Latest news with #EmilyCarr
CBC
09-07-2025
- Business
- CBC
Vancouver Art Gallery cutting staff, programming by about 30%
Social Sharing The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) is making deep cuts to its programming and staffing in an attempt to balance its budget. Eva Respini, VAG interim co-CEO, said overall, the cuts will amount to about 30 per cent. She said before the layoffs, there were 129 employees. Last month, 16 people accepted voluntary departure incentives, and 18 people have received layoffs since then. "We're really looking across the institution, trying to leave no stone unturned, and we really tried to save as many roles, as many jobs as possible," said Respini, adding that there's a union seniority process now taking place that could affect the final number of people who lose their jobs. "This is an incredibly difficult moment," she said. "It's quite literally every department in the museum that has been affected in one way or another." The co-CEO said the gallery will be doing fewer exhibitions in the coming year — from 12 down to eight — and they will last longer. One floor will change to showing art from the VAG's permanent collection, rather than travelling exhibitions. The gallery is planning a big Emily Carr exhibition this year, relying largely on the artist's more than 250 pieces in its collection. "We will be organizing an exhibition from our collection of Indigenous art, specifically from the Pacific Northwest coast. So it's an opportunity to lean into the local, and what I would say is that's what this upcoming year is. It's really about the local stories we can tell," said Respini. Cultural sector under pressure According to Jon Stovell, VAG board of trustees chair, the entire cultural sector across North America and Europe is struggling, as less money comes from philanthropists and governments and the cost of everything continues to increase. Stovell said attendance at the gallery never returned to pre-pandemic levels. Respini said in the fiscal year that just ended, the gallery ran a $22-million budget, but with the cuts, they're looking to meet a balanced budget of $16 million. According to a spokesperson with the B.C. Ministry of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport, the provincial government provided $1,987,000 in operating assistance from 2022 to 2025, as well as $1,581,000 in what it calls post-pandemic resilience supplements in 2022 and 2023. "This [supplement] was a temporary funding measure introduced to help arts organizations manage the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. These one-time funds were always intended as short-term support," said the spokesperson. New gallery construction plan proceeding Despite the challenges operating the gallery with the resources it has at its disposal, plans to build a new building for the VAG continue. "It seems a bit dissonant, I understand, in the current climate to be pursuing that, but it's something that I think if we don't pursue, will become a generational lost opportunity," said Stovell, adding that contributions from different levels of government and donors are still in place for the project. In December, the gallery scrapped its design for the proposed building at Cambie and West Georgia streets after costs soared to $600 million. Stovell said the VAG is now in the final stages of selecting a new architect from a pool of 14 Canadian firms. He said the goal is to announce the selection in late fall. According to Respini, the drawn-out project spanning 15 years to build a new gallery may make it more difficult to attract donations from philanthropists to cover operating costs. "There's some truth to a limited pool of donors who, for the last 15 years, have been spoken to — a lot of asks about the shiny new thing, and it's hard to maintain that for 15 years," she said. But Stovell disagrees, saying donors are generally quite specific in terms of whether their contributions will go toward operating or capital costs, and many prefer capital projects. "I think it would be harder to raise operational funding if people didn't see the prospect for the new gallery," he said.
CBC
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
'When I started, we were dead people': Tantoo Cardinal on bringing nuanced Indigenous stories to the screen
To understand the legacy and trajectory of Tantoo Cardinal's renowned acting career, you really have to understand the cultural context she was born into. "I was born only [five] years after Emily Carr passed away," the Indigenous icon tells Q 's Tom Power in an interview. "If you look at her work, it's all about the dying culture and the dead Indian…. So when I started, we were dead people." By the time Cardinal landed her first professional acting role in 1971, she says there was "massive ignorance" about Indigenous peoples across Canada. Fueled by rage, she turned to acting and storytelling as a form of resistance. "I understood the power of stories," Cardinal says. "Those stories had to be changed to empower ourselves to decolonize … to get back to the origins of who we are." In 1986, Cardinal moved to Los Angeles to find more work. That's where she landed a career-changing role in the Oscar-winning film Dances With Wolves, opposite Kevin Costner and Graham Greene. For a lot of people, Dances With Wolves was the first time they saw Indigenous people being represented in a way that highlighted their humanity. "There was a lot of magic surrounding that movie and I knew that it was significant," Cardinal says. "It was going to be in a Native language and then I asked them, 'Could you use a language where there are some materials, so that the actors have something that they can use to learn what the language is? … So that's how Lakota became the language that they used." Recently, Cardinal was honoured with the Equity in Entertainment Award at The Hollywood Reporter's Women in Entertainment Canada gala in Toronto. The award recognizes the Canadian acting legend's tireless work to bring authenticity, accuracy and nuance to Indigenous stories. When she looks back on her career now, Cardinal can see how her advocacy helped lay the groundwork for greater Indigenous representation today. "There's no turning back," she says.
