News Roundup: Krista Belle Stewart and Bruce Grenville Win VIVA Awards

This was a big week for awards: Stan Douglas won the newly $100K Audain Prize, Winnipeg’s Alyssa Bornn won the Emerging Digital Artists Award, and several more prizes, rounded up below, were announced. Also in our coverage, Deanna Bowen’s new public artwork in Vancouver is paying tribute to Black history in that city. And here at Canadian Art, we welcomed Maya Wilson-Sanchez as fall 2019 editorial resident. Read on for more.

More Awards

Artist Krista Belle Stewart and curator Bruce Grenville have won VIVA Awards. Each receives $12,000 from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts, which recognizes achievement by BC artists and curators. Stewart is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Syilx/Okanagan Nation, and currently based in Berlin. Her newest show, just opened at the Nanaimo Art Gallery, is called “Truth to Material” and focuses on groups of German citizens who call themselves “Indianer” and dress up and enact what they imagine to be a North American Indigenous lifestyle. Bruce Grenville has been senior curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery since 1997 and has curated exhibitions of Stan Douglas, Carol Sawyer, Gathie Falk and Wang Du, among other artists. (Straight, Shadbolt Foundation, Nanaimo Art Gallery)

Artists Abel Rodríguez and Hera Büyüktaşçıyan have won the inaugural Toronto Biennial Prizes. The Bogata-based Rodríguez has won the biennial’s Art Prize and the Istanbul-based Büyüktaşçıyan has won the Emerging Artist Prize, both awards being based on their works at the biennial. Each of these prize winners will receive $20,000. The biennial also awarded an honourable mention to the artist duo Althea Thauberger and Kite, based in Vancouver and Montreal, respectively. They will receive $5,000. The biennial, and the chance to view these honoured artists’ works there, continues until December 1. (Artnews, Toronto Biennial)

Artist Katie Ohe is receiving the Alberta Order of Excellence, the highest honour the Province of Alberta can bestow on a citizen. Ohe also won a Distinguished Artist Award from the province earlier this year. “Katie Ohe is considered one of Alberta’s pioneers of abstract art,” notes the award website. “Her six-decade career working in sculpture in a range of materials including steel, concrete, epoxy and chrome has spearheaded the abstract sculpture medium in Alberta. Ohe has exhibited extensively throughout Canada and internationally, and her sculptures are found in numerous public collections.” She has also taught at Alberta University of the Arts since the 1970s. The Esker Foundation in Calgary is currently working on a survey exhibition of six decades of her work, which will open January 24, 2020. (Herringer Kiss Gallery, Alberta Arts Awards)

Artist and activist Lou-Ann Neel will receive the Tony Urquhart Advocacy Award this week. The award, presented by CARFAC, is for “her dedication and contributions to the visual arts sector in Canada.” Neel is from the Mamalilikulla and Kwagiulth peoples of the Kwakwaka’wakw and has lived much of her life in Victoria. Neel is a practising artist as well as a repatriation specialist at the Royal BC Museum. “I believe Indigenous artists and communities of practice should be recognized and supported at the same levels as other BC and Canadian artists and arts organizations, so my goal is to ensure there are Indigenous arts organizations established to provide the kinds of supports needed and to ensure our unique traditions are transferred to future generations of Indigenous artists,” Neel said in a release. (CARFAC)

Photographer Jenna Hobbs is one of 11 artists worldwide shortlisted for the 2019 Luxembourg Art Prize. Based on a farm in Stony Plain, Alberta, Hobbs creates work that focuses on the circumstances of mothers, often including herself and her five children. Going to the prize ceremony and exhibition this weekend, Hobbs tells the CBC, is the first time she will be seeing one of her prints in an art gallery. The prize winner, to be announced September 28, receives 50,000 euros. (CBC)

Climate Strike and Art Schools

Emily Carr University of Art and Design and the Vancouver Film School will be cancelling classes for the Global Climate Strike on September 27. ECUAD’s campus will remain open, the university president announced Monday, but classes will be cancelled noon onwards to permit students to attend the strike. “We know that many of you care deeply about this global priority and have taken action in your daily lives. Some of you have created work that engages with pressing environmental concerns, or have produced research that tackles questions about the future of our planet,” observed ECUAD president Gillian Siddall in a Monday statement. Vancouver Film School followed suit with a Tuesday announcement. (ECUAD release, Global News)

