campbell, premier of British Columbia.

Raised in Tsimshian towns along the remote coast of B.C., Vickers now lives and works in Cowichan Bay, where he has his own gallery. He works in serigraph, sculpture, gold relief, glass and granite, red and yellow cedar. The desk, presented to the premier last fall, was designed and painted in the form of a traditional bentwood box, which in Coastal cultures has been used to keep treasures, and to tell stories.

Keith Harder, Children of Icarus – Dereliction of Memory, installation.

Built last year over the course of six months, University of Alberta fine art professor Keith Harder has given a new focus to a bit of Canada’s key wartime history. His installation, Children of Icarus – Dereliction of Memory, was built in a farmer’s field near Nanton, south of Calgary. The town is home to the Nanton Lancaster Air Museum, with a mission to restore old fighter jets and bombers, and Harder was able to access the remains of 12 decaying Anson airplanes.

The Avro Anson was the workhorse of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, teaching airmen how to fly during World War II, but was obsolete as a combat plane even before the war broke out. Rescuing the planes for his installation, Harder wanted to spotlight a little-known aspect of Canadian military history. Measuring 100 yards across, the planes are set up in a carved compass rose pattern, easily visible to pilots flying over the site.

William Kurelek, King of the Castle, 1958.

LOST WILLIAM KURELEK PAINTING MAKES A FORTUITOUS RETURN

There’s an odd sense of serendipity in the timing around Shaun Mayberry’s latest high-profile acquisition. The Winnipeg-based art dealer, one of the proprietors of Mayberry Fine Art, received an email from England in the middle of the night. It was the summer of 2008, and Mayberry checked the attachment — an image of a painting by William Kurelek that required an appraisal. The 1958 painting, King of the Castle, was one of the missing links in the artist’s catalogue, a masterwork that had long been thought lost, or at least very difficult to track down.

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Media artist Jackson 2Bears, winner of a 2009 Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award.

Victoria-based new media artist Jackson 2Bears joins seven other mid-career artists, in multiple artistic disciplines, given a 2009 Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award by the Canada Council. A Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) artist with a track record of live performance and DJ work, 2Bears mixes critical Native sociological concepts with the sleekest modern technology. His multimedia work pulls from new music, video, and contemporary culture to remix Native stereotypes and transmit indigenous teachings. Worth $15,000 and awarded annually, the winners of the Lynch-Staunton award are chosen by peer review.

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Jasna Sokolovic, a couple (from messengers series), ceramic, 2009, 12".

A Vancouver artist molds clay into collage

The two finalists for the 2009 Winifred Shantz Award for Ceramists couldn’t have been more different. Both from British Columbia, one works on a grand scale, while the other works on the kind of collectible artifacts found in craft galleries and online artisan shops. Nelson-based ceramist and installation artist Ian Johnston has branched into huge, room-filling statements. Jasna Sokolovic, winner of the Shantz Award, given by the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario, is focused on encapsulating common memories in delicate objects and utilitarian vessels. A $10,000 prize given annually to an emerging ceramist (with a companion award for a glass artist), the Award supports travel, study, and mentorship.

Originally from Yugoslavia, but now working out of a studio on Vancouver’s Granville Island, Sokolovic creates tiles, vessels and objects that become surfaces for collage and sketchbook-style imagery. She has participated in residencies at The Banff Centre and at the Ceramic Research Centre in Denmark, and has exhibited her work in Canada, the United States, and Korea. Inspired by the colour and form of traditional Mexican ceramics, she plans to direct the award to further study in rural Mexico.

Just in time to open the doors on a long-awaited new building, Edmonton’s Art Gallery of Alberta has appointed a new director, Gilles Hébert. Among Hébert’s first orders of business — lift the veil on architect Randall Stout’s glossy new gallery, a monument of silver surfaces that will be the focus of contemporary architecture in this prairie city for some time. Hébert arrived in Edmonton from the Art Gallery of Windsor, where he was director, but he has spent most of his career in western Canada. Originally from Winnipeg, he graduated from the University of Manitoba, and has had leadership roles at the St. Norbert Arts Centre in rural Manitoba, and at Saskatoon’s Mendel Gallery.

Painter Joane Cardinal-Schubert, who passed away in September after a battle with cancer, was part of an important wave of contemporary Native artists who emerged in the wake of Norval Morrisseau’s great success more than 30 years ago. Born in Red Deer, of Blackfoot ancestry, she was inspired by the iconography of the Plains — war shirts, medicine wheels, pictographs — and she had a great deal to say about the place where Aboriginal culture clashed with the European influence. Her work is in the collections of galleries including the National Gallery of Canada, the Smithsonian, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and she was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy.

Painter Andrew Valko took home the 2009 Kingston Portrait Prize, winning $10,000 for his work Personal surveillance. Valko is an accomplished printmaker who studied in Japan, and he’s known particularly in western Canada for a series of photorealist portraits that capture private moments between subjects and technology, filtered through mirrors and reflective surfaces. In Personal surveillance, a teenage boy is lit only by the light from his handheld video camera, which he has trained on himself.

Awarded by the W. Garfield Weston Foundation, the Grand Prize is chosen by an invited jury, which in 2009 included Guelph-based art critic Robert Enright, Lily Koltun of the Portrait Gallery of Canada, artist June Anderson, and Eliza Griffiths of Concordia University. The Prize, given bi-annually as a program of the Kingston Arts Council in Kingston, Ontario, attracts hundreds of entrants from across Canada. About 30 finalists are chosen for an exhibition that travels across the country — in February through April 2010 the exhibition will be at the Art Gallery of Calgary.

Four western Canadian artists and one two-person partnership have been shortlisted for the 2009 RBC Painting Competition. With a $25,000 grand prize (and two $15,000 honourable mention prizes) at stake, the competition recognizes the best emerging painters from across Canada. Juried by a panel of nine, including Vancouver artist Ken Lum, Nathalie de Blois, curator of contemporary art at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and Benjamin Diaz of the Toronto gallery Diaz Contemporary, the winners will be chosen in early October. Among finalists from west, central and eastern Canada, the western shortlist includes Noah Becker of Victoria, Brenda Draney of Vancouver, Calgary’s Dave and Jenn, Ryan Peter of Vancouver, and Joseph Tisiga of Whitehorse.

A new project through the Department of Archeology at Simon Fraser University will reunite members of the western Arctic Inuvialuit people with cultural artifacts lost more than 150 years ago. Part of the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage project at SFU, researchers will visit Washington’s Smithsonian Institution to study the Inuvialuit pipes, tools and clothing in the Museum’s Arctic Studies Center collection. The elders’ examination of the more than 500 pieces in the collection will be recorded by researchers, expanding the knowledge of traditional craft and culture in the high Arctic. The artifacts were bought in the mid-19th century by Hudson’s Bay Company trader Roderick MacFarlane, and later became one of the founding collections of the Smithsonian. One of five recently launched projects that will explore exchange of knowledge in indigenous cultures around the world, the SFU researchers plan to create an interactive exhibition and school curriculum to share the work with the Inuvialuit.

David Hoffos, Scenes from the House Dream: Sherwood Schwartz, single channel video, audio and mixed media installation, detail, 2005. Collection of the artist.

David Hoffos’ almost-impossible Dream

Requiring 5000 square feet of open space and spanning 25 separate works consisting of 40-channel installation, audio and mixed-media dioramas, soundscapes, projections, mirrors, false walls, windows, lighting, surprise cut outs, and every other semblance of dreams brought to life, David Hoffos’ sprawling installation Scenes from a House Dream (2003 - 2008) challenges the viewer at every turn, and as it turns out, is an even greater challenge to tour.

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Josée Aubain Ouellette, Drop City, 1968, from the 2009 The Works Festival, Edmonton.

Every summer for the past 24 years, The Works Art and Design Festival has taken over Edmonton’s downtown core with a spectrum of international art and design. Highlighting the work of fine artists at various stages of their careers in lobbies, basements, and hallways, The Works remains Northern Alberta’s biggest art festival. With the 2009 theme of "Heat", arts and crafts tents and a spacious beer garden cover most of the main area of Sir Winston Churchill Square in Edmonton. The art exhibitions can be found near the north end of the Square, tucked away to the side of the road.

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Vancouver conceptual artist Ian Wallace, winner of the 2009 Molson Prize.

Ian Wallace, a conceptual artist based in Vancouver, has been awarded one of two $50,000 Molson Prizes from the Canada Council for the Arts. Awarded annually to one recipient in the arts and one in social sciences, the prize recognizes outstanding achievement throughout an established career, and ongoing contribution to the arts and humanities in Canada. Winner of a 2004 Governor-General’s Award in Visual Art, Wallace taught for 16 years at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and evolved his art practice from minimalist sculptures and paintings to include work in photography and new technology, and has published criticism in catalogues, anthologies and magazines.

O Zhang, Horizon (Sky), detail, photographic print on vinyl, series of six, at Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite.

Opening with a show by fine art photographer O Zhang, the Vancouver Art Gallery has created an outdoor exhibition space for art in the city’s downtown core. Set at the base of the Shangri-La Hotel at Georgia and Thurlow Streets, Offsite will catch passers-by with sculpture, video, installation and photography, with rotating shows that change twice a year. Zhang’s Horizon (Sky) captures rural schoolgirls in the artist’s native China, in frames expanded to monumental proportions.

Michael Zhang's The Stop is installed as part of the 2009 - 2011 Vancouver International Sculpture Biennale.

With the installation of Michael Zheng’s The Stop in Vanier Park and Charleston Park and Lithuanian artist Vladas Vildziunas’ Barbora outside Pacific Central Station, the 2009 – 2011 Vancouver International Sculpture Biennale officially kicked off in late summer. With plans to install 30 monumental outdoor works by international artists in 12 Vancouver neighbourhoods, Biennale organizers plan to expand on the last sculpture event (2005 – 2007). They have left six “legacy” works from the previous Biennale, and will add the 30 more through the fall. In the spring, organizers will add a new media component, with works in video, robotics, animation, and interactive technologies installed along the new Canada Line rapid transit system. The Biennale will also feature a new performance art aspect in 2010, with plans to draw viewers in to the possibilities of accessible, outdoor art, and engage the city through its Olympic year and beyond.

Members of the Coast Art Trust recently announced that that they have donated more than 100 works to the permanent collection of the University of Victoria’s Maltwood Museum. The Trust, set up in 2005 to collect groups of work by contemporary coastal B.C. artists — paintings, sculpture, collage, mixed media, and photography — has put together representation of three decades of work by 45 artists. Started by artists James Felter, Kal Opré, and Gregg Simpson, the collection includes work by Eldon Grier, Frank Perry, Sylvia Tait, and many others. The works will be kept as part of the Maltwood’s permanent collection, and will contribute to documenting the art of western B.C. in the second half of the 20th century.

A long-time resident of Winnipeg, Leo Mol left a lasting legacy to the city with the donation of a collection of 300 bronze sculptures and other works, many of which enhance the Leo Mol Sculpture Garden on the bank of the Assiniboine River. He was best-known for his immense bronzes — portraits of Queen Elizabeth II and Winston Churchill, now in the Winnipeg garden, the sculpture of John Diefenbaker on Parliament Hill, and three bronzes of popes, installed in the Vatican. Originally from the Ukraine, Mol settled in Winnipeg in the 1940s and never left, reflecting the Manitoba landscape in the sketches and paintings he made in addition to the famous bronzes. Mol died in Winnipeg on July 4 at the age of 94.

If Indian summer days are expected, there are worse places to spend a long Thanksgiving weekend than Gabriola Island, off the coast of B.C. The vibrant island art community there plans an open house of more than 30 artist’s and artisan’s studios all over the island. Hosted by the Gabriola Arts Council, visitors can design their own studio tours, and see painters, photographers, potters, jewelers, weavers, and more October 10 to 12.

Sculptor Liz Magor, an artist whose work consistently challenges interpretation and intellect, has been awarded the 6th annual Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts. Awarded by the Vancouver Art Gallery and funded by the Audain Foundation, the $30,000 prize is given each year to an outstanding British Columbia artist. Over a 30-year career, Magor has shown across Canada and internationally, including participation in the Venice Biennale and Documenta, exploring form, material, and meaning. Hand-formed objects in a multitude of media take on layers of story and context in each of her complex installations.

With an announcement in early April, Simon Fraser University ratcheted up the buzz on its eagerly awaited new downtown Vancouver location. Built on the site of the historic Woodwards Department Store on West Hastings, the new School for Contemporary Arts will open its doors in January 2010. To get ready, the school has already scheduled a lineup of arts programs to fill its public spaces, including an inaugural performance written and directed by Canadian theatre guru Robert Lepage (see the schedule at sfuwoodwards.ca). Designed by Henriquez Partners, the School is part of a larger, Woodwards-site community development, and will house undergraduate programs in fine and performing arts, as well as multiple theatre, performance, and gallery spaces.

The MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina has just made a great hire, with the appointment of Stuart Reid to the position of Executive Director. A curator and writer originally from Scotland, since 2001 he has been Director and Curator of the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery in Owen Sound, Ontario, a small collecting gallery with a strong commitment to the collection and exhibition of both historical and contemporary Canadian art. Reid is currently President of the Board of Directors of the Ontario Galleries Association, and sits on the exhibitions committee of Toronto’s Textile Museum of Canada.

The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria also welcomes a new Director and CEO – John Laughlin Tupper, most recently the Director of the Confederation Arts Centre in Charlottetown. An artist and grad of the School of Art at the University of Manitoba, Tupper has directed Canadian galleries including Winnipeg’s Plug-In and the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre.

Over in Vancouver, the recently opened Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art has appointed former Glenbow Museum CEO Michael Robinson as CEO. As part of the role, Robinson has been appointed Director of the Bill Reid Foundation, created in 1999 to preserve the work and legacy of seminal Northwest Coast artist and master carver Bill Reid.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery will keep a champion of Manitoba art and artists in the ranks with the appointment of Helen Delacretaz as Chief Curator. Beginning at the WAG in 1998, she has worked her way up to, most recently, Head of Exhibitions and Public Programs, bringing in popular international touring exhibitions and promoting the work of talented locals.

The Board of Directors of the Mendel Gallery in Saskatoon has made the first move toward a complete revitalization of the Gallery, throwing in a proposed name change while they’re at it. In early April they announced the intention to move to the city’s new River Landing development, on the south bank of the South Saskatchwan River, creating a new cultural district adjacent to the city’s new Persephone Theatre.

With a proposed price tag of $55 million, the Gallery is currently seeking Federal funding to complement committed funds already in place from the province and the city of Saskatoon. The idea behind the River Landing project, which will include some residential buildings, as well as dining, retail, and greenspace, is to create a cultural destination that will boost traffic to the Gallery substantially, helping to offset the cost of a purpose-built project.

The Mendel had already outgrown its current location, and discussions had been ongoing about whether to renovate the existing building, or to move. Mendel Executive Director Vincent Varga says that the original expansion plan, developed in 2001, had already become insufficient for the Gallery’s growth.

