Rendering of the Kenojuak Cultural Centre and Print Shop. Courtesy Panaq Design.
Our editors’ weekly roundup of Canadian art news.
After a two-year-long fundraising campaign that raised more than $10 million, construction has officially begun on the Kenojuak Cultural Centre and Print Shop in Cape Dorset, Nunavut. The 10,000-square-foot centre will provide a space for community meetings, exhibitions and artists’ studios. Construction of the centre will be handled by the Iqluit-based, Inuit firm Kudlik Construction Ltd., who have arrived in Cape Dorset and started to prepare the site, creating service roads, installing power lines and driving piles into bedrock. Work will be halted over the winter and resume in April, with a tentative completion date in March 2018.
Montreal’s 375th anniversary will be marked with kilometre-long public art exhibition, titled “An Open-Air Museum,” organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in cooperation with the McCord Museum, Concordia University and McGill University. In addition to celebrating the city’s 375th anniversary, the exhibition will mark the 50th anniversary of Expo 67 and the 150th anniversary of Canada. The exhibit will be installed along Sherbrooke Street from May 29 to October 27, 2017, and include 67 works that are “in keeping with the universal values of humanism, tolerance and openness that inspired Expo 67.” Participating artists will include Jim Dine, Sorel Etrog, Ivan Eyre, Joe Fafard, Yayoi Kusama, Ju Ming, Richard Prince, Ugo Rondinone, Wang Shugang and Catherine Sylvain.
British Columbia philanthropist Michael Audain, through the Audain Foundation, has pledged $2 million to support expansion plans for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. The 12,000-square-foot, glass-and-steel addition to the AGGV was approved by city council in late 2015, and the gallery has been fundraising to meet the $21 million goal, with a target to begin construction in March 2016. The Audain Foundation’s gift is contingent on the AGGV receiving necessary funding from the provincial government during the 2017 calendar year.
The Art Dealers Association of Canada celebrated its 50th anniversary at an event in Toronto this week. The idea of an association representing Canada’s top galleries was initiated by a Montreal group of art dealers in the early 1960s. In 1966, the association was formally incorporated as the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada, after meetings between the Canada Council for the Arts and dealers including Dolores Booth, Mira Godard, Avrom Isaacs, Walter Moos and John Robertson. Headquartered in Toronto, the national not-for-profit organization’s mandate “includes stimulating the art market in Canada, and encouraging the awareness of the visual arts both nationally and abroad.”
