The Canada Council for the Arts in Ottawa. Photo: Kohila Kurunathan.
Our editors’ weekly roundup of Canadian art news.
The Canada Council for the Arts announced on Wednesday that the opening of the second phase of their new portal, the website that facilitates applying for grants in the New Funding Model, will be delayed due to technical issues. While applicants are able to register on the portal at present, full applications to programs will be pushed back until June 5, 2017. This means that a number of granting deadlines have been altered: a table with updated dates has been released by the Council.
NSCAD University announced last week that the Anna Leonowens Gallery has received a New Chapter Grant from the Canada Council of the Arts to re-establish the NSCAD Lithography Workshop, which was previously in operation from 1969 to 1980, and hosted a number of famed visiting artists. Among them: John Baldessari, Michael Snow, Joyce Weiland, Guido Molinari and Vito Acconci. The grant will allocate $285,000 to allow the contemporary version of the workshop to host eight Canadian artists at NSCAD to work onsite with Jill Graham. This will include an exchange between the NSCAD Printmaking Department and Kinngait Studios in Cape Dorset.
The National Gallery of Canada announced that the Canada Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is undergoing a $3 million restoration. The process is being handled by architect Alberico Barbiano di Belgiojoso (a descendant of one of the original architects) along with Troels Brun from M & B Studio and Gordon Filewych of onebadant. The restoration will address a number of issues: the changes to the pavilion’s surrounds in the Giardini; the deterioration of the building’s facade and structure; and the need for a seismic retrofit. Work on the site has begun, but will be suspended during the 2017 Venice Biennale exhibition, and then resume in December 2017. The first showing of the restored structure will be in the Architecture Biennale in 2018.
The winners of the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowships in Contemporary Art, which are annual awards for emerging artists worth $60,500 each, were announced yesterday. Andréanne Abbondanza Bergeron of Concordia University and Martin Leduc of the Université du Québec à Montréal are this year’s recipients. The awards are dedicated to recent graduates from a master or PhD program in the visual or media arts, and past recipients include Myriam Jacob-Allard, Julie Favreau, Aude Moreau and Brendan Flanagan.
The Banff Centre and the Hnatyshyn Foundation announced on Thursday that Lou Sheppard has been awarded the Emerging Atlantic Canada Artist Residency. Sheppard, who studied at NSCAD University and Mount Saint Vincent University and is based in Halifax, works in painting, performance, video and audio installation. Their work will be included in the upcoming 2017 Antarctic Biennale. Sheppard will use the residency to create a work that tracks daily changes in ice and translates it into musical notation. The award, which is valued at $30,000, is a partnership between the Banff Centre and the Hnatyshyn Foundation with support of the Harrison McCain Foundation, and recipients are able to spend a period of eight weeks in residence at the Banff Centre.