Ottawa Citizen
02-06-2025
- Politics
- Ottawa Citizen
Today's letters: National Gallery mustn't neglect these volunteers
In search of Emily Carr, without help Article content I recently visited the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria. I was hoping to see many of Emily Carr's paintings but I was told that the National Gallery of Canada has a lot more. I visited the gallery on Victoria Day, May 19. The information desk in the Great Hall was empty. I couldn't find any of Carr's paintings near the Group of Seven collection. The only person to ask was a security guard but he wasn't able to help me. I am wondering: Why is the gallery cutting the service of knowlegable volunteers? Article content Article content Maria Barczyk, Ottawa Article content Thank you for recognizing the important work of the volunteers at the National Gallery of Canada. Having worked at the gallery as a docent since 2016, I have found it rewarding at so many levels. I have loved working with children visitors, doing tours, giving talks and appreciating art with both friends and the public. I have learned so much. Article content It would be wonderful to hear that the service of the volunteers could be re-instated. Article content Why would the National Gallery silence its most passionate, knowledgeable ambassadors? Volunteers gave freely — and this is the thanks they get. Kicking out trained volunteers who helped thousands engage with art is shameful. Article content The gallery claims to care about education and access, then scraps the very program that delivered both. Hypocrisy in action. Thousands of hours of free, expert work were erased overnight. This isn't just a mistake. It's an insult to the public, which funds the gallery. Article content Article content Royal visits can prompt grumbling about the monarchy. While it is indeed odd that the individual who is 'the final decider' in matters of public policy and appointments is someone in another country — who has that role by virtue of who their parents were, and their birth order — let us consider the positives. Article content As we look south, we see an administration that increasingly exploits the levers of governance for personal and partisan advantage, to the detriment of much of the populace and the world. Although it should be subject to the law and courts, it has structured the courts to its political advantage. Article content So it is comforting to know that, under our constitutional monarchy, the 'final decider' is someone who is completely insulated from all of that, and gives assent based on whether something is good for the nation, rather than for himself or herself personally or politically.
Globe and Mail
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Swiss exhibit Northern Lights puts classic Canadian art in new perspective
A Canadian art lover might be surprised to discover an exhibition where Emily Carr is hung alongside Edvard Munch. What would those beloved images of West Coast trees and totems have to do with the Norwegian's notoriously psychological art? Both, it turns out, were artists who painted the boreal forest. That is the starting point for Northern Lights, an exhibition comparing Canadian and Northern European landscape painting in the late 19th and early 20th century. It matches up Carr, Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris and J.E.H MacDonald with Munch, the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint and less familiar European names such as the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela and the Swedish artists Anna Boberg and Gustaf Fjaestad. 'We had the feeling there is a lot to say about northern art,' said curator Ulf Küster, who organized the exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation, a museum of modern and contemporary art near Basel, Switzerland. Building on a successful 2007 exhibition devoted to Munch, it's part of a look northward for an institution better known for a strong collection of southern European art, including works by the French Impressionists Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. The new show also reflects the slowly growing recognition of classic Canadian art outside of Canada. Once the exhibition closes at the end of the month, it moves to the United States where the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo has recently launched an initiative to show Nordic art. 'Canadian art of the early 20th century is practically unknown outside Canada. It's very strange,' Küster said. 'Even in America, the Americans don't know much about it.' A decade ago, Küster was introduced to the Canadian landscape tradition by the Scottish painter Peter Doig, who grew up partly in Canada. Doig gave him the catalogue for the 2011 show of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, England, a rare example of European attention to Canadian art. Küster is particularly impressed by the small oil sketches produced by Thomson and the Group, praising their plein air directness on the one hand and their well-conceived compositions on the other. 'It's funny: The second-largest country on Earth has been painted with these tiny sketches. It works extremely well,' he said. 'The tiny can be monumental.' The exhibition devotes an entire room to the sketches. However, Canadians who have grown up with the notion that Carr, Thomson and the Group form a national school determined to create new painting for a new country will be interested to discover Küster's different approach. Although he recognizes that both the European and Canadian artists may have found national sentiment a useful marketing tool, he describes them as independent from stylistic schools or political agendas. Their styles range widely from Harris's abstracted geometric mountains to Fjaestad's pointillism – so detailed it reaches for photo realism – and then all the way to Munch's dark subjects, such as Vampire in the Forest in which a woman sucks at a man's neck. 'They are modernists, really doing their own individual thing. They have a distinct personal style,' he said. 'I try to avoid all these isms, like symbolism, realism, naturalism – and nationalism.' For example, the painting Charred Tree by Gallen-Kallela is a snowy landscape depicting an old burnt trunk with a fresh young birch growing beside it. Painted in 1906, 11 years before Finland gained independence from Russia, it is often interpreted as an image of the new country springing up beside the dead empire. Küster calls this nonsense, pointing out that after a forest fire birch trees are the first to regrow. His environmental approach to these works is inspired by his late brother, a botanist who died in 2024 and who first pointed out to him that the northern European landscape paintings often featured depictions of the taiga, or boreal forest. In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, he also remarks that equating the Group of Seven with Canadian nationalism is problematic because it doesn't include any First Nations' perspectives. Canadians might be surprised not to find any Indigenous art in the exhibition, since increasingly curators here mix contemporaneous Indigenous pieces with Canadian ones. Nor is there much further reference to Indigenous presence on the land, which Carr was one of the few landscape artists of that generation to recognize. Küster said he felt that as a scholar of European art, he lacked the expertise to include Indigenous art. Instead, in the catalogue, he provides a series of historic photographs by settlers and tourists that show human activity, both white and Indigenous. The photos belong to the Archive of Modern Conflict, the London photography collection owned by David Thomson (whose family holding company Woodbridge Co. Ltd. owns The Globe and Mail). Dating from about 1880 to 1920 the photographs include a Hudson Bay settlement and First Nations camps in Canada, railway building in Siberia and rare images of the Sami, the Indigenous people who live in Northern Scandinavia, Finland and Russia. The images also feature two valiant attempts by a Norwegian photographer to capture on film the capricious spectacle of the Northern Lights. Northern Lights continues at the Beyeler Foundation in Riehen, Switzerland, to May 25, and opens at the Buffalo AKG in Buffalo on Aug. 1.
CBC
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Famous Canadian paintings visit Calgary before hitting auction block
Paintings from Canadian artists like Emily Carr and Group of Seven members A.Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris are on tour as part of a live auction preview. Calgary is one of four stops before the art goes to auction in Toronto in May.
