Philippa Jones, Film Documentation of the Bubble (film still), 2016. Jones is the new executive director of Eastern Edge in St. John's.
Our editors’ weekly roundup of Canadian art news.
The St. John’s artist-run centre Eastern Edge has hired artist Philippa Jones, who has been based in the city since 2009, as the new executive director. Jones studied art at Falmouth University and has exhibited at galleries including the National Gallery of Canada, the Rooms and Two Rivers Gallery. Eastern Edge has also hired Hannah Morgan as the manager of the art festival Hold Fast, which is now in its 18th year and will run from August 10 to 13, 2017.
Municipal awards from both the Toronto Arts Foundation and the Ottawa Arts Council were announced in the last week. In Toronto, Anique Jordan received the $10,000 Emerging Artist Award and the Artists Mentoring Youth Project was recognized with the $20,000 Arts for Youth Award. In Ottawa, Maura Doyle and Andrew Wright were finalists for the Ottawa Arts Council Mid-Career Award (which was won by composer Jesse Stewart), while Gillian King won the RBC Emerging Artist Award.
Yasmin Nurming-Por has won the 2017 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators for her proposed project “My curiosities are not your curios.” The award, which is organized by the Art Gallery of Guelph, rewards a curator under the age of 30 with a space for their exhibition at the AGG and a $5,000 honorarium. Nurming-Por, who studied art history at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto, is currently in the Curatorial Research Practicum at the Walter Phillips Gallery. Curator Nancy Campbell, Untitled Art Society director (and past Middlebrook Prize recipient) Natasha Chaykowski and the McMaster Museum of Art’s Aboriginal curatorial resident, Rhéanne Chartrand, juried this year’s prize.
Business for the Arts, a national charitable organization that aims to strengthen relationships between the cultural and private sectors, has announced that the total economic impact of their artsVest program, which works with “small to mid-size arts organizations looking to procure sponsorships and build sustainable partnerships with the business community,” is valued at $4.45 million for 2017. The 331 arts organizations participating in the program went through a 10-month program to secure partnerships (663 were created), and those that secured sponsorships received matching funds.
Toronto artist-run centre Art Metropole announced a number of staffing changes on Friday. Nicole Cropley, who was previously the gallery manager of Gallery TPW, will begin as the new administrative director on June 12, 2017. Previously, Cropley was a member of FUSE Magazine’s editorial committee, and she studied both art history and curatorial practice at York University in Toronto. The centre’s associate director, Jacqueline Lachance, will be leaving Art Metropole after more than three years.