As part of this move forward, the Gallery will be renamed The Art Gallery of Saskatchewan, maintaining the current name with a Mendel Gallery inside the new building. The Gallery was originally named for its benefactor, local meatpacking magnate and art collector Fred Mendel.

The Sagebrush Studio gallery and art studios in southwestern Saskatchewan.

In 1996, artists Dean and Fran Francis embarked on an ambitious project just 30 miles south of Dean’s original family farm. “We just wanted to be out here, have a studio and paint,” he says about their home and work space, Sagebrush Studios, right by the Alberta boundary west of Leader, Saskatchewan. When his hometown church in Mantario came up for sale, he bought it and moved it south onto his 80 acres. It’s now one of three churches on the property devoted to art-making and exhibition.

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Artist Birthe Piontek.

German-born photographer Birthe Piontek is always looking for the individual — people who leave the beaten path in their quest for self-discovery. She’s a fan of oddball film director David Lynch, whose TV series Twin Peaks influenced her recent Idea of the North portfolio. “I’m drawn to the quirky, interesting odd characters that are at the end of the road,” she says. “I also love the atmosphere Lynch creates. It’s the whole idea of telling stories and creating atmospheres — of giving little hints instead of telling the whole thing.”

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E.J. Hughes, View of Shawnigan Lake, watercolour, 2004.

While recently clearing what remained of the historical Malaspina Hotel for a downtown revitalization project in Nanaimo, B.C., workmen uncovered a piece of Canadian art history. Painted in 1938 as a wall mural, E.J. Hughes’s Lieutenant Malaspina Sketching the Malaspina Gallery was once again brought to light.

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Artist Rita McKeough, awarded a 2009 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Vancouver painter Gordon Smith and Calgary-based installation artist Rita McKeough are among this year’s nine honourees for one of Canada’s most prestigious visual arts prizes. The Governor General’s Visual and Media Arts Awards were announced March 24 in Ottawa. Valued at $25,000 each, they’re awarded annually to recognize career achievement.

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Mary Bradshaw, director of the gallery at the Yukon Arts Centre.

Originally from Tofino on Vancouver Island, Mary Bradshaw has worked in the Yukon arts community since 2004. After a stint coordinating the Odd Gallery for the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, Bradshaw returned to the Yukon Arts Centre in Whitehorse as Acting Curator. When the Centre re-envisioned that role as Director, Bradshaw was hired. Now, she’s seeking curators to collaborate on shows for the only Class A gallery north of 60.

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The proposed new Prairie Art Gallery in Grande Prairie.

When the roof and the walls of the historic Prairie Art Gallery in Grande Prairie, Alberta collapsed under heavy snow on March 19, 2007, the art community in the region was left homeless. Not so the art itself. In the days and weeks that followed the disaster, gallery staff slowly and meticulously rescued the entire permanent collection from the ruins of the building.

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Artist Tim Lee.

Vancouver artist wins $50,000 prize

Tim Lee, a Vancouver-based artist working in photography, video, and sculpture, has won the 2008 Sobey Art Award, one of Canada’s premier awards for young artists. Given annually to an artist 40 years old or younger, the award comes with a $50,000 prize.

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Detail from Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Paradise Institute, 2001, The National Gallery of Canada, anonymous gift.

Following a remarkably successful, years-long partnership that has created groundbreaking work in installation, sound and video art, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have been awarded the third annual $50,000 Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award. Long associated with the arts community in Lethbridge and the University of Lethbridge, they currently divide their time between central B.C. and Berlin, Germany.

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Sculptor Steve Tobin with his Trinity Root in New York City.

Torode gifts Calgary with works by Steve Tobin, Jeff de Boer

Noted Calgary art collector John Torode, and his Torode Group have gifted the city with two additional public art works, one by an international sculptor, and another by a well-respected local artist. Following on Torode’s sponsorship of Dennis Oppenheim’s Device to Root out Evil, and Micah Lexier’s $1-million commission for a large-scale piece in the city’s Victoria Park neighbourhood, the company has announced new public works by sculptor Steve Tobin and local metal artist Jeff de Boer. Tobin has sculpted one of his signature root works (his piece Trinity Root in New York memorializes the events of 9/11, a stylized conception of the roots of a huge sycamore toppled in the World Trade Centre collapse). The 24-foot-high carbon steel Calgary Root will be centred at the intersection of 8 Avenue and 8 Street SW, where Torode will open its new corporate offices. Further east, by the company’s Hotel Arts, de Boer’s Light the Universe and Everything is an 18-foot sphere that glows with a light show. Best-known for his intricate and whimsical narrative-heavy metalworks, de Boer’s public work includes pieces at the Alberta Children’s Hospital and the Calgary Airport.

The Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver has launched a new series for visiting senior scholars that will enrich the city in scholarship and research into a variety of arts practices connected to anthropology. Called the Claude Lévi-Strauss Visiting Scholar Fund, the program was begun with a $50,000 donation by Vancouver philanthropist Dr. Yosef Wosk, which was then matched with $25,000 each from the University of British Columbia and the museum itself. The program will bring key international researchers and thinkers to Vancouver for study in structural or symbolic anthropology, mythology, visual or performative culture, critical museology, and similar areas of study. It is named after one of the pre-eminent anthropological scholars of the 20th century — Lévi-Strauss was particularly interested in the First Nations cultures of North America, and visited UBC twice in the early 1970s.

The Manitoba Arts Council has announced a new program partnership with the New Brunswick Arts Board, for artists to travel between the two provinces for creative residencies. The program will cover up to $10,000 for a one- to three-month residency, and will create an annual exchange between the two provinces, in artistic disciplines including visual and media arts, and literary and performing arts. Judith Flynn, chair of the Manitoba Arts Council, adds that preference for the first two years of the program will be given to applicants of Francophone descent “in accordance with our ongoing commitment to fostering the extremely strong and vibrant artistic and cultural Francophone community in Manitoba.”

Expect a renewed focus on contemporary Canadian art at Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada with the appointment of Marc Mayer as director. Director general of the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal for the past four years, Mayer put a focus on acquisitions and planning exhibitions for seminal Canadian artists of the late 20th century. Formerly head of visual art in the cultural services section of the Canadian Embassy in Paris, Mayer has held positions at galleries including the Brooklyn Museum, and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto.

Organized by Calgary-based curators Nicole Burisch and Anthea Black, Truck Gallery recently launched the Alberta art review site shotgun-review.ca, a partnership with a similar site based out of San Francisco and covering shows and exhibitions in the Bay Area. A line-up of news and views from public galleries and artist-run spaces around the province, the new site also reviews public talks and conferences with a focus on contemporary art.

Winnipeg’s Urban Shaman Gallery has named artist and arts administrator K.C. Adams its new director, taking over from Steve Loft, who left to become curator-in-residence at the National Gallery of Canada. Adams’ work as an artist has been seen in solo and group shows in galleries including the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, the Confederation Art Gallery in Charlottetown, and the Art Gallery of Alberta, and has been acquired into the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. She has previously worked as program coordinator at Urban Shaman, and has worked as an administrator at Winnipeg’s Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art, and as a mentor for Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art. An artist-run centre with a focus on Aboriginal art, Urban Shaman presents gallery exhibitions in all contemporary media, along with talks, film series, and online projects.

In early December, the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver found itself in an unusual situation. Third-year industrial design students had debuted Homes for Less in October, a creative answer to the problem of homelessness in lower mainland B.C. Designed in partnership with the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Advanced Wood Processing program, the end result was a collection of small homes that could be set up anywhere in the province.

Built for less than $1,500 each, the homes are pre-fabricated in componenets, many of them made of recycled materials, and can be assembled easily. They’re designed to accommodate one person, and were created with the input of homeless people, and directors of shelters and support agencies. Each one has 64 square feet of living space, plus a sleeping loft (washrooms are extra), and two of the shelters can fit in one standard parking space. "The main objective of this project was to construct an experience about the reality of homelessness that would connect with people more than the statistics we keep seeing — and get more of us talking about real solutions," Emily Carr associate professor Christian Blyt said about the project.

The homes were set up on Granville Island, close to the University buildings, but by mid-December, despite interest piqued among several lower mainland municipalities, the shelters didn’t have a post-exhibition home. At press time, Emily Carr was trying to find takers for the innovative, low-cost units.

Artist Fenwick Lansdowne.

Acclaimed wildlife painter Fenwick Lansdowne, often compared to John James Audubon for his intensely detailed bird studies, died July 26 in Victoria. Born in Hong Kong, he began his artistic career at 19 with a solo show at the Royal Ontario Museum... (continue...)

Daniel Barrow, Craft Room, mixed media, 2006. Barrow is shortlisted for the 2008 Sobey Art Award.

Runners-up for the annual Sobey Art Award will now receive $5,000 in prize money, which makes the Sobey easily one of the richest prizes in Canadian art. The increase is in addition to $50,000 awarded to the winner. Organized in conjunction with Scotiabank and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Sobey Art Foundation shortlists artists from regions across Canada (one criteria is that they have to be under 40), with the help of a curatorial panel. This year, the panel included Gemey Kelly of the Owens Art Gallery in New Brunswick, Nathalie de Blois of the Musee National des beaux-arts du Quebec, David Moos of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Anthony Kiendl of Winnipeg’s Plug-In ICA, and Scott Watson of the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery at the University of British Columbia.

Shortlisted artists for 2008 include Vancouver photographer and video artist Tim Lee, Winnipeg media artist Daniel Barrow, Mississauga-based mixed media and performance artist Terence Koh, Quebec-based installation artist Raphaëlle de Groot and Moncton, New Brunswick painter Mario Doucette. Work by shortlisted artists is on at the Royal Ontario Museum, where the winner and runners-up will be announced on October 1.

Glenbow president and CEO Jeff Spalding.

It’s no secret that artist and curator Jeff Spalding has a passion for collecting. Over almost two decades as director of the Art Gallery at the University of Lethbridge, he expanded the permanent collection from 212 pieces to more than 15,000 works. (continue...)

Diane Colwell, Bugaboo Spire with Glacier and Tarns, photograph, 2007, 30" X 30".

An account of Dennis Oppenheim's sculpture Device to Root Out Evil created for the Venice Biennale in 1997, and how come 2008 it ended up in Calgary... (continue...)

Michael Audain in his boardroom at Polygon Homes. On the wall, 2002 works by Tom Burrows.

By day, he’s chairman of Vancouver-based Polygon Homes, but Michael Audain’s real passion is the visual arts. He’s an enthusiastic collector and evidence of his passion for British Columbian artists can be seen on the walls of Polygon’s 9th floor office — paintings by Jack Shadbolt, Gordon Smith and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun mix with photorealist works by Ian Wallace, Rodney Graham and Tim Lee. His volunteer commitments include years as a director at the Vancouver Art Gallery — he now chairs their endowment fund.

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Most recently guest curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Jordan Strom has been appointed interim curator at the Kamloops Art Gallery. An artist, writer, and curator of contemporary art, Strom has taught video art and experimental film at Emily Carr University. Some of his recent projects have included curating a group exhibition about the connection between art and domestic space called Interior of Design at Vancouver’s Republic Gallery, and a collaborative installation at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

More than 80 artists from close to 30 countries will have work in the first-ever Edmonton Print International September 26 to October 17 in the city’s Capital Art Gallery and at satellite locations such as SNAP Gallery and the University of Alberta. Selected through a combined curatorial process and open juried competition — the jury included Tetsuya Noda from Japan, Belgium’s Maurice Pasternak, and Canadian print artist Davida Kidd, more than 1,200 works were submitted.

The point is to present both the art and the technique behind printmaking. Artist Walter Jule, general secretary for the EPI, says that traditional printmaking will be shown alongside contemporary digital techniques, and print-based sculptures, installations, and video projections, book plate miniatures, digital murals, and fabric.

Born from the remnants of 2002’s TrueNorth Biennial, EPI 2008 has been growing in momentum, in large part because of Jule. Edmonton, and particularly alumni and faculty of the Fine Arts program at the University of Alberta, have done particularly well in international competitions and awards during the past 30 years. The city’s print community has participated in international exchanges for decades, but this show will bring together the breadth of contemporary international printmaking into one setting. The EPI jury will award $30,000 in prizes during the show.

There are at least 50 print biennials around the world, most of them in Europe, and EPI hopes to fill a gap in North America. “I compare the development of printmaking to weather patterns,” says Jule. “A new movement starts in one place and it flows around the world, partly because of these kinds of shows.”

— Amy Fung

Vernon, B.C.-based landscape painter Jerry Markham will open a show on November 1 at Calgary’s Webster Galleries that brings together two generations of plein air painting. Markham, who has contributed to landscape painting instructional books and regularly leads plein air workshops, took a group of Calgary high school students into a city park in June to teach them some of the fundamentals of the technique. The idea behind the show, which will include work by the students, is to show the development of a painting, from outdoor studies to finished work.

Artist's rendering of Micah Lexier's Half K public sculpture, Calgary.

If expenditure is any indication, Calgary has reached a new high in the realm of public art acquisition. Launched by Torode Development for their downtown condo project Arriva, the $1 million art commission went to Toronto-based conceptual artist Micah Lexier, who has worked on multiple exhibitions and projects in Calgary, and whose new work, called Half K, is large and public enough to draw new attention to the city’s recently slumbering art scene. Made of a half-kilometre of painted steel pipe, Half K twists itself on a grand scale around the heritage school building that Torode has incorporated into the condo development. Lexier’s work was selected by a seven-member jury, headed by CEO John Torode, that included Alberta College of Art and Design president Lance Carlson, Calgary artist Chris Cran, and Rene Marcous-Devine, former art program director at Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park.

Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology has moved on to phase two of an ambitious expansion project that will increase its size by 50 per cent by 2010. To do that, the Museum will close its doors until early March of next year. By then, though a portion of the site will still be under construction, most of the Museum’s public spaces will be reopened. The full gala re-opening is planned for January 2010, coinciding with the Cultural Olympiad. Some of the Museum’s public programming will continue off-site during the full closure.

Diane Colwell, Bugaboo Spire with Glacier and Tarns, photograph, 2007, 30" X 30".

Digital photography has its fans and its uses, and it is revolutionizing photography, but the other side of the evolution of digital is the end of film-based processes. The prediction that the digital era would kill film is proving true — Polaroid announced in February it would no longer manufacture its instant film. (continue...)

James Hart, carving the interior of the new Bill Reid Gallery in Vancouver. Photo by Felicity Crawshaw.

Ten years after Haida artist Bill Reid died, his memory will come alive with the opening of the new Bill Reid Gallery for Northwest Coast Art in downtown Vancouver in early summer. Many of the Gallery’s 150 rarely-seen works were bequeathed to the Bill Reid Foundation by private donors, including Reid’s wife Martine, who wanted to create a lasting legacy for the sculptor and master carver. Finding a home for the collection — everything from a monumental bronze of a killer whale to miniature works in gold and silver — was a five-year quest, but Foundation president and former director of the Canadian Museum of Civilization George MacDonald says the space at 639 Hornby (formerly the Canadian Craft Museum) is a near-perfect fit.

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Collected guns make raw material for Pedro Reyes’ artwork.

