VICTORIA GALLERY AWARDS FIRST AUDAIN FELLOWSHIP

The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria will undertake a curatorial project that will explore the history of Aboriginal artists and artists of colour on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, part of the gallery’s first Audain Aboriginal Curatorial Fellowship. The Fellowship went to B.C.-based artists France Trepanier and Chris Creighton-Kelly, who will create the project Here Now: Here Before for the AGGV. The project will bring together the work of Aboriginal artists with work by artists of Chinese, South Asian, and African roots on Vancouver Island.

“Too often Aboriginal art is defined solely by its relationship to European culture and history,” says AGGV director Jon Tupper, about the project. “This ground-breaking project will add new knowledge to a subject that has been largely overlooked by art historians and scholars.” The Audain Fellowship at the AGGV, created in 2010 with an endowment from the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts in British Columbia, is the only one of its kind in Canada.