NSCAD University students are provided academic amnesty for Global Climate Strike. That means that students can miss classes on September 27 without penalty. “From our perspective, we couldn’t in good faith not support our students, but also our staff and faculty who might want to participate in the demonstration,” said NSCAD president Aoife Mac Namara in Halifax Today. (Halifax Today)

OCAD University Student Union is leading a walkout Friday morning for the strike. The walkout will leave at 11 a.m. for Queen’s Park, where wider protests will be taking place. “As members of OCADU and as Artists and Designers it is our duty to prioritize sustainability, consider new and innovative approaches to issues like climate change, and stand up for our future.” said OCADSU on Facebook. (Toronto Star, OCADSU Facebook)

Public Art

A major piece of public art by Ai Weiwei is being installed in Winnipeg. The sculpture Forever Bicycles, which consists of 1,254 bicycles and is 30 feet long, is being installed at the Forks. It will be in place there for two years, possibly three. According to the CBC, this is the first time Ai Weiwei’s art has been exhibited in Winnipeg, and organizers at the Forks are hoping he may come to speak there in the spring. (CBC)

Of Art and Real Estate

The artists and curators using the Darling Foundry have raised enough money to put in an offer on that Montreal building. Quartier Éphémère, the arts organization which has used Darling Foundry for some 18 years for exhibitions and residencies, has raised $80,572 on the Indiegogo crowdfunding platform and received pledges for other donations. These funds have enabled Quartier Éphémère to put in an offer to buy 745 rue Ottawa from the city. “We wish to emphasize the many artists, cultural workers, dedicated citizens, and international supporters who donated, as well as the significant contributions made by philanthropists, art institutions, local businesses, the neighbourhood, Montreal, and Canada, which indicates that the Darling Foundry’s scope reaches far beyond its local community,” said a release. (Darling Foundry)

The art-book publisher Anteism has opened a new space in Montreal, including a gallery. “After six months of hard work we’ve converted an abandoned, burnt out empty shell into a new arts venue in Mile Ex, Montréal,” says Anteism on Instagram. The new space is at 435 Beaubien Ouest. Its first exhibition opens October 3, featuring work by Frances Adair Mckenize and Alicia Piercy, Jenny Lin and David Jhave Johnson. (Anteism, Instagram)

John B. Aird Gallery in Toronto has found a new home. Originally opened in 1975, the non-profit gallery was, until recently, located in a Government of Ontario building near Queen’s Park in Toronto. Now it is located at 906 Queen Street West in a building owned by cultural non-profit Artscape. (John B. Aird Gallery)

Passages

Ker Wells has died. A founding member of Primus Theatre in Winnipeg and Number Eleven Theatre in Toronto, Wells was known for his many collaborations. Of late, he was an associate professor of theatre performance at Simon Fraser University’s School for Contemporary Arts in Vancouver and worked on the River Clyde Pageant in PEI. “Ker’s artistic influence has been powerfully felt as a teacher: transformative experiences, encounters with students and performers, amateur and professional, and community members, all charged by his dedicated attention, his tremendous physical and creative energy, and the singular pleasure he took in play,” say a remembrance on the SFU website. Wells was born on May 31, 1964, and died August 30, 2019, from pancreatic cancer. (SFU SCA)

Eva Mendel Miller has passed. Miller was the daughter of Frederick Mendel, who endowed the former Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, and she was an artist herself. “Miller, who died Sept. 5 in Calgary, was born in Germany [in 1919] but fled with her family prior to the Second World War, eventually setting in Saskatchewan in 1940,” says Galleries West. “She studied painting with leading artists of her day, including Hans Hoffman, George Grosz and Goodridge Roberts. An oil painter and watercolorist, she concentrated on collage in later years. Her works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in France and Canada since the early 1940s. Miller inspired her father to begin his collection of modern paintings and advised him on purchases that eventually formed the nucleus of the Mendel Art Gallery.” (Galleries West, Saskatoon StarPhoenix)

More remembrances of Bruce Ferguson have emerged. Since Canadian Art published a feature on Ferguson’s passing last week, remembrances have also appeared in Artnews, the Los Angeles Times and Artforum.