One of the artists included in the Vancouver Art Gallery‘s spring show The Tree: From the Sublime to the Social, will take his work a step further, planting a tree in the city‘s Strathcona Park using a spade fashioned from guns collected in a firearms amnesty. After soliciting guns as part of an exchange program for food stamps in Culiacán, Mexico, artist Pedro Reyes fabricated more than 1,500 spades as part of his art work Palas por pistolas. Each of the spades was distributed to residents of Culiacán, with 27 reserved for sale to support the project. Each buyer had to agree to plant a tree with the spade, and the Vancouver Art Gallery is the first to fulfill Reyes‘ wish. A snake maple will be planted in the park, with the artist in attendance. Trained as an architect, much of Reyes‘ work centres on the social and physical environments of Mexico City. He has had solo shows at the Seattle Art Museum and the Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York, and participated in the 2003 Venice Biennale.

Stephen Borys, director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

In June, Dr. Stephen Borys will take over as the director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery. He arrives in the city from Florida, where he was curator of collections at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. Closely associated with Florida State University, it’s the largest university-affiliated gallery in the U.S. A teacher as well as a curator, Borys was born and raised in Winnipeg, going on to work as senior curator at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he also taught in the Art History department. With a PhD. in Art and Architectural History from McGill, an MA from the University of Toronto and a BA in Art History from the University of Winnipeg, among other roles, Borys was the assistant curator in European and American art at the National Gallery of Canada, and worked at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.

Winnipeg’s Urban Shaman Gallery has hired Melissa Wastasecoot as Interim Director, now that former director Steve Loft has taken up the newly created position of Aboriginal curator-in-residence at the National Gallery of Canada. Most recently president of Urban Shaman’s Board of Directors, Wastasecoot was asked to step in to see the gallery through the transitional phase before the Board chooses a new director in Fall 2008.

At the Nanaimo Art Gallery on Vancouver Island, Ed Poli has been appointed Gallery Manager. He comes into the position after a career in business, civic involvement, and community activity, including involvement with the Downtown Nanaimo Arts, Culture and Entertainment Committee, and the Downtown Business Development Committee. After a management career in the civil service, Poli was instrumental in the development of the city’s Community Economic Development Strategy.

George McLean (Walking Buffalo), Norman Luxton and Jonas Rider on the day Luxton was made honourary chief, 1935. Photo Byron Harmon.

Banff’s Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies has outdone itself with a summer exhibition two years in the making. The exhibition, called The Stuff of Legend: The Luxton Family in Banff and the Bow Valley, centres around the family of the remarkable adventurer and entrepreneur Norman Luxton, who was one of the earliest settlers in Banff. The show brings together documentation, photographs and artifacts of Luxton’s eventful life — he set out from the West Coast of B.C. in the dugout canoe Tilicum with Captain Jack Voss in 1901, traveling across 10,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean before abandoning the voyage in Australia — with the help of the Eleanor Luxton Historical Foundation.

Painter Mark Holliday will participate in the Studio Alberta show in England.

Five Alberta artists, with curator Donna Chyz of Artfirm Gallery in Calgary, head across the pond this summer to open a show in the city of Liverpool, which celebrates its status this year as European Capital of Culture. Hosted by the artist-run gallery Wolstenholme Projects, the show Studio Alberta will run from June 29 to July 13. Artists Carl White, Keith Diamond, Mark Holliday, Michael Jones and Laurie Steen have all been chosen to participate — most have a close family connection to England, and in some cases, to Liverpool. Chyz says that part of the motivation for putting the show together is to establish connections with that city’s art scene, with the aim of creating exhibition exchange opportunities between northern England and Alberta. The work created for Studio Alberta will be strongly focused on creating a sense of place that encompasses both locations, and will include painting, drawing, photography, and video.

Ceramic works by Lynne Johnson.

Almost 25 years in existence, the popular ceramics show and sale that hits the town of Metchosin on Vancouver Island runs May 30 to June 1 this year. Originally held in the lush garden of artists Judi Dyelle and Robin Hopper, who founded the event in 1984, the show has moved to the Metchosin Hall, where 11 member artists will exhibit with three invited guest artists and one special guest artist — University of Victoria sessional instructor and raku specialist Walter Dexter.

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Facilitated by the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, and the Sto:lo Tribal Council and Sto:lo Nation, a stone sculpture that had been in the collection of the Burke Museum of Natural History in Seattle returned back north across the border after 100 years away from home. Spirited away in the early 20th century, the sculpture is a stone representation of Sto:lo ancestor T‘xwelátse, following the legend that T‘xwelátse was turned to stone as a punishment for mistreating his wife. The Sto:lo people, who live in the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver, had been working on repatriating the sculpture for almost 15 years.

Virginia Boulay, Ravenscrag Road, acrylic on canvas, 4' X 5'. Available at For ArtSake Gallery, Eastend, SK.

Just east of the Cypress Hills and west of Grasslands National Park, in a part of Saskatchewan chronicled by two remarkable writers — Wallace Stegner and Sharon Butala — the rolling hills and endless skies have attracted a growing number of artists to the region. (continue...)

Kenojuak Ashevak, The Enchanted Owl, stonecut, 2006, 61 x 66 cm, Edition of: 25 (red), 25 (green). Printer: Eegyvudluk Pootoogook / Iyola Kingwatsiak. Reproduced with the permission of: Dorset Fine Arts.

Cape Dorset artist Kenojuak Ashevak, Alberta painter Alex Janvier and Vancouver-based conceptual artist, curator and teacher Eric Metcalfe are among this year‘s recipients of the Governor General‘s Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Created to honour career achievement by Canadian artists and presented by Governor General Michaëlle Jean, each of the Award-winners receives $25,000, making it one of the most valuable prizes in visual and media arts in Canada.

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Custom-painted Moodys by six international artists.

It started as a simple doodle, but within seven months, Lethbridge, Alberta-based artist Ted Stilson was the creator of the first Canadian do-it-yourself vinyl platform art toy. Moody, named for its vaguely cow-like appearance, is an eight-inch-tall three-dimensional articulated sculpture constructed of rotocast vinyl — providing an unlimited ‘canvas’ for artists. “I’m inspired by the incredible diversity of what's happening in the designer vinyl art movement,” says Stilson. “Artists and toy companies are definitely pushing the boundaries.” (continue...)

Winnipeg-based fine art photographer Don Reichert is among this year’s recipients of the Manitoba Arts Grants, worth $25,000. Awarded by the Manitoba Arts Council to artists in all disciplines, the grant will allow Reichert to produce a new series of digital images on canvas and paper. A major contributor to the visual arts in Manitoba, Reichert had his first solo show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Winnipeg in 1960, before teaching for 14 years at the University of Manitoba. His work is represented by the Martha Street Studio and Ken Segal Gallery, both in Winnipeg.

Norval Morrisseau near Beardmore, Ontario with his wife, Harriet, 1962 Photo: Steffich Fine Art

One of the most iconic painters in Canadian history, Norval Morrisseau passed away in Toronto on December 4 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. There are very few artists who are as strongly associated with a particular style as Morrisseau, who created and defined the Woodland style of painting. A unique update of traditional Ojibwa iconography, his style is instantly recognizable, and has been widely imitated. (continue...)

Painter Pascale Ouellet in the Corridor Collective space

A unique artistic endeavour is taking place in a nondescript building in the mountain town of Canmore, Alberta. For the past year, the Corridor Collective Studio and Gallery, the brainchild of Cheryl Baxter, who runs Canmore’s Elevation Gallery, and her husband Chris Beck, has provided five Bow Valley artists with a place to work, experiment and show their work.

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Wendy Peart, Rolling Composter, steel and organic material, 2003

An unexpected respite from the angst of public transit, Charles Fox’s audio installation Wildurban brings the soothing sounds of nature to Saskatoon’s downtown bus mall. Piped in on an eight-channel outdoor system, Fox’s meadow sound effects are interspersed with the gusting exhaust noise of the city’s buses, and Saskatoon Transit’s own Muzak soundtrack. It’s part of Aneco, a three-year civic initiative to break out of the box of public art with site-specific works including video projection, new media and photography.

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Chai Duncan, Bunny Valley, digital photograph

For Chai Duncan, the medium matters less than the exploration process. His work is varied and includes short narrative and experimental films, encaustic drawings, installations, and found objects encased in wax and resin, just to name a few. Recently, he’s returned to photography. “I grew up in a family involved in the photography business and have always used a camera the way some people use a sketch book.” His most recent series of works involve juxtaposing porcelain bird statues with old nature pictures and paintings, then photographing the results. “There’s a naivety and sweetness to how nature is represented in the figurines,” he says. “There’s a pathos captured in the images that speaks of a nature lost and a longing for what may have been. Yet in reality, it’s just fake on fake.”

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Simon Fraser University's new school for the Contemporary Arts. Design by Henriquez Partners

With an influx of cash from the BC government — almost $50 million announced in November — work continues on one of the most ambitious creative revitalization projects in Vancouver. Breaking ground in a location that’s popularly known as “the old Woodward’s building,” Simon Fraser University is building their new multi-disciplinary School for the Contemporary Arts on the city’s East Side. Part of a larger redevelopment of the site that is expected to become a cultural magnet for the city, the School is set to move there in late 2009.

The school has a 30-year track record in education for a variety of fine and performing arts disciplines, including dance, theatre, and visual arts, and this new site, designed by the Vancouver firm Henriquez Partners, will include a ground-floor contemporary art gallery that will have an artistic and curatorial teaching component.

Roald Nasgaard's Abstract Painting in Canada

One of the most heralded art books to hit the market in the past few months is Roald Nasgaard’s Abstract Painting in Canada, a lavishly illustrated compendium of almost one hundred years of Canadian painting history. Written over the course of five years by the former chief curator of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the book traces early attempts to break from the figurative and realist techniques by painters such as Kathleen Munn and Lawren Harris. It leaps through eras defined by artists, notably Jean-Paul Riopelle, and includes western Canadian masters such as Jack Shadbolt and Takao Tanabe. Published by Douglas & McIntyre, Nasgaard’s book concludes with a forward look to the promise of the 21st century.

Other notable books recently published include the long-awaited study of the life and work of celebrated Saskatchewan-born abstract painter Otto Rogers. Published by Radius Books and called, simply Otto Donald Rogers, the book finely illustrates the breadth of Rogers’ talent. The book is available through galleries that represent the painter, including Gallery Jones in Vancouver and the Paul Kuhn Gallery in Calgary.

Rory MacDonald, graffiti kiln (flow blue), portable kiln, glaze.

Rory MacDonald, a Regina-based ceramic artist known for work that blurs the line between functional and decorative ceramics, has won the 2007 Winifred Shantz Award for Ceramists, one of the biggest visual arts awards given to Canadian ceramists. Given annually by the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario in partnership with local patron Winifred Shantz, the award provides $10,000 toward professional development.

An assistant professor in the Fine Art department at the University of Regina, MacDonald has established a practice that easily breaks the boundaries of ceramic art. His work weaves the functional history of fired clay — as architectural embellishment, building material, and industrial component — into innovative fine art. Most recently, his work was included in a group show organized by Regina’s MacKenzie Art Gallery called Mobile Structures, about the line between architecture and ceramic art.

Arabella Campbell, winner of the 2007 RBC Painting Competition with her winning work, Physical Facts Series #6

Arabella Campbell, a painter based in Vancouver, took home the national prize for the 2007 RBC Canadian Painting Competition. Awarded the $25,000 top prize for her work Physical Facts Series #6, Campbell was among 15 semi-finalists, chosen from almost 700 entries from across Canada. Another western-based painter, Chris Millar from Calgary, received one of two Honourable Mentions for his work FACEBITOR — The Untimely Transmogrification of the Problem. Established by RBC to recognize emerging Canadian painters, the annual competition leads to a traveling exhibition showcasing all the semi-finalists.

Vancouver artist Ken Lum, winner of the 2007 Hnatyshyn Award

Acclaimed Vancouver-based multidisciplinary artists have had a good run at the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Awards. The first annual $25,000 Hnatyshyn Award, given in 2006, went to Stan Douglas, and this year’s was won by painter, sculptor, photographer and conceptual artist Ken Lum. Known for his large-scale site-specific works, including There is no place like home, installed on the façade of Vienna’s Kunsthalle, and Four Boats Stranded: Red and Yellow, Black and White, on the roof of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Lum’s work as an artist, teacher and curator is dedicated to dissolving the boundaries between art, culture and politics.

Established by the late Right Honourable Ramon Hnatyshyn, former Governor General, the Foundation supports a selection of important awards in the arts, volun-teerism and law. The Visual Arts Awards are given annually, one to an artist in mid-career, and one to an outstanding Canadian curator. This year’s curatorial award was given to Montreal-based gallery director Louise Déry.

Martha Sturdy's recent sculptural donation to the Vancouver General Hospital

Vancouver-based sculptor Martha Sturdy has brought a splash of colour to the Wellness Garden at the Vancouver General Hospital with the donation of a steel sculp-ture painted poppy red. Made of two abstract figures, at 28 feet and 24 feet, Sturdy says the work symbolizes the bonds between beings — doctor and patient, parent and child, husband and wife. It was donated as part of the hospital’s Art Committee initiative, which has brought more than 500 artworks by mostly Canadian artists to the foyers, lobbies and waiting rooms of VGH buildings. A long-time supporter of the hospital, Martha Sturdy is known for her three-dimensional works of fine and decorative art in steel, brass and resin.

Steve Loft, who until very recently was director of the Urban Shaman artist-run centre in Winnipeg, has been appointed to the position of first aboriginal curator-in-residence at Ottawa’s National Art Gallery. Further sign of the Gallery’s commitment to bringing Canadian aboriginal art to a more prominent place in the public consciousness, Loft’s appointment is particularly promising because of his track record for developing and supporting the work of contemporary artists in photography, video, and new media…With the retirement of president and CEO Mike Robinson, Calgary’s Glenbow Museum has appointed noted artist Jeffrey Spalding to the position. President of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Spalding was most recently director and curator of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. He was also instrumental in building the permanent collection of the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery by thousands of important works. As an artist, Spalding has participated in solo and group exhibitions at venues including the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the McMichael Canadian Collection…One of Jeffrey Spalding’s protégés, Ryan Doherty has been appointed curator at Lethbridge’s Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG). Returning to Lethbridge after finishing a Master of Arts from Bard College in New York, Doherty previously worked as a curatorial assistant at the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, and as assistant curator at SAAG. In his spare time he also curated the current show of abstract work at the U of L, Big Bangs …The MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina has recently appointed Michelle LaVallee as assistant curator. An interdisciplinary artist and curator originally from Newmarket, Ontario, LaVallee was a recipient of the Canada Council’s grant program for aboriginal curators, and had been developing programming in 2007 for A Space Gallery in Toronto.

Noted BC artists Dana Claxton, Jayce Salloum and Henry Tsang have been commissioned to create new original work in contemporary media as part of a unique funding program tied to the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. The work is underway through the Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art in Kelowna, which was awarded $107,000 for creation and development of the commission by the Arts Partners in Contemporary Art, a partnership between a group of funders including The City of Vancouver, the Canada Council, and the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

The project, titled Edges of Diversity, shares a $1-million grant with only seven other arts organizations in the province, and is earmarked for development of a creative project that underscores the province’s diverse culture.

