Laurel Woodcock, wish you were here, 2003.
Our editors’ weekly roundup of Canadian art news.
Laurel Woodcock, conceptual artist and professor at the University of Guelph, passed away on January 7 in Toronto. Woodcock studied fine art at Concordia University in Montreal and completed an MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art in Halifax. Her multidisciplinary work, which included sculpture, video, audio, photography and performance, has been exhibited at the Power Plant in Toronto, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver and Artist’s Space in New York City.
Scottish painter Peter Doig, who was raised partly in Canada, will be awarded the 2017 Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon Award on January 25. The annual award, presented in partnership with Swarovski, is distributed as a part of the Art Icon event, a dinner and auction that raises funds for the Whitechapel Gallery’s programming. Past recipients include Joan Jonas and Richard Long. Doig set auction records in 2007 with his work White Canoe, which sold at Sotheby’s for $11.3 million, then a record for a living European artist.
Kim Nguyen has been appointed curator and head of programs at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco. Most recently, Nguyen was the director and curator of the Vancouver artist-run centre Artspeak. In 2016, she was the recipient of the $10,000 Award for Emerging Curator of Contemporary Canadian Art from the Hnatyshyn Foundation and TD Bank Group. Before joining Artspeak, Nguyen worked as the director and curator of Access Gallery, and curated shows at the Belkin Satellite, Gallery Atsui and Or Gallery. She has written for Fillip, Ricepaper and Cahiers métiers d’art.
OCAD University in Toronto has selected three architectural firms to design and implement their Creative City Campus: a project of “approximately 55,000 square feet of new construction and 95,000 square feet of renovation and repurposing of existing space in and around the existing facilities of the university.” Morphosis, a firm based in Los Angeles and New York, and Toronto’s Teeple Architects will be working on the project, alongside Two Row Architect, an Indigenous owned and operated firm on the Six Nations in Southern Ontario. Two Row Architect will be creating the Indigenous Visual Culture and Student Centre.
