C.4 Art Under the Big Sky: Prairie Art Network Open Session
Fri Oct 20 / 13:30 – 15:00 / KC 203
chairs /
- Andrea Korda, University of Alberta, Augustana Campus
- Karla McManus, University of Regina
The Prairie Art Network (PAN) aims to build a network of art historians, art educators, curators, and arts workers in the Canadian Prairies in order to create a stronger presence for the visual arts in the region. To that end, we invite Prairie-based art historians, artists, curators, and other arts professionals to join us for PAN’s first session at UAAC. We invite proposals for presentations on any aspect of teaching, research, curation, or artistic practice that is shaped by the Prairie context. We are particularly interested in hearing about projects and practices that engage with the places, histories, and communities of the Canadian Prairies.
keywords: Prairies, teaching, curating, collections, institutions
session type: panel
Andrea Korda is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Alberta, Augustana Campus. She is the author of Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (Ashgate, 2015), a co-organizer of the Crafting Communities project, and a founding member of the Prairie Art Network. Her articles on nineteenth-century British visual and material culture have appeared in The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Victorian Network, the Journal of Victorian Culture, Paedagogica Historica, Word & Image, and Nineteenth-Century Art Online. Her current research project looks at exchanges and overlaps between art and education in 19th- and 20th-century Britain and North America.
Karla McManus is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Regina. Alongside co-investigators Devon Smither and Andrea Korda, Karla was awarded a SSHRC Connections Grant to develop the Prairie Art Network event Art Under the Big Sky: Prairie Art Institute to be held in Regina in June, 2023. Karla’s current SSHRC-funded research grant explores how bird photography and its history in print has contributed to ecological knowledge and wildlife species conservation. Her ecocritical art history has been published in Les Cahiers de ARIP, the Journal of Canadian Art History, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies and Captures, Figures, théories et pratiques de l’imaginaire, as well as numerous edited collections and exhibition catalogues. She has held research fellowships and grants through the National Gallery of Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
A Fundamental Unity: The Communities of the Calgary Group
- Jocelyn Anderson, JR Shaw Institute for Art in Canada, Glenbow
The artists Cliff Robinson, Vivian Lindoe, Luke Lindoe, Janet Mitchell, Marion Nicoll, Maxwell Bates, Wesley Irwin, H.B. Hill, W.L. Stevenson, and Dorothy Willis came together in the 1940s, just before the postwar oil boom in Alberta sparked tremendous growth in Calgary. In 1948, they exhibited as the Calgary Group, creating a show that toured nationally and attracted significant critical attention. The group would later be cited as a key mid-century artist movement in the development of modernism in Western Canada, and some members became famous for their groundbreaking work with Expressionism and abstraction. Notwithstanding this narrative, the strongest bonds between artists in the group stemmed not from allegiance to questions of style but rather from deep interests in community building. Part of an exhibition development project designed to center community voices, this paper offers a close study of the group with an emphasis on relationships rather than individuals, on community spaces and connections rather than artworks. Many of the artists in the group felt they were struggling to find their place in Calgary, and their work with the Alberta Society of Artists (especially its newsletter, Highlights), the exhibitions at Coste House, and the teaching program at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art were fundamental to the strong friendships that emboldened their art. They created landscapes informed by everything from visits to reserves to oil exploration, experimented with a wide range of approaches to form and colour to reinvent traditional genres, debated the position of artists in society, explored art history and cultural traditions, and supported a new generation of artists, including Alex Janvier, Katie Ohe, and Roy Kiyooka. Investigating the activities of the group and their contemporaries illuminates a multicultural artistic community that was fundamentally concerned with tensions between regionalism and cosmopolitanism and passionately committed to negotiating a balance between these forces. Their history offers a model for a new kind of prairie art history exhibition, one that decenters single narratives to honour intersecting diverse histories.
Jocelyn Anderson is the Director of the JR Shaw Institute for Art in Canada at Glenbow, Calgary. Prior to joining Glenbow, she was the Deputy Director at the Art Canada Institute and an instructor at the University of Toronto Mississauga, where she created courses on modernism, nationalism, and colonialism in art in Canada. She is the author of William Brymner: Life & Work (2020), and she has contributed essays to Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment (2021), Generations: The Sobey Family & Canadian Art (2022), and Gathie Falk: Revelations (2022). Her research on art and the British Empire has been published in the Oxford Art Journal, British Art Studies, and Eighteenth-century Studies. She holds a PhD and MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.