Joshua Choi, a painter based in Vancouver and Etobicoke, Ontario, has been awarded the 2007 Kingston Prize, given biannually for portraiture. His painting, titled Emily, was chosen from 30 finalists among more than 200 entries for the 2007 award, this year increased to $10,000 through an endowment from the W. Garfield Weston Foundation.

From the Winnipeg Art Gallery Show Post Secret, November 24, 2007 to February 3, 2008

Only shortly preceding the MySpace-fuelled craze for sharing our personal information with the world, in 2004 Washington, D.C.-based Frank Warren began a public art project with a unique twist. He handed out blank postcards, and left some lying around for pickup in public places. (continue...)

Viles, Caleb Speller, collage

There are probably many artists in Victoria who would like to make art as easily as Caleb Speller seems to. There are probably also a lot of artists, not to mention non-artists, who think that any six-year-old could do what he does. But the strength of his drawing practice resides precisely in his ability to emulate the uncensored world of a child. (continue...)

Vaughan Grayson sketching, July 24, 1937. Photo Courtesy: Leonard Chatwin

During a life that spanned 100 years, Vaughan Grayson became particularly adept in recording the landscape of the west in paintings, silkscreens, sketches, and words. Her particular subject was the Canadian Rockies, though later in life she recorded the views near her house in the Okanagan, and traveled extensively with her paintbox. In a finely curated show now on at Banff’s Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, every aspect of Grayson’s life as an artist and traveler is represented.

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(Scenes from the House Dream, Treehouse), David Hoffos, detail, mixed media installation with miniature model, video, audio, 2007. Photo courtesy the artist and TrepanierBaer

Lethbridge artist David Hoffos has become known for his unique installations — elaborate models of eerily empty spaces punctuated by translucent video image projections. (continue...)

Members of the Skidegate Dance Group at the opening of the Haida Heritage Centre

Construction began in 2003, but the dream to build the Haida Heritage Centre at Kaay Llnagaay (Sea Lion Town) in Skidegate on Haida Gwaii started more than 30 years ago. The community wanted a focal point for Haida culture says Haida Gwaii Museum curator Nika Collison. The vision, forged between partners like the Skidegate Band Council, the museum and Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site, included a place to learn, teach and work according to the Haida way of life. (continue...)

The Reves d'Automne Festival in Baie St-Paul, Quebec

When the annual week-long festival of art and culture unfolds in Baie St-Paul, Quebec September 21, the work of four western painters will be showcased in a cross-cultural celebration of the province’s Charlevoix region. (continue...)

The staff members of the Prairie Art Gallery in Grande Prairie, Alberta have been getting creative since the collapse of a piece of the gallery’s roof in March. Beginning with an emergency removal of the collection, gallery directors including executive director / curator Robert Steven arranged to have Tara Fraser of Vancouver conservation firm Fraser Spafford-Ricci supervise the moving, drying and restoration of the work. As Steven says, “Although some items were damaged, nothing was destroyed.” In the spring they moved into a temporary space on 97 Avenue in Grande Prairie, installing the collection on all the available wall space.

Since the move, the gallery has carried on with almost all their public programs, including two fundraisers that raised about $100,000 (supplementing a $15,000 emergency donation from the Community Foundation of Greater Grande Prairie), and they’ve altered their in-house school program — now they’re taking the art into the schools with a temporary initiative called Artist in the Classroom. In the time since the collapse, more than 800 of the region’s schoolchildren have taken part. The plan for the new, fully renovated gallery space is to open in 2009 with double the capacity of their older gallery. Temporary exhibitions have been postponed until then, but, as Steven adds, the gallery is consistently “searching for innovative programming that can be delivered without an exhibition space.”

Untitled, Eli Bornowski, acrylic on canvas

More than 650 artists from across the country were considered for the finalist list of the 2007 RBC Canadian Painting Competition. Awarded to one national winner, who will take home a prize of $25,000, and two honourable mentions, who will each receive $15,000, the Competition recognizes professional Canadian painters within the first five years of their art careers.

Semi-finalists from western Canada in 2007 include Eli Bornowsky, Arabella Campbell and Angus Ferguson of Vancouver, Chris Millar of Calgary and Shaun Morin of Winnipeg. The jury assessed more than 1,400 works in narrowing the field down to the 15 semi-finalists, which include five artists from central Canada and five from the eastern region. The winners, named this fall, will join all the semi-finalists in a touring exhibition that will travel to galleries across Canada, including the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in Vancouver. Established in 1999, the competition is a showcase for the work of young artists, and winners’ work becomes part of the extensive RBC corporate art collection.

Artist Myfanwy Pavelic

Portraitist of luminaries including Pierre Trudeau, Katherine Hepburn and musician Yehudi Menuhin, Victoria-based artist Myfanwy Pavelic passed away on May 7 at the age of 91. Born Myfanwy Spencer in 1916, she was the granddaughter of Vancouver Island retail magnate David Spencer, and in her early years she counted Emily Carr as a mentor. Travelling across Canada during the Second World War, Pavelic painted portraits to raise money for the Red Cross war efforts. She would then spend most of the next 30 years moving back and forth between Victoria and New York with her husband Nikola Pavelic, son of the former prime minister of Yugoslavia.

Pavelic was awarded the Order of Canada in 1984, and her portrait of Pierre Trudeau was unveiled at the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa in 1985. One of the few Canadians to land an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Pavelic became known for her detailed portraits of the famous and cultured people she met, while continuing to create commissioned portraits and her own still lifes. During her lifetime she donated extensive collections of her work to the Maltwood Gallery at the University of Victoria, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and the Sooke Museum, north of the city. The Morris Gallery in Victoria will hold an exhibition and sale from her private collection in late November, called Myfanwy Pavelic – The Last Show.

Transient Architectures for New Tomorrows n. 5: The Bluff (Pursuant to Supreme Court of British Columbia, Vancouver Registry #S062778), detail, 2007, two inkjet C-print photographs mounted on Sintra panels, rotary oak, brass, steel screws, 68" x 70" x 20" each panel Blaine Campbell

Blaine Campbell, a recent grad of Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, took home the $5,000 first prize at the 2007 BMO 1st Art Invitational Student Art Competition. His photographic work, Transient Architectures for New Tomorrows, is a diptych that looks into the relationship between photography and nature, and the moment in reality that a photograph captures. Shot in a forested area north of Vancouver that has been cut through with highways, the work is presented on a handbuilt frame that curves toward the viewer.

Created five years ago to recognize young artists studying at the post-secondary level, in 2007 the 1st Art Invitational got more than 175 entries. In addition to the national grand prize, 13 regional winners were each awarded $2,500. Regional winners in 2007 included Kathleen Mangelana of Inuvik, Calgary’s Angela Lane, and Jessie MacDonald of Regina. The winners’ work will be installed in BMO branches across Canada and be incorporated into the BMO corporate collection.

Ron Terada, You have left the American Sector, 2005, 3M Diamond Grade vinyl and exterior vinyl on extruded aluminum, galvanized steel, wood, 120" x 120"

Two western Canadian artists have made the shortlist for the 2007 Sobey Award, which will award the $50,000 prize this fall. Chosen from a group of 25 artists, the finalists include Vancouver installation artist Ron Terada and Rachelle Viader Knowles, who is currently on staff at the University of Regina. Created in 2002 to recognize Canadian artists under 40, the Sobey is one of the country’s richest art prizes. This year’s finalists were chosen by a panel that included curators from across Canada, notably Dan Ring of the Mendel Gallery in Saskatoon, and Helga Pakasaar of Vancouver’s Presentation House.

Ron Terada, who won the 2006 Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for mid-career artists from the Canada Council, has work in the public collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Originally from the UK, Regina-based video and installation artist Rachelle Viader Knowles has had solo shows at galleries including the Art Gallery of Calgary, the MacKenzie Gallery in Regina and the Art Gallery of Windsor. Each of the Sobey finalists are included in a group show this fall at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

Painting by Andrew Kiss

Alberta-based landscape painter Andrew Kiss has joined the Pembina Institute as their new official artist, supporting the environmental organization through art sales and donations to a silent auction. The primary venue in the fall for exhibition and bidding on Kiss’s work will be at a series of Green Planet Concerts for Pembina (with headliner Art Garfunkel) at the Jubilee Auditorium in Calgary and Edmonton, and the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver.

Originally based in Drayton Valley, Alberta, the Pembina Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to informing the public about environmental issues including climate change and alternative energy sources. They now maintain offices across the country, and have been particularly instrumental in the growth of wind power, particularly in western Canada.

Throughout the 40 years of his painting career, Kiss has been involved with environmental, conservation and wildlife organizations in Canada, donating work and creating limited editions for groups including the BC Wildlife Federation and Ducks Unlimited. A painter as well as an illustrator of children’s books, Kiss has said that the landscape of the west and the settings for his paintings have made it increasingly important to be directly involved in the preservation of the land.

The Kelowna Art Gallery has just hired Liz Wylie, who has moved out to the Okanagan from Toronto to take on the position of curator. With ten years’ experience at the University of Toronto Art Centre, she is a graduate of Concordia, and York University. For more than 20 years she has project managed exhibitions across the country and has taught at the University of Toronto, the University of Alberta, Brock University and the University of Saskatchewan. She has also contributed to the understanding and awareness of Canadian contemporary art as an exhibition reviewer. One of the largest public art galleries in the interior of B.C., the Kelowna Art Gallery hosts local, national and international exhibitions and anchors the cultural district of the Okanagan city.

As Liz Wylie arrives at KAG, Joan Stebbins is departing her position as curator of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge after almost 30 years with the gallery. Beginning as a gallery attendant in 1979, she was named director and curator in 1985, a post she held until 1999 when the two jobs split and she chose the role of curator. A keystone in the Lethbridge and Alberta contemporary art scenes, Stebbins has curated more than 200 exhibitions, including many that went on to tour the country. The leading-edge tone that she has brought to the gallery and the city through residencies and exhibitions helped put Lethbridge on the map of contemporary Canadian art.

Thirty portrait artists from across the country have been shortlisted for the 2007 Kingston Prize, which will be awarded in October as part of a gala exhibition in Gananoque, Ontario. With an award of $3,000 for first place and two honourable mentions of $500 each, the prize is specifically for paintings and drawings in portraiture. This is the second time the prize has been awarded (the first was in 2005) and the call to artists drew more than 200 entries. A project initiated by the Kingston Arts Council in Kingston, Ontario, the Prize jury chose five western artists among the 30 on the shortlist. They include Jesse Garbe of Maple Ridge, BC, Janine Hall of Calgary, and Justin Ogilvie, Jay Senetchko and Dylan Wolney of Vancouver.

There could be a creative, if not bright, side to the devastating storm that blew through Vancouver’s Stanley Park last September, knocking down trees over 41 hectares on the level of a hurricane. The storm, which attracted the attention of international media and closed the park for periods of clean-up, has sparked a call for artistic response. The Vancouver Parks Board and the Stanley Park Ecology Society have invited artists to conceive of public art projects that will not only “memorialize” the downed trees, but will also use ecologically sound materials, or plants and materials that are native to the park. The call has gone out for projects, which will be built through the summer of 2008, that express the relationship between the community, the park and the world (in part, the world’s weather, which so significantly changed the face of Stanley Park). The goal is to create a collaboration between artists, ecologists and park stewards, and to help along the restoration of the park’s beloved natural areas.

Sculptor Dale Roberts at the James Bay Art Walk, in Victoria Photo Courtesy John Harris

The oldest community in Victoria, the scenic neighbourhood of James Bay extends from the city’s inner harbour around Beacon Hill Park, and is home to Emily Carr’s birthplace, now known as Carr House. It’s a place that has attracted artists for more than 100 years, and today is home to dozens of artists and artisans. The annual James Bay Art Walk runs September 15 to 16 this year, bringing together many of the community’s artists’ studios and small gallery spaces. Visitors are invited to walk the self-guided tour among spaces for working artists including ceramists, painters, photographers and artisans, picking up the tour map from local businesses or from the James Bay Market at Superior and Menzies on Saturdays.

Daphne Odjig, Spiritual Renewal, 1984. Laurentian University purchase: B.A. McDonald Memorial Fund and the Canada Council Art Bank 1984. Photo Courtesy: Krista Young

Manitoulin, Ontario-born and Okanagan-based painter Daphne Odjig is the subject of a wide-ranging retrospective this fall at the Art Gallery of Sudbury in Ontario, and as part of the show, The National Gallery in Ottawa has partnered with AGS to produce a catalogue in English, French and Ojibway. (continue...)

Cranes, 2006, photograph by Tedd Kerr

Opening June 22 and running through July 4, Edmonton’s popular annual celebration of art and design takes over a multitude of public spaces downtown. The Works Art and Design Festival is focused on discovery of new work, and presenting surprising and unexpected juxtapositions between artists and exhibitions in all genres of fine art, craft, and practical design. Free to the public, the Festival is in its 22nd year in 2007. Highlights this year include a show of stone and bone carvings from Canada’s Far North, including carving demonstrations on the city’s popular Sir Winston Churchill Square. Ken Rinaldo will build his elegant and symmetrical installation of six robotic arms, their exposed wires and circuitry as elemental to the piece as the robots’ movement. A major exhibition of fine art glass is a juried show overseen by the Glass Art Association of Canada. Ted Kerr’s industrial photographic landscapes, shot while he was artist in residence at Shell’s Scotford refinery, are collected for the Festival, along with Vancouver painter Val Nelson’s new show, Minding the Gap.

Just What is it that Makes Asian Men So Appealing, Brendan Tang

Kamloops-based artist Brendan Lee Satish Tang creates quirky and ornate clay hybrids that blend classic ceramic traditions, pop-culture appropriation and contemporary criticality, placing his work at the intersection of the post-modern discourse on art versus craft. (continue...)

, Stan Douglas, Winner of the 2007 Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award

Earlier this year, the inaugural $25,000 Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award went to internationally renowned Vancouver-based photographer, filmmaker and multimedia artist Stan Douglas. (continue...)

Salish basket with tumpline, squamish Nation

In 2007 this city is embracing the art and culture of its Squamish roots with a series of exhibitions, cultural talks, artists’ demonstrations and other events. Growing out of the city’s designation as one of the 2006 Cultural Capitals of Canada, the centrepiece of this months-long event, called the Squamish Sculpture Symposium, is the dedication of a new piece of public sculpture in Ambleside Park. Called Sna7m Smánit (Spirit of the Mountain) designed by artist Xwa lack tun, the sculpture, featuring traditional Squamish symbolism, was unveiled in March. To celebrate the sculpture, and a renewed focus on Squamish and Coast Salish contributions to the community, the city planned events including the Stitúyntm, Enduring Traditions exhibition at the West Vancouver Museum through August 31. A selection of traditional and contemporary Coast Salish objects and artworks, this elegant exhibition has many pieces on public display for the first time. The Museum will also host a lecture series on the cultural traditions of Northwest Coast First Nations on May 9 and 23, June 13, and July 4, and talks on local First Nations cuisine and clothing.

Coquitlam's Evergreen Cultural Centre will feature Marianna Schmidt's works on paper

Arriving in Vancouver in 1953 at the age of 35, a refugee from the communist upheaval in Hungary, Marianna Schmidt took a night job as a lab technician, and began attending classes at the Vancouver School of Art. (continue...)

Electric Skin, video installation at Back Gallery Project by Suzy Webster

After eight years as a curator, most recently at Vancouver’s Buschlen Mowatt Gallery and OnePointSix Gallery, Monica Reyes has stepped out on her own with an unusual and slightly hidden space behind the Monte Clark Gallery. Called The Back Gallery Project, she’s opened with representation for three young artists, showing experimental work in new materials and new technology. Opened January 18 with an installation by Sascha Yamashita, she added a show by Suzy Webster called Electric Skin, featuring a new form of reactive fabric that glows blue when the wearer breathes on it. The space opens into the alley behind Monte Clark. “I wanted the location to be an important consideration,” Reyes says. “I wanted it to feel slightly underground.” Her plan is to add two more artists this year, and to keep programming shows that attract a new generation of collectors. “It’s a slow process of development,” she says. “But I definitely want it to evolve.”

Entuck, at Vancouver's Coastal Peoples Gallery by Joe David

A combination of bodily fluids and mussel shell have inspired the master carver Joe David to create an unusual new work that mixes modern forms and materials with an ancient West Coast legend. His new work, Entuck, is a ghostly, alien form in milky blown glass, peering out of a half mussel shell carved from yellow cedar. (continue...)

Vancouver Art and Economies, is published by Arsenal Pulp Press

Within the past two decades, Vancouver has established itself as one of the cultural centres of North America, partly due to increased international interest in cultural communities outside the main thoroughfares (London, Paris, New York) but also because of the underlying cohesiveness and shared vision among the city’s artists, curators and gallerists. Just released from Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver Art and Economies, edited by Melanie O’Brian, is a series of 20 essays on the evolution of Vancouver into a viable cultural destination. Particularly timely on the eve of the 2010 Olympics’ international spotlight, the book tears into the notion of the city’s cultural definability, and examines the historical, critical and political elements that have come together to form Vancouver’s artistic identity.

Daphne Odjig, winner of a 2007 Governor General Award in Visual Arts Media

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the Canada Council recently raised the amount awarded for its annual Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts from $15,000 to $25,000 per artist. (continue...)

With a unique approach to taking art into the streets, the Martha Street Studio in Winnipeg will celebrate on June 2 with the Steamroller Print Festival. Home of the Manitoba Printmakers’ Association, Martha Street will celebrate this public event and open house with hands-on workshops, music, food, and an opportunity to see large-scale print works created with a full-sized steamroller. With a mandate that includes classes, residencies, public exhibitions, and print sales, the Festival is an innovative way to take printmaking to the people.

It’s turning out to be a great year for Saskatchewan sculptor Joe Fafard. Invited to the Governor General’s home at Rideau Hall earlier in the year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Canada Council (one of a select group of distinguished artists from across Canada to be invited), the artist also received a Lieutenant Governor’s Arts Award in the category of Lifetime Achievement, and Regina’s Mackenzie Gallery will open a retrospective of his work in September. Best known for his life-like bronze sculptures of farm animals and ordinary people, Fafard works from his own bronze foundry outside Regina, the Julienne Atelier. After leaving the Mackenzie, the show Joe Fafard Retrospective will move to the National Gallery in Ottawa before embarking on a two-year tour of Canadian galleries.

With a collection of the very early works of B.C. watercolourist Toni Onley, the Art Gallery of the South Okanagan in Penticton has decided to honour the painter by renaming its Foyer Gallery after the artist. After moving to Penticton in the early 1950s with his two small daughters, Onley won a scholarship to attend the Institute Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. To fund the trip, Onley sold off 250 of his works at $5 each in Penticton, raising enough to travel south, where he stayed for three years. Over the years, the Gallery has collected a series of these auction works, giving them a unique picture of the painter’s early career.

The Winnipeg Arts Council and the City of Winnipeg have chosen Jennifer Stillwell to design and build a new piece of public art for Waterfront Drive, at the intersection of historical and emerging cultural districts along the banks of the Red River. The Drive links significant historic districts, including Portage and Main, the Exchange District, The Forks, and the site for the planned new Museum of Human Rights. The plan is for Stillwell to meet with community groups, the City, and the Arts Council to develop artwork for the site. A semi-finalist for the Sobey Award in 2002 and 2006, Jennifer Stillwell is known for her site-specific and site-responsive work in galleries and public spaces, and her video and sculpture projects. Chosen for this project from 45 artists from across Canada who responded to the call to artists, she has shows upcoming at the Darling Foundry in Montreal, and at Winnipeg’s Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art.

Rollercoaster, 2005, photograph, 48" x 48", Edition of three by Toni Hafkenschied

Photographer Toni Hafkenscheid says children are often drawn to his landscape work. Not surprising considering how he makes our big world appear toy-like. (continue...)

The Art Gallery of Ontario is opening its newest awards program up to an international field of fine art photographers. Called the Grange Prize, the $50,000 annual award will have a short-list of five artists, two or three of them from Canada and the rest international artists, chosen from a distinct region of the world each year. International recipients will be offered artist-in-residence opportunities at Canadian art schools or art centres, and a photography student or practicing photographer will be selected to intern with each international candidate. Currently the largest prize of its kind in Canada, the recipients of the first Grange Prize will be announced next spring, as the Gallery gets set to finish a spectacular, Frank Gehry-designed expansion.

Winner of the Manitoba Arts Council Award of Distinction is Aganetha Dyck

Lifelong Winnipeg resident and much-loved artist and mentor Aganetha Dyck has been honoured with the $30,000 Award of Distinction from the Manitoba Arts Council. The fifth Manitoba artist to be given the award, Dyck was a shoo-in for the recognition. The award was created to recognize senior artists who represent the province on a national and international scale. Judith Flynn, chair of the Council, says of Dyck that she “began her professional artistic practise later in life and has since consistently produced original and thought-provoking work.” Dyck is best known for her collaborations with honeybees, in which she places ordinary household objects in beehives — the results are elaborately waxed natural sculptures that leave a slightly eerie impression on the viewer. Her contributions to the artistic and cultural communities in Winnipeg have also been extensive. She currently sits on the Board of Directors at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, and she has devoted 20 years to mentoring young artists as part of MAWA, Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art.

A few years ago, Shirley Brown, an artist from Deloraine, Manitoba, had her imagination sparked by the chance discovery of a clutch of bird skeletons in a cook stove on her family farm (see page 41). The show she created from that discovery, Vestiges, has since traveled extensively in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and will open this summer at the Art Gallery of Swift Current. In April, Brown received a substantial grant from the Manitoba Arts Council to create the second phase of this artistic exploration. Called The End of Civilization, it will recreate her imagined view of primitive history through light, transparencies, and images. Brown is one of seven established artists in all disciplines to receive up to $25,000 as part of the Council’s Major Arts Grants program. The program designates funds to allow artists to devote time and energy to a significant project for up to one year. Other grant recipients in the visual arts this year include Sigrid Dahle, former director and curator of the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in Brandon, and multi-media artist Marcel Gosselin, who will create a series of large-scale diptychs in digital stereogram. Wanda Koop, one of the province’s most distinguished painters, will create six large paintings under the name At the River of Secrets, exploring the clash of nature and technology, and sculptor and installation artist Jennifer Stillwell, who has just been commissioned by the Council for a major public art project, will produce a new body of work interpreting architecture and its place in the environment.

One of British Columbia’s most significant painters, Edward John (E.J.) Hughes, died on January 5, 2007 at the age of 93 in his hometown of Duncan on Vancouver Island. After graduating from the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr School of Art + Design), Hughes spent a few years as a commercial artist before being commissioned as an official war artist during World War II. Returning to Vancouver Island, he continued to develop the rich, elemental landscapes that he would paint throughout his career. A chronicler of life on the Island, he captured countless vivid views of the region’s fishing industry, unique flora, coastal inlets, and his beloved Shawnigan Lake near Duncan. With work in the permanent collections including those of the National Gallery of Canada and the Vancouver Art Gallery, Hughes was named to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, the Order of Canada, and to the Order of British Columbia.

Robert Steven, director of the Prairie Art Gallery in Grande Prairie, was praised locally and nationally for averting a potential disaster March 19 when half of the gallery’s roof fell in. At work early in the Gallery’s historic building, Steven noticed a crack in a central roof beam. With children due to arrive for the playschool in the building’s basement, the director quickly evacuated the Gallery and kept people from entering. The roof gave way soon after, but not before Steven was also able to move some of the art collection from the damaged space. Though he received a special “life saving” award for his actions at the recent Canadian Museums Association conference in Ottawa, Steven has acknowledged that the timing of the disaster is particularly bad. Now with suspended operations for at least six months, the Gallery was about to embark on an ambitious, multi-million-dollar expansion and renovation project that would incorporate a library and new gallery space into the existing building. Groundbreaking on the project was set for this spring.

Launched in April at the Triangle Gallery in Calgary, painter and sculptor Fred Spina’s new book of poetry and paintings is called Arctic Notes and Prairie Places. Published by Bayeux Arts, the book is inspired by Spina’s recent work in the Arctic region of Kitikmeot, where he’s been working for the past four years as a counselor and art therapist. Best known for his public murals and sculptures around Calgary, Spina’s new work takes the reader high above the Arctic Circle in words and images.

After 18 months on public display, the works in the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale were auctioned off by Christie’s in the spring, raising close to $3 million for the ongoing operation of the event and to establish an endowment for future public art in the city. The Biennale included 24 works by local and international artists including Sorel Etrog, Yoko Ono, John Henry, Bill Reid and Dennis Oppenheim. An interactive experience for visitors to the city, the show included a cell phone tour, and an opportunity for viewers to participate in voting on favourite pieces and to blog about their impressions.

At its Annual General Meeting in September, the Calgary Regional Arts Foundation (CRAF) voted to dissolve and merge with the recently created administrative organization Calgary Arts Development Authority (CADA). Created in March, 2005 in the wake of an ongoing city-wide debate about the value of arts and culture in a city driven by business and entrepreneurialism, CADA was put in place by the City of Calgary to bring together arts organizations under a single umbrella for promotion, investment and strategic direction. In place for 37 years as the city’s arts funding agency, it made sense to fold CRAF into the authority, to centralize granting and funding processes. The new organization is now fully responsible for allocating municipal grants to arts organizations for operating costs and special projects. In the visual arts, CADA currently grants a variety of public institutions and organizations, including the Art Gallery of Calgary, the Leighton Foundation, the Triangle Gallery, and the Alberta Printmakers Society.

The City of Calgary Public Art Program has commissioned acclaimed North Carolina-based sculptor Thomas Sayre to create a multi-stage outdoor work that incorporates elements of water conservation, micro-climate, and prairie landscape. Known for his large-scale organic sculptures and “earthcastings”, Sayre will transform the landscape outside the city’s new public utilities building, the Water Centre. Working with landscape architect Doug Carlyle, Sayre’s design will combine retention ponds and runnels that will capture and filter storm runoff, banked by prairie perennials, benches, and landscaping elements.

When one of Shell Chemicals’ main worksites was getting set to go into “turnaround”—a six-week maintenance phase for clean-up and repair, managers decided to try something different. They hired Edmonton fine art photographer Ted Kerr to become artist-in-residence at the company’s Scotford site northeast of Edmonton, documenting the work and the workers in new ways.

Creating a blog about the project at the same time, Kerr produced a series of photographs of the inner workings of an industrial site that are rarely seen. In October, the work went on display for plant employees and the local community. “I was moved by the generosity and willingness of all the skilled workers and craftsmen who shared their time and their job with me,” Kerr writes of the experience. “Very early on, I saw my role as not only the artist in residence, but also communicator to the outside world about the work that was being done at the site.”

The new CEO of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria is Shirley Madill

After an extensive search, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria welcomed new director and CEO Shirley Madill, who started at the gallery in November. An accomplished curator and arts administrator, Madill arrived in Victoria from Hamilton, Ontario, where she had been vice president and COO at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Before that, she had been chief curator, director of programming, and senior curator at AGH, and senior curator at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

At Winnipeg’s Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Anthony Kiendl recently took on the position of director. Previously the director of visual arts and the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre, Kiendl had also worked as acting director / curator of the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina.

In September, the Alternator Gallery in Kelowna welcomed Jennifer Pickering as exhibition director. An installation artist with an MFA from UBC, Pickering is on the lookout for innovative and controversial artwork to add to the Gallery’s programming.

Calgary-based painter Joane Cardinal-Schubert, RCA is one of 14 recipients of the 2007 National Aboriginal Achievement Award. Given annually to honour outstanding career achievements among First Nations, Inuit and Métis in Canada, Cardinal-Schubert received the award in part to recognize her excellence as a painter, but also in acknowledment of her work as a writer, curator, and activist for the creative identities of Aboriginal artists across North America. Known for paintings that evoke a ghostly sense of spirituality and place, Cardinal-Schubert has been writing on the value of Aboriginal creativity throughout her career. A graduate of the University of Calgary and the Alberta College of Art and Design, much of her work as an activist has been focused on Native land claims and repatriation of Plains cultural objects.

Summer lake V (Flags), 2004, acrylic on canvas, 49" x 54" by Vancouver-based painter Pat Service has has just been acquired by the Canada Council Art Bank.

Western Canadian artists created 25 of the 79 new works acquired in June by the Canada Council Art Bank. Worth a total of $279,305, the works chosen from 1,840 submissions included senior artists such as Joe Fafard in Saskatchewan as well as younger artists such as Dana Claxton in Vancouver and Paul Robles in Winnipeg. The Art Bank now includes some 18,700 artworks of which about 6,400 are rented to more than 200 government and corporate clients. Check for the next deadline date for artist submissions at www.artbank.ca.

Twenty-six Western Canadian glass artists are represented in 500 Glass Objects: Functional & Sculptural Glass, a new book published by Lark Books in Asheville, North Carolina. More info at www.larkbooks.com

A new $25,000 Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award will recognize a mid-career artist for an outstanding body of work and promise of future contribution to Canadian art. The Hnatyshyn Foundation, established by former governor general Ramon John Hnatyshyn, has selected six regional curators to serve as the award’s jury. The prize will be awarded in December. More info at www.rjhf.com.

Sculptor and sound-poetry performance artist Nobuo Kubota has won the $10,000 juried art competition for a new sculptural award art piece. In April the Globe and Mail became the title sponsor for the Council for Business and the Arts in Canada’s recognition of businesses that partner with Canadian arts organizations. The new award design — a polished stainless steel undulating wave form passing through a brushed aluminum circle — will be unveiled at the CBAC gala in October. More at www.businessforarts.org.

The federal government commitment to Canada’s arts and culture sector will grow by $20 million in 2006/2007 and will rise to $30 million in 2007/2008. The overall Canada Council budget will reach $180 million by 2007/2008.