kîkwây kikîkwetaweyihten What Are You Missing: Walks, Nature Journaling, and Visual Poetics
- Mackenzie Ground, Simon Fraser University
kîkwây kikîkwetaweyihten or what are you missing is a teaching from Elder Bob Cardinal that I ask myself from a year long course on the Four Directions I took during my graduate work. It is a question I often ask to myself, to others, of readings, of practices, etc. It is a question that opens up my creative and scholarly studies and encourages pause and thought. This question guides my approach to land-based practices and how to express experiences of being out on the land. Originating from a poetic and weekly practice of walks in the river valley of amiskwâciwâskahikan or Edmonton, questions arise about how to document these experiences and how to articulate these embodied, emplaced moments and reflections. In my own studies, I aim to enact and to live theory and thought on kinship with the land to help others see themselves as interconnected with place and to share this. This presentation asks what is missing when writing poetry, journaling, sketching, nature journaling, taking photographs, and creating cutups, collages, and concrete poetry and what colonial structures and narratives do these forms invite that Indigenous artists need to navigate, refuse, speak to, and challenge? Using my own experiences and works of other Indigenous artists and writers such as Michelle Porter and Faye HeavyShield, this presentation will address the colonial frameworks that visual traditions can carry and seek instead to nourish the Indigenous practices, connections, kinship, stories, memory and responsibilities to the land within these works.
Mackenzie Ground is a nehiyawiskwew and writer from Enoch Maskekosihk Cree Nation and amiskwacîwâskahikanihk Edmonton, Alberta in Treaty Six Territory. She is a PhD student at Simon Fraser University in the Department of English. She is a learner of nehiyawewin (the Plain Cree language) which informs and guides her writing and thinking alongside her walks. Her work considers the relationships of identity and place, to the land and to cities, and to the more-than-human beings who live there. She works with writing and poetry, story, inks and drawing, cut-ups, and collage. Her writing has appeared most recently in The Capilano Review, The Denver Quarterly, and C Magazine.
Oneirophyte: Prairie Plants Dream Digitally
- Lucie Lederhendler, The Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba
A discussion of the exhibition Oneirophyte, which occurs concurrently to the UAAC Conference, frames a description of the contemporary art landscape of Brandon, Manitoba. The exhibition, which is in the Main Gallery at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba (AGSM) from September 21st, includes the work of five professional artists from Winnipeg, as well as a summary piece by students studying Creative Media Arts at Assiniboine Community College (ACC), a vocational school in Brandon.
The theme of the exhibition itself was born from research into the state of digital art in Manitoba, which revealed a non-animal turn. Oneirophyte addresses the triadic cybernetics of plant, digital, and human bodies. The urgency with which the artists investigate alternate modes of understanding plants appears to be charged by the climate crisis. However, the application of digital systems–including artificial intelligence, automated surveillance, and sensory capacitors–was one of the earliest artistic applications of personal computational technology in the early 1990s.
The work produced by the students will be situated within the institutional art ecosystem of this small city between Winnipeg and Regina. With an urban population of just over 50 thousand, Brandon is served by: the AGSM, a 116-year old public art gallery; Brandon University’s BFA program and University Gallery; and ACC, which inaugurated a newly-equipped Creative Media Centre in 2022. The collaboration between professional Winnipeg-based digital artists and Brandon-based students of digital media has implications to contemporary art on the Canadian Prairies, manifesting the presumptions that larger urban centres are necessary to obtain steady work and a secure income as a digital creative. I will review past AGSM digital initiatives and responses to them, as well as current students and artists involved in the exhibition.
Lucie Lederhendler (she/her) is a curator, writer, and artist of Yiddish and settler heritage. She been the curator of the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in Brandon, Treaty Two Territory, Manitoba, since January 2021. Her previous practice was based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal, where she focused on supporting emerging artists in hybrid spaces, often as a member of the curatorial collective Studio Beluga. Previous presentations include PULSE (Concordia University), Colloque Ecopoétique (Université Perpignan); and LEAF (The Nature of Cities, for whom she is a regular contributor). She holds degrees in Art History from McGill University and Art Education from Concordia University, and is a lecturer in Art History at Brandon University.
Prairie Connections: Artist-centred research
- Michelle Schultz, Independent Curator
Why do artists stay here, why do they move here, why do they choose to build a life here, and why do they return after time away? What connects them to each other, and what connects them to national and international contemporary arts practices? What are the spaces that artists have built over the years and what gaps are they working to fill?
Driven by my own curiosity and personal experience, in early 2023, I began a primary research project centred around these questions. Starting in amiskwacîwâskahikan and moving across the Prairies, I have spent time in the studios of over 30 artists to ask these questions, and circle around the question of “What is Prairie Art?”
Michelle Deanne Schultz is a curator and senior arts administrator who has worked in public and private institutions in Canada, the US and the UK for over 10 years. She studied History of Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Alberta before completing an MA in Contemporary Art from the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, UK. In 2020, she earned an Executive Certificate in Nonprofit Leadership from John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
She worked at various London institutions including Whitechapel Gallery, Frieze Art Fair and Somerset House, and spent three years in Los Angeles, CA where she was Director of an emerging contemporary art gallery. She was Director of dc3 Art Projects in Edmonton, AB from 2015-18 and the Executive Director of Latitude 53, from 2018-23. Her current research focuses on Prairie-based artists and the connections between them and the larger art world.