Toronto-based company Akimbo promotes contemporary visual art, video, new media and film via the internet and through Akimblog, an independent publishing arm edited by Terence Dick. More than 6,000 readers are now using the service, which was established in 1999, to receive up-to-date information about exhibitions, publications, performances, screenings, talks, lecture series, launches, calls for submissions and jobs related to visual culture across Canada. More at www.akimbo.biz.

The Canadian Crafts Federation will welcome Governor-General Michaëlle Jean as patron as it gets set to celebrate 2007 as the Year of Craft. A national celebration of Canadian craft, artisans and galleries across the country will examine professional craft, how it is used and how it is practiced through exhibitions, a series of international and national forums, and innumerable smaller events, meetings, and street actions in every province.

Abbas Akhavan, Matthew Brown and Holger Kalberg of Vancouver, David Foy and Jennifer Saleik of Calgary, and Melanie Rocan of Winnipeg are among the 15 semi-finalists in the $55,000 annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition. Winning entries will be shown at the Art Gallery of Calgary November 1 - 11 and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver November 14 - 19. Names of a national winner, two honourable mentions and three regional finalists will be announced in September. More info at http://www.rbc.com/ paintingcompetition.

Ivy Gave Me Wings, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20" by Calgary artist Jeff Beier was presented to Governor General Michaëlle in June

Calgary artist Jeff Beier’s painting Ivy Gave Me Wings was presented to Michaëlle Jean, Governor General of Canada, in June following the opening of his solo exhibition Midnight Son at Birchwood Gallery in Yellowknife. The painting of a butterfly was chosen for its representation of the spirit of change, beauty and freedom. More info at www.jeffbeier.com.

Who Has Seen the Wind, stoneware plate, 12.5" diameter, by Bradley Keys

A collection of contemporary fine craft reflecting Alberta’s distinct sense of place, All About Alberta, is showing at the Canadian Embassy Art Gallery in Washington, DC. Curated by Tom McFall, executive director of the Alberta Craft Council (ACC), and showcasing 43 works by 30 senior members of the Council, the exhibit was part of a larger “Alberta at the Smithsonian” show at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival June 30 to July 11. The Smithsonian show included a giant dump truck similar to those used to transport Athabasca tar sands, which fueled Capitol Hill talk about oil sources — and showcased Alberta’s oil resources. All About Alberta continues until September 16 in Washington and will come home to the ACC gallery in January 2007. More info at www.albertacraft.ab.ca.

The Emily Carr Institute and Festival Cinemas in Vancouver are partnering to bring the work of the Institute’s alumni, staff and faculty to audiences at three movie theatres: the Fifth Avenue, the Park and the Ridge. Festival Cinemas, which specializes in showing artistic, foreign and upscale Hollywood films, is donating screen time to exhibit still images of work by past and present Emily Carr visual artists, media artists and designers.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery will host two noteworthy travelling shows this fall. Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession running September 30 to January 1, 2007, is a complete retrospective of Rodin’s career including more than 60 bronzes, from small studies to monumental works. Christopher Pratt: All My Own Work, a retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Canada, will be on display October 4 to January 7, 2007. The National Gallery exhibition focuses on the last 20 years of the artist’s production, including key works from the past four decades.

Former National Ballet School of Canada administrative director Robert Sirman replaces John Hobday as director of the Canada Council for the Arts. Sirman’s prior administrative duties include 10 years as director of operations and director of research and policy planning for the Ontario Arts Council.

Vancouver-based furniture designer Peter Pierobon is among the five finalists for the $25,000 Saidye Bronfman Award for fine craft, adjudicated by the Canada Council. One of the biggest single prizes in visual arts in Canada, the winner will be announced in late October. Pierobon, a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, is also an educator and lecturer. With work in the collections of the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, the American Craft Museum in New York, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pierobon has exhibited his sculptural and functional works nationally and internationally over the past 30 years. He has been nominated for the Saidye Bronfman Award along with glass sculptor Kenneth Lockau, silversmith Michael Massie, sculptor and ceramist Peter Powning and quiltmaker Anna Torma.

The Manitoba Arts Council recently announced the names of the first artists to be awarded residencies in its newly restored Deep Bay Cabin in Riding Mountain National Park. Open to artists in disciplines including writing, composing, visual and performing arts, the cabin will also be available to artistic directors and Manitoba-based arts administrators. Visual artists chosen for 2006 residencies include painter Simon Hughes, digital artist Reva Stone and artist and writer Bob Haverluck. For more information: www.artscouncil.mb.ca

Mary Longman: Ancestors Rising, 2006, patinated bronze and stone, has just been installed at Regina's Mackenzie Art Gallery.

The Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina unveiled a major addition to its outdoor sculpture garden as part of National Aboriginal Day celebrations in June. Ancestors Rising, a large bronze sculptural installation, was created by artist Mary Longman, a member of Gordon First Nation.

Early Upper Missouri River Beaded Hide Dress is one of 29 artifacts acquired by Edmonton's Royal Alberta Museum at a recent Sotheby's auction.

The Royal Alberta Museum has acquired 29 of 39 lots that originated from Western Canada at an auction of aboriginal art in May at Sotheby’s in New York. The museum spent more than $1 million to acquire a range of items, including a highly sought-after beaded hide dress that fetched almost $500,000 US. The artifacts were collected in the mid-1800s by James Carnegie, Scotland’s ninth Earl of Southesk, during a trip across the Prairies.

Royal Roads University near Victoria has announced it will build a $10-million Robert Bateman Art and Environmental Education Centre housing an extensive collection of Bateman’s original artwork and prints, photographs, and archival material. The centre will also house the new Canadian Centre for Environmental Education. An architectural design competition is planned and construction is expected to begin in late 2008 or early 2009, with the building opening in 2010.

Highlights of Craft Year 2007 across Western Canada will include Celebrating Excellence – Contemporary Craft in BC, an exhibition accompanied by a seminar series, public forums and craft demonstrations September 9 to 26, 2007, at the Roundhouse Community Centre in Vancouver (www.cabc.net), four major craft exhibitions at the Alberta Craft Council gallery in Edmonton (www.albertacraft.ab.ca), and seven exhibitions of fine crafts by Saskatchewan artists hosted by the Saskatchewan Craft Council (www.saskcraftcouncil.org). The Manitoba Arts Network is touring Crafting Contemporary Art October 2006 to July 2007 and will mount another province-wide touring exhibition of fine craft beginning in September 2007 (www.communityarts.mb.ca). For more info visit www.canadiancraftsfederation.ca.

Plug In ICA in Winnipeg is organizing a September 30 symposium titled Critical Condition — A Forum for the Dissenting Voice. The symposium aims to examine the contemporary critical landscape and to place local issues into a larger context. Keynote speaker is Bruce Hainley, Artforum art critic and faculty member at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. As well, a multidisciplinary panel will include Robert Enright, art writer and research professor in art criticism at the University of Guelph, as moderator along with panellists Richard Rhodes (editor of Canadian Art); Trevor Boddy (architecture critic for the Vancouver Sun); Alison Gillmor (Winnipeg Free Press, CBC), and Kate Taylor (Globe & Mail). More info at www.plugin.org.

Red Deer Alberta-based metalsmith Paul Leathers was recently elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Calgary artist Beverley Tosh is among five western Canadians elected this year to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. The other 2006 inductees are British Columbia printmakers Lucie Lambert and Arnold Shives, Red Deer metal artist Paul Leathers, and Calgary painter Seka Owen.

The Triangle Gallery and the Calgary Contemporary Arts Society has launched an innovative virtual project called Painting with Harry intended to raise funds for exhibition programs. Participants pay by the pixel on a webpage provided by the gallery to promote a work of art, link to another website or create an interesting image. Pixels may be purchased for one cent each (50 pixels x 50 pixels, for example, costs $25). To participate log onto http://canvas.trianglegallery.org.

Alexandra Keim was appointed chief curator of The Art Gallery of Calgary in August. Keim comes to Calgary from the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, PEI. She began her career in architecture after studying at the North Sydney Technical College in Australia. After graduating from the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) in 1994, she completed her MFA at the Chelsea College of Art and Design at the University of the Arts London in 1995.  Between 1996 and 2005, she founded and directed Centre d’art Marnay Art Centre (www.camac.org), an international multidisciplinary art centre near Paris, France.

The Death of Sir Isaac Brock, acrylic on board, 12" x 12" by Lewis Lavoie is among 90 paintings that Calgary's Museum of the Regiments will translate into murals.

A fundraising project by Calgary’s Museum of the Regiments has netted contributions from Canadian actors Mike Myers and Dan Aykroyd. Organizers hope to raise upwards of $240,000 for the museum’s art gallery through sponsorship of 240 mural panels depicting events in Canada’s military history. Approximately 90 paintings are available for commissioned themes and 40 are still available for general sponsorship. The individual panels, when completed by book illustrator and muralist Lewis Lavoie, will form a large mosaic image. Myers commissioned Lavoie to paint a panel portraying Canadian soldiers routing their American counterparts in the War of 1812. Aykroyd, who was in the CBC movie, The Arrow, has sponsored a painting of the Avro Arrow. The mural will be unveiled in November 2006, in its state of completion to that date.

This suitcase full of "Johnny Cash" bills by artist Sascha Yamashita was stolen in June from Vancouver's onepointsix gallery.

A suitcase full of stolen “art money” has gone astray. Originally created by artist Sascha Yamashita for “...but I will remain,” a successful Valentine’s Day 2004 group exhibition honouring country singer Johnny Cash at Vancouver’s Misanthropy Gallery, the suitcase was filled with stacks of ”Johnny Cash” bills in $2 denominations offered for sale at $2 each. The popular conceptual work was on display at onepointsix gallery in Vancouver when it was stolen in early June.

Paul Cézanne: La Femme à la cafetière, 1890-1895, oil on linen, 1605 x 965 cm; Musée d'Orsay, Paris

A look at Canadian art abroad. (continue...)

Sarah Hall, Photo by Malcolm Taylor

Glass artist Sarah Hall is constructing the first stained glass installation in North America to utilize photovoltaic cells. The installation is the central element of a wind tower being built at Regent College on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
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Canada's art community sadly lost a few of its own within the last six months. Galleries West would like to acknowledge these art community members and their contribution to Canada's art scene. (continue...)

A.Y. Jackson (second from left, standing) and Dr. Frederick Banting (with pipe next to George P. MacKenzie, leader of the Canadian Government Arctic Expedition) with group on board the SS Beothic, 1927.

Northern Passage: The Arctic Voyages of A.Y. Jackson, Frederick
Banting and Lawren S. Harris is on display at the Art Gallery of Alberta (formerly the Edmonton Art Gallery) June 10 to September 10. The exhibit includes drawings, sketches, paintings, photographs, film and archival material drawn from Jackson’s two six-week voyages into the Canadian Arctic — in 1927 with Banting and in 1930 with Harris — aboard the RCMP supply steamer Beothic.

The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria hosts Maxwell Bates: At the Crossroads of Expressionism April 28 to June 25. The retrospective exhibition features more than 80 works divided into chronological sections spanning the years from 1921 to 1978. Organized and circulated by the Art Gallery of Alberta, the exhibition has already been shown at the Nickle Arts Museum in Calgary and at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon.

The Galt Museum in Lethbridge celebrates its grand reopening May 6 after undergoing extensive renovations and upgrades. The Galt expansion, one of the most ambitious cultural projects to be undertaken in southern Alberta in the past 20 years, adds more than 13,000 square feet which, together with the renovated existing facility, will include 5,000 square feet of exhibition space, a new archives resource room, classroom, learning studio and gift shop. The grand opening coincides with Lethbridge’s week-long centennial celebrations.

Invitation: the Quilt of Belonging is on view at the Surrey Art Galley to June 25.

Canada’s diversity and vast cultural geography is reflected in Invitation: the Quilt of Belonging, a monumental textile art project on exhibit at the Surrey Art Gallery to June 25. Crafted by people from 263 aboriginal groupings and world nationalities, the quilt measures 36 metres by 3.5 metres. Coordinated by artist Esther Bryan, it is the largest and most inclusive work of textile art ever made about Canada. More info at artgallery@surrey.ca.

The University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George and the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver have signed a protocol agreement for a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Expected to start in 2007, the proposed degree will combine creative writing and studio arts and will be the first fine arts degree offered in northern BC.

Emily Carr Institute will also launch Canada’s first Master of Applied Arts degree program in September. The Master of Applied Arts will offer three streams: design, media arts and visual arts. More info at www.eciad.ca/graduate_studies.

The work of Montréal artist Dominique Blain is featured in an exhibition on display until July 9 at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. Organized and circulated by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the installation focuses on 20th century social relations and reflects often-controversial subject matter such as injustice, racial and social inequality, fanaticism and oppression. Blain is considered one of the most important artists of her generation in Québec. More info at www.mackenzieartgallery.sk.ca/.

Huang Yongyu (b.1924): Crabs--Autumn Interest, hanging scroll, ink and colours on paper.

Tradition and Innovation in 20th Century Chinese Paintings, an exhibition running June 11 to September 3 at the Kamloops Art Gallery, brings together over 70 Chinese scroll paintings dating from the first to the last days of the 20th century. Curated by Barry Till, Asian art curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Tradition and Innovation focuses on three major themes: Romantic Landscapes; Birds, Beasts, Blossoms and Bugs; and Body and Soul.

The City of Port Moody, BC, is partnering with local artists to enhance the experience of park visitors through the presence of artists at work. The fourth annual Artists in the Park program invites artists to work, display and sell in a number of Port Moody parks as well as at the Port Moody Arts Centre, Port Moody Station Museum or Queen Street Plaza. The program runs from May through September. For details visit www.cityofthearts.ca.

Deadline for entry to the 2006 RBC Canadian Painting Competition is May 14. The competition is aimed at artists in the early stages of their professional careers. For details visit www.rbc.com/paintingcompetition/index.html.

A Canadian contemporary ceramics exhibition May 13 to July 9 at the Esplanade Art Gallery in Medicine Hat showcases the work of 28 ceramists from across the country. The ceramics range from utilitarian pieces to mixed media installations. The exhibition is co-curated by Joanne Marion, Esplanade Art Gallery curator, and Les Manning, director of the Medalta International Artists in Residence Program, and coincides with this year’s Artists in Residence Program. An official opening presentation is scheduled for June 1. For more information visit www.esplanade.ca or www.medalta.org, or contact Joanne Marion at 403-502-8583.

The Art Gallery of Ontario is accepting submissions for In Your Face, an exhibition of what the AGO hopes will become the largest presentation of portraits in the world. The presentation will be entered for consideration by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest collection of portraits ever assembled. Deadline for submission of postcard-sized portraits is June 1, with the In Your Face exhibition opening July 1. Details at www.ago.net.

The Biennial International Miniature Print Exhibition (BIMPE) happens on Granville Island in Vancouver at the Federation Gallery during the month of June and at Dundarave Print Workshop during July. Held every two years and hosted by New Leaf Editions and Dundarave Print Workshop, BIMPE is intended to facilitate international artistic exchange and to increase public awareness and appreciation for printmaking. Deadline for entries is May 15. More info at www.bimpe.com.

Jake's Pond, watercolour, 20" x 30", is by Ray Cattell, a participant in the watercolour symposium this August.

A watercolour painting symposium August 20 to 25 at the University of Calgary offers artists of all levels instruction and inspiration from Canada’s top watercolour professionals. Organized by the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour (CSPWC), the event costs $475. For information contact Liz Roberts at robertsliz@shaw.ca or 403-254-8626.

The 21st annual The Works Art & Design Festival runs June 23 to July 5 in Edmonton. The leading festival of its kind in North America, The Works animates one square mile of downtown Edmonton by transforming public spaces into alternative galleries. This year the festival will celebrate photography as well as the element of play in art. More info at www.theworks.ab.ca.

Galleries West magazine won a Members’ Showcase Award for best feature layout at the Alberta Magazines Conference in March. Art director Wendy Pease designed the Spring 2006 feature article written by Julia Dault about Vancouver artist Brian Jungen.

The Nunavut government, working with Nunnavit Tunngavik Incorporated and with Inuit Heritage Trust, will build a $55-million heritage centre in Iqaluit, the territory’s capital, to house its historical artifacts. The artifacts have been stored since 1999 at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife at a cost of $1 million, but need to be housed in a permanent home, according to government officials. Nunavut has set aside $10 million for the project, and plans to approach the federal government as well as the private sector for additional funding.

A Prairie Alphabet, illustrated by Saskatchewan artist Yvette Moore, won the centennial ward for "My Favorite Saskatchewan Book."

A Prairie Alphabet, by Saskatchewan artist Yvette Moore and author Jo Bannatyne-Cugnet, won the “My Favourite Saskatchewan Book” centennial contest award. The award was based on a popular vote from a selection of 100 books. The owner of Yvette Moore Gallery in Moose Jaw has won numerous other awards for book illustrations. Published by Tundra Books, A Prairie Alphabet has sold more than 300,000 copies. See www.yvettemoore.com.

The new Manitoba Culture, Heritage and Tourism online database will assist Manitoba arts and community organizations in locating potential grants and financial assistance. Deadlines for Heritage Grants Program applications are June 1 and January 31 each year. The Grants and Resources Directory is located at www. gov.mb.ca/chc/grants/index.html.

Emily Carr: New Perspectives opens June 2 at Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada and runs through September 4 before traveling to the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. Co-organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, the show looks at Emily Carr through the historical lens of 20th century exhibitions of her artwork and features more than 150 of her works. The Victoria artist, who died in 1945, is best known for her depictions of the Northwest Pacific coast as well as First Nations villages.

Egypt, Greece and Rome: Art of the Ancient Mediterranean World opens June 30 at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.

Egypt, Greece and Rome: Art of the Ancient Mediterranean World runs June 30, 2006, to June 10, 2007, at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in collaboration with the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Japan, the exhibition tracing the rise and fall of Egyptian, Greco, and Roman civilizations features nearly 200 artifacts spanning a 5,000-year history.

Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff will present Conceptual Comics, a survey of 47 books from Printed Matter, Inc., an artists’ bookstore in New York City, until August 3. The exhibition draws upon the history and vernacular of the comic book.

Shuda Creek by Marg Metcalf won the Trout Unlimited Canada's 2006 Artist of the Year competition.

Sylvan Lake artist Marg Metcalf has won Trout Unlimited Canada’s 2006 Artist of the Year competition for her work Shunda Creek. The $2,000 annual juried competition seeks works that draw attention to Trout Unlimited’s mission of conserving and protecting Canada’s freshwater ecosystems by capturing the beauty of these resources.

Situation Comedy: Humour In Recent Art will run June 10 to September 3 at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Organized by Independent Curators International (iCI) in New York, Situation Comedy presents more than 60 works — video and sound installations, paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs — by younger as well as more established contemporary artists working primarily in North America and Europe.

Vancouver is the most artistic large city in Canada, according to a report from Hill Strategies Research, and three of the four cities with the highest artistic concentrations are in British Columbia — Vancouver, Victoria and North Vancouver. The Artists in Large Canadian Cities report, based on 2001 Statistics Canada census data, includes nine arts occupations ranging from actors to painters, sculptors and other visual artists. Cape Dorset, Nunavut, with almost one in four labour force workers in the arts, is the most artistic small municipality in Canada. Hill Strategies Research has also launched a new web resource, ArtsResearchMonitor. com, which provides online access to its Arts Research Monitor newsletter articles. More info at http://www.hillstrategies.com

Vancouver artist Chris MacClure, who now lives and works in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, is organizing an International Artist Day. October 25 (the birthday of Pablo Picasso) is intended to honour artists and to recognize the contributions they make to civilization. Everyone is encouraged to do something special on that day to enhance the visual arts — take an artist to lunch, host an exhibition, buy a piece of art, attend a gallery show or visit the studio of a favourite artist. More at www.internationalartistday.com.

Stephen Shearer: Longhairs (detail), 2004, crayon on paper. Collection of Eva Presenhuber, Zurich.

West Coast artist Steven Shearer and Annie Pootoogook of Cape Dorset are among the artists shortlisted for the 2006 Sobey Art Award, a $50,000 prize. Until recently, 38-year-old Shearer’s pop-culture imagery was better known in Europe than in the Vancouver area he calls home. (continue...)

The Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation’s annual VIVA awards, which recognize two mid-career BC artists and are worth $12,000 each, were given to Damian Moppett and Marianne Nicolson this year. Nicolson works in a variety of media to express First Nations concepts in both traditional manners (which remain within traditional contexts) and in contemporary manners (which are meant for exhibition under contemporary conditions). Moppett is a Vancouver photoconceptualist and filmmaker.

Winner of this year’s $25,000 Audain Foundation lifetime achievement award for a BC artist is Eric Metcalfe. Metcalfe’s career has spanned 40 years. He was closely associated with the Fluxus, correspondence, and conceptual art movements in Vancouver in the 1960s. In 1972 he began producing and performing extensively in film and video, and in 1973 he co-founded the Western Front artists’ centre, where he curated the performance program. He also taught at Emily Carr Institute until his retirement last year. The award was presented at the VIVA gala award ceremony in Vancouver in April.

Ken Lochhead

Victoria-based sculptor Mowry Baden and painter Kenneth Lochhead have won the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for artistic achievement. (continue...)

Mowry Baden

Mowry Baden, who has received the Governor General’s award in recognition of his outstanding contribution to art in Canada, was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1936. He completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at Pomona College in 1958 and a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University in 1965. (continue...)

David Marshall at work in 1975 on the monumental piece Three Forms, now in the VanDusen Botanical Gardens in Vancouver.

David Franklin Marshall
1928 - 2006

David Franklin Marshall, an abstract sculptor, teacher and founding member of the Sculptors’ Society of British Columbia, passed away peacefully after succumbing to leukemia at the Burnaby General Hospital in January.
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Gordon Halloran takes his abstract ice art to the 2006 Olympic Winter Games.

Sunshine Coast artist Gordon Halloran has been invited to Turin, Italy, during the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in February to present Pitture Sotto Zero/Paintings Below Zero. This installation of original abstract art in ice will be featured in the 450-year-old Fortezza di Fenestrelle, the largest military fortress in Europe. Halloran has spent more than a decade developing his ice painting techniques, and his work has been seen at the 1996 World Figure Skating Championships in Edmonton and at Calgary’s Olympic Plaza. More info at http://www.paintingsbelowzero.com and at www.icepaintingproject.com.

Randall Stout's design for the newly named Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton.

The Edmonton Art Gallery has been renamed the Art Gallery of Alberta. Gallery officials are also planning to build a curvaceous new $48-million home designed by Los Angeles architect Randall Stout. Construction is scheduled to start in 2007, with completion two years later. In the meantime, the gallery is celebrating its past with Building a Collection: 80 Years at The Edmonton Art Gallery, which runs January 21 to April 2.

Liza Frulla, Minister of Canadian Heritage, announced in November that an additional $342 million will be invested in arts organizations throughout Canada over the next three years. This announcement doubles Canada Council for the Arts funding, which will reach $300 million by 2008.

Four Saskatchewan communities are getting giant sculptures as a birthday gift celebrating that province’s 100th anniversary. Doorways to Opportunity, a seven-metre-wide steel work by Lionel Auburn Peyachew, is installed in Yorkton; Lloydminster gets Douglas Bentham’s Sky Dance, an airy creation with steel triangles surrounded by a red tubular frame; Chris St. Amand’s Portage, a towering work of two people and their canoe, is in La Ronge and Estevan receives Jefferson Little’s Spinning Prairie, which resembles a giant carnival pinwheel.

WINNBAC CO-OP (Winnipeg Beach Art + Culture Co-op), a rural art producers’ cooperative and creator of The Wave Artist Studio Tour in Winnipeg Beach, was recognized by the Manitoba Cooperative Association with a 2005 Distinguished Cooperators and Co-op Achievement Award. The award honours organizations that have made significant contributions to the promotion of cooperative values in Manitoba. The Wave coordinator, Helma Roggere Rehders, was also nominated for a 2004 Manitoba Tourism Award in the Tourism Innovation individual category. Visit www.watchthewave.ca.

Edwin Holgate: Tha Bathers, 1937, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, part of the Glenbow Museums Variations exhibition, March 18 to June 4, Calgary.

Variations: Holgate, Group of Seven & Contemporaries will run March 18 to June 4 at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. Three shows are included in the admission price. Edwin Holgate: Canadian Painter (from the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreal) is the first major retrospective on Holgate, who died in 1977, and features nearly 130 works. Art and Society in Canada 1913-1950 (from the National Gallery of Canada) includes approximately 45 works by many well-known Canadian artists. Beyond the Group of Seven, a selection of 40 paintings from the Glenbow collection, will show the diversity of artistic practice in Canada during the first half of the 20th century.

A report highlighting creative neighbourhoods across Canada shows that nine of the 10 urban neighbourhoods with the highest concentration of artists are in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. The other top-10 postal region is on Salt Spring Island near Vancouver. Nine arts occupations are included in the analysis. The full report is available free at www.hillstrategies.com.

The Northwest Territories Arts and Fine Crafts database has launched. The new database, intended to connect members of the NWT arts community with each other and to serve as a showcase of their products, may be viewed at www.nwtartistsdatabase.com.

The Kamloops Art Gallery is the first tour stop for British Drawings from the National Gallery of Canada. On display January 22 to March 25, the exhibition features 70 watercolours and drawings by such British masters as William Hogarth, Benjamin West, Thomas Gainsborough, J. M. W. Turner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Henry Moore. British Drawings was first on display at the National Gallery in the fall of 2005.

The Canadian Conference of the Arts will host Mapping Canada’s Cultural Policy: Where do we go from here? This is a dual National Policy Conference (March 3 to 4) and Chalmers Conference for arts service organization representatives (March 2 and 4). The consultation process in Ottawa is intended to help chart a course for CCA advocacy efforts for the arts and cultural sector.

Chris Cran, visiting artist in The Banff Centre's Optic Nerve residency and first recipient of the Keith Evans memorial Scholarship.

Alberta artist Chris Cran received the Keith Evans Memorial Scholarship, which is awarded annually to an Alberta visual artist. Cran, currently a studio fellow for The Banff Centre’s Visual Arts Optic Nerve Residency, is known for investigating perception, illusion and the viewer’s role in how images are formed. Optic Nerve is a thematic residency that explores vision, seeing, perception and optics as they relate to knowledge, consciousness and meaning. More info at www.banffcentre.ca.

West Vancouver and Saskatoon are among the five communities designated by the Department of Canadian Heritage as Cultural Capitals of Canada for 2006. Designations are given to municipalities who submit proposals to build a legacy for arts and culture. Winning municipalities each receive up to $2 million in federal funds to undertake a range of cultural and artistic activities.

An innovative project by Pechet and Robb Studio of Vancouver will represent Canada at the prestigious 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture from September to November. SweaterLodge is a multimedia exhibition that provides a portrait of Vancouver within a giant orange polar fleece sweater. Pechet and Robb Studio is an interdisciplinary design practice specializing in both architecture and fine art. More info at www.sweaterlodge.ca.

About $800,000 was awarded to B.C. arts organizations in the second round of funding by Arts Now, an Olympic cultural catalyst that is part of the 2010 Legacies Now organization. About $1.5 million has been awarded so far in anticipation of the Vancouver-Whistler 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. The next deadline for applications is January 16, 2006, for the Catalyst Program for building organizational and/or artistic capacity, and January 31, 2006, for the Innovations Program for creating opportunities for people to engage in sustainable and transformative arts and cultural activities. More info at www.2010legaciesnow.com or 604-659-1400.

Chali-Rosso Gallery in Vancouver is displaying a unique electronic ticker tape to keep people informed about current trends and prices in the international art market. View the updated-daily ticker tape at 2250 Granville Street.

The cover photographer George Webber's award-winning book A World Within

Calgary photographer George Webber has received an International Documentary Photo Award in Seoul, South Korea. Webber’s project documenting the final days of southern Alberta’s Little Bow Hutterite Colony received a fourth-place award out of 233 photographers from 39 countries who submitted work. Webber’s book, A World Within: An Intimate Portrait of the Little Bow Hutterite Colony, was recently published by Fifth House. View the award-winning images at http://koreadocu.net.

The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria Volunteer Committee is organizing a contemporary art tour of Cuba March 27 to April 3. Lisa Baldissera, curator of contemporary art at AGGV, will lead a seven-day tour of studios, galleries and exhibitions featuring the Havana Biennale. More info at http://aggv.bc.ca/index.html or call Diane Rickson at 250-370-1921.

The hotel art trend appears to be escalating. Hotel Arts in Calgary, formerly the Holiday Inn at 119 - 12 Avenue SW, is aiming to attract cultural travellers while bolstering the local arts community. The hotel has an eclectic mix of work on display, ranging from non-representational abstract pieces to one-of-a-kind handmade lamps. The Hyatt Regency at Centre Street and 7 Avenue S in Calgary also features an impressive collection of fine art from across the country. In Vancouver, all rooms at the recently updated Dominion Hotel at 210 Abbott Street in Gastown have been uniquely designed by local artists, and the Lobby Gallery unveils a new exhibit of diverse art monthly.

Royal Road Test(Ed Rusha & Mason Williams), 2004, by Damian Moppett, one of the semi-finalists for the 2006 Sobey Art Award.

Among the 25 semi-finalists in the 2006 Sobey Art Award are, from the West Coast region, Geoffrey Farmer, Luanne Martineau, Damian Moppett, Lucy Pullen and Steven Shearer, while artists from the Prairies and North region include David Hoffos, Taras Polataiko, Annie Pootoogook, Jennifer Stillwell and Rachelle Viader Knowles. A $50,000 grand prize will be awarded to one of the five regional winners to be chosen by a panel of curatorial advisors in Spring 2006. More info at www.sobeyartaward.ca.

The Manitoba Arts Council is launching the Deep Bay Artist Residency in Riding Mountain National Park of Canada. This year the program will offer artists, artistic directors and arts administrators the opportunity to work in an idyllic natural setting for up to six weeks between June 26 and October 29, 2006. Apply at www.artscouncil.mb.ca by February 15.

The inaugural Merge: Festival of Contemporary Art will be held in Vancouver in May. Merge Festival is focused on projects intended for outside traditional gallery spaces including site-specific installation, outdoor video screening, performance art and other hybrid practices. For submission and other details visit www.mergefestival.com.

Edmonton artist Jane Ash Poitras will receive a 2006 National Aboriginal Achievement Award in the Arts and Culture category. Poitras works in a variety of media and is noted for infusing her work with powerful social and cultural meaning. Recipients of the award will be honoured January 27 at a gala ceremony at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver.

Montreal artist Linda Covit was awarded a commission to create a sculpture in Calgary’s newly constructed Water Centre. Water Garden, a monumental water column within a contemporary, stylized take on a “wooded grove,” designed for contemplative viewing, will be installed this fall. As well the City of Calgary Public Art Program in conjunction with the city’s Utilities and Environmental Protection Department (UEP) has awarded a contract to Via Partnership (and team) to create a UEP Public Art Plan. The plan will create a procedural framework for the acquisition and commission of about $6 million worth of public art related to water utilities, and the geology and ecology of the Calgary watershed, over the next five or so years. More info at www.calgary.ca/publicart.

Marcia Perkins', self-potrait, 2004, won the Kingston prize for Contemporary Canadian Portraiture.

Marcia Perkins of Victoria was awarded the first Kingston Prize for Contemporary Canadian Portraiture by the Kingston Arts Council in Ontario. Worth $3,000, the prize was given for an oil-on-canvas work entitled Self-portrait, 2004.

Tudy Ellen Golley, RCA beside her clay model for Becoming Goddess, a two-metre-tall figurative cast metal sculpture created during her recent artist's resdency in Shanghai, China.

Trudy Ellen Golley, RCA, a Red Deer College visual art instructor and department chair, was the only Canadian chosen from among several international artists selected to sculpt a piece for the Harmony—Embodiment 2005 Shanghai International Sculpture Exhibit. While in China, Golley spent six weeks in the fall at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art (SIVA) creating a two-metre-high sculpture in ceramic and bronze. A practicing artist for 30 years, Golley is garnering international attention. Her work was included in a recent Chinese publication entitled World Famous Ceramic Artists’ Studios: Volume of America (2), as well as in a recent Canadian book, Studio Ceramics in Canada. For more info see www.alluvium.ca.

The Red Deer & District Allied Arts Council has issued a call for entry to artists wishing to participate in SinSation: An Experience in Erotica, the arts council’s annual fund raising extravaganza on February 11. Deadline for entries is January 10. More info at 403-309-3083.

Regina’s Dunlop Art Gallery is breathing a little easier. Almost two years after the Regina Public Library board announced the gallery would close due to lack of funding, the board announced support for the gallery. The Dunlop Gallery, which has been able to maintain operation since the initial announcement, will be kept as an integral part of the library. The RPL is expected to have a strategic plan for the library as a whole in place along with a feasibility study for a fund raising plan in early 2006.

An Alberta artist was one of about 40 international sculptors chosen to create a sculpture this past fall in the An Giang Hallmark II International Sculpture Symposium in Vietnam. Morton Burke’s six-cubic-metre marble sculpture weighs more than 35,000 pounds and is exhibited in a large sculpture garden park at Chau Doc in An Giang province. More at http:// members.shaw.ca/mortonsculpting.

Lynn Richardson: Red State, 2004-2005, vinyl, nylon, steel, collection of the artist, showing as part of the Winnipeg Art Gallery's supernovas exhibition

The Winnipeg Art Gallery is showing Early Masters: Inuit Sculpture 1949-1955 from January 5 to June 11. The years 1949 to 1955 represent the gestational phase of Inuit art — the early sculptures in this show are highly prized by collectors, although many are by unknown artists. The WAG has also organized supernovas, a major exhibition of Manitoba’s emerging artists. On view January 27 to May 14, the 29 artists selected for inclusion are challenging the borders between traditional media and commercial culture, questioning ownership through the use of appropriation and found materials, and playing freely with traditional materials to articulate their concerns.

Saskatoon city council has approved in principle a new cultural centre. The $31 million River Landing project is to house Tourism Saskatoon’s visitor centre and proposed Joni Mitchell Centre for Creativity, the Meewasin Valley Authority’s expanded Meewasin Valley Centre to celebrate Saskatoon and the South Saskatchewan River, and Persephone Theatre.

Western Canada’s oldest public art gallery has a clean new graphic look to its name marked by a tilted triangle superimposed over the word Art in Winnipeg Art Gallery. The Southern Alberta Art Gallery also has a new logo — the acronym SAAG has been sliced in half horizontally, evoking the feel of mountains on the distant horizon.

Wayne Alfred of B.C. will represent Canada in a carving exhibition at the Commonweath Games in Melbourne, Australia, March 2006.

VisionQuest Gallery in Calgary will represent Canada in a unique carving exhibition at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Australia, in March 2006. During the exhibition, Wayne Alfred, a First Nation master carver from the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation in Alert Bay, B.C., will carve a traditional West Coast totem pole.

The Canmore Artists and Artisans Guild will host its 2006 Juried Show April 14 to May 2. Visitors to the gallery will be asked to vote on their favourite piece, and the winner will receive a $1,000 People’s Choice award. Closing date for submissions from artists living and working in all media within the Bow Valley corridor is February 15.

B.C. painter Robert Genn is leading the charge against copyright infringement by the owners of a Chinese website called Arch-World, which appears to be copying jpg images of artistic works from artist, dealer and public gallery websites and offering poor-quality reproductions for sale on the Internet. By Genn’s estimate, about 800 Canadian artists are listed on the Chinese website. Artists, art dealers and public gallery curators are encouraged to check whether they are listed by visiting the Arch-World website at www.arch-world.cn/ or the Robert Genn website at http://www.painterskeys.com — look for the link to International Theft.

Etienne Zack with Escape from Shapes

Etienne Zack’s recent paintings have a hazy, dream-like quality, as though the viewer is looking at them through a foggy lens. This is particularly so of his award-winning work in the 2005 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, Escape from Shapes, for which Zack collected the top prize of $25,000.
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Michael Hosaluk

Michael Hosaluk is more famous outside Canada than inside — except in Saskatchewan, where he’s acknowledged as the province’s most inventive woodturner and admired as a genuinely nice guy. (continue...)

Pablo Picasso: Le Sculpteur(The Sculptor), 1931 (Paris), oil on plywood, 50 1/2" x 38", Museé National Picasso©Picasso Estate (Paris) / SODRAC (Montreal), 2005

The Vancouver Art Gallery hosts Picasso: Drawings and Prints from the National Gallery of Canada & Selected Paintings from International Collections  October 15 to January 16, 2006. With this show the VAG has assembled the greatest number of Picasso paintings ever exhibited in Vancouver, and the most important collection of Picasso’s graphic work in the country. Protean Picasso, the showcase of graphic works, is curated by Diana Nemiroff, and Selected Paintings is curated by Ian Thom. More info at www.vanartgallery.bc.ca.

Two Western Canadians have been appointed to the Canada Council for the Arts by Canadian Heritage Minister Liza Frulla. Amir Ali Alibhai, a visual artist, independent curator, writer and arts programmer at the Roundhouse Community Centre in Vancouver, and Esther Ondrack, an arts supporter with extensive management experience in the petroleum industry in Edmonton, join Regina artist David Thauberger, a council member since February 2002 whose term was renewed for another three years this February. More info at www.canadacouncil.ca.

Among the 15 semi-finalists in the seventh annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition announced in June were Matthew Brown, Holger Kalberg, Krisdy Shindler and Etienne Zack of Vancouver, and Chris Millar of Calgary. The work of these semi-finalists, chosen from more than 400 artists who submitted approximately 1,200 entries, will become part of a national exhibition tour scheduled to arrive at Vancouver’s Bau-Xi Gallery October 23 to 31. The winner of this competition for emerging artists will receive $25,000 and be announced in September. More info at www.rbc.com/paintingcompetition.

Art Toronto 2005, this year’s version of the annual Toronto International Art Fair, is coming up November 3 to 7 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, South Building, Exhibit Hall E. Look for a strong Vancouver contingent exhibiting again this year, including: Bau-Xi (also in Toronto); Bjornson Kajiwara; Monte Clark; Equinox; Diane Farris; Catriona Jeffries; and Gallery Jones. Loch Gallery of Winnipeg and Toronto is participating again, as are Winnipeg-based othergallery, Calgary’s TrépanierBaer and Douglas Udell Gallery of Edmonton and Vancouver. Go to www.tiafair.com for details.

Regina painter Andrew Salgado represents Team Canada December 7 to 17 at the Games of La Francophonie in Niger, Africa. Only at the Games of La Francophonie are sports and cultural activities represented in a competitive context — like the athletes, winning artists receive gold, silver or bronze medals. Salgado was born in Regina and graduated from the University of British Columbia in 2005. He is represented by the Victoria Art Gallery in Regina. For more info visit www.pch.gc.ca/special/ jeux2005/index_e.cfm.

ItuKiagâtta! Inuit Sculpture from the Collection of the TD Bank Financial Group, organized and circulated by the National Gallery of Canada, features 51 bone, stone and ivory sculptures dating from 1945 to 1967. The exhibition schedule includes stops at: The Winnipeg Art Gallery until September 5; the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia September 23 to November 20; the Edmonton Art Gallery December 9 to February 26, 2006; the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria April 6 to June 11, 2006; and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, June 29 to October 8, 2006.

BC artists Kent Laforme of Victoria and Kathryn Ellis of Denman Island are two of seven Canadian artists participating in The Atlantic Stone Carving Symposium August 28 to September 10 in Inverness, Nova Scotia. The event is the first stone carving symposium in Atlantic Canada and one of very few in North America. For more info visit www.capebretoncraft.com.

Minotaur with Hare, 1996, galvonized wire, 130" x 90.6" x 48", by Sophie Ryder is installed in the UBC Botanical Gardens as part of the Vancouver Scupture Biennale

The Vancouver International Sculpture Biennale, a celebration of art in public spaces, kicks off September 22 with a VIP media launch to introduce the nine major Biennale events. The Biennale includes 35 sculptures by 23 artists representing 13 countries. Works will be installed in public areas throughout Vancouver until December 2006. Visit www.vancouverbiennale.com or call 604-682-1289.

Mountains and waters at the initial stage, by Shenguyan Zhang, oil on canvas, 21" x 20" is part of the Chinese Contemporary Fine Art in Canada exhibition.

Chinese Contemporary Fine Art in Canada, an exhibition of original works from China, is on display September 15 to 30 at the Canada Export Centre, 602 West Hastings Street in Vancouver. The exhibit is being organized by the Canadian Modern Fine Arts Research Institute Inc. in partnership with Bel Art Gallery Inc. of North Vancouver. For info call 604-924-3719.

The Alberta College of Art & Design will host a series of keynote speakers to lead critical discussions on community and diversity. The free Stirring Culture series begins September 7 in the Jack Singer Concert Hall at Calgary’s EPCOR Centre for the Performing Arts with Tim Rollins, a conceptual artist and educator who founded Kids of Survival (KOS), an after-school program and arts collaboration for students with learning difficulties in the South Bronx. For more information see www.acad.ca.

Regina Clay: Worlds in the Making opens November 19 at the MacKenzie Art Gallery (with a public reception on November 18) and continues to February 26, 2006. More than 120 works by 14 artists — including Victor Cicansky,Joe Fafard,David Gilhooly,Marilyn Levine,David Thaubergerand Russell Yuristy— are featured in this exhibition which examines how, during the 1960s and ‘70s, clay became the vehicle for a creative explosion in Regina. For more information call curator Timothy Long at 306-584-4283.

A new art book, Alberta’s Unsung Heroines, has been created from a travelling Centennial exhibition of the same name featuring a series of 12 diptych paintings by Alberta artists Izabella Orzelski-Konikowski and Bogdan Koral-Konikowski. The book celebrates the lives of 12 contemporary women whose daily work and sacrifice improved life for others. More info at www.artiza.com

The Canada Council for the Arts has approved a new program that changes the way it awards grants to visual artists. For the first time, the new program will provide two-year grants to visual artists. The new program — modified from a previous proposal that would have directly linked all creation grants to a confirmed exhibition — has two main components: Project Grants that provide support on a project basis, and Long-Term Grants that provide support over a two-year period. The first Project Grant deadline for applications is December 1, while the first deadline for Long-Term Grants will be September 1, 2006. More info at: www.canadacouncil.ca/visualarts.

Government Spending on Culture in Canada, a report commissioned from Hill Strategies Research by the Canadian Conference of the Arts, examines spending on culture by federal, provincial and municipal governments between 1992–93 and 2002–03. Key findings of the report are that government spending has failed to keep pace with substantial growth in the cultural sector over the past decade, and that there is a
relatively low level of government support for the arts. The full report is available at www.hillstrategies.com as well as from the Canadian
Conference of the Arts at www.ccarts.ca.

Rod and Denyse Simair's Papillon,17" x 3", crystalline-glaze ceramic bowl, won the Grand Prix at Crystallines 2005 in France

Rod and Denyse Simair, a Saskatchewan-based husband-and-wife team of ceramic artists, were awarded the judges’ Grand Prix at Crystallines 2005, an international exposition of crystalline glazes that was held in April in Vallauris, France. The Simairs, who represented Canada at the exposition in France, operate their own SimAIR gallery near Prince Albert and are represented by the Letterbox Gallery in Lumsden, Saskatchewan and the Lando Gallery in Edmonton. Visit www.simair.ca.

Bill Shurniak with The Honourable Dr. Lynda Haverstock, Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan, at the opening of the Shurniak Art Gallery.

Thanks to a retired banker’s home-town gift, the tiny Saskatchewan community of Assiniboia, about an hour south of Moose Jaw, now houses a major art collection that includes more than 500 works by artists such as A.Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer and Allen Sapp. Sculptures by Joe Fafard and Robert Davidson are installed on the gallery grounds. The collection was donated by Bill Shurniak, a Saskatchewan native and advisor to Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing. Shurniak also donated $1 million to build the gallery that houses his collection. The Shurniak Art Gallery, which will also feature works by local artists, opened July 30

Dear Editor,
Thanks for the great article by
Douglas MacLean (Art 05; Summer 2005 issue) — just to let you know,
though, the reference to “Liz Ingram’s quiet upside down garden of colour” on page 41 should in fact have been credited to Lyndal Osborne as the artist.
    Thank you,

Doug MacLean replies:
My sincere apologies to the artists, Liz Ingram and Lyndal Osborne, for the mix-up of names in my review of the Alberta Biennial. I can only blame myself for this “senior moment” mistake. As you both know, I have known your work and careers for many years. Unfortunately, the past interfered with recent history and I inadvertently mixed up your names.
    Thanks,