From the Editor - August 1, 2023 Issue

July 31, 2023

9:30 PM

Western Canada’s art magazine since 2002

Portia Priegert

From the Editor

This is a quick note as I’m about to take a two-week break from the editor’s chair. Our regular flow of articles will not resume until mid-August, although event listings will continue to be posted. This is the first hiatus in an almost-daily publishing schedule since we launched our uniquely digital format in 2016.

In Ottawa, the National Gallery of Canada today formally inaugurates a year-long outdoor installation, The Black Canadians (after Cooke), by Montreal-based artist Deanna Bowen. Veteran journalist Paul Gessell last month broke news about a behind-the-scenes curatorial debate over the accuracy of one aspect of the work, a massive photomural of historical images. For this issue, we decided to ask arts writer Amy Fung, now completing her doctorate in Indigenous and Canadian Studies at Carleton University, to take a deeper dive into other histories that Bowen references.

The inauguration is timed to coincide with Emancipation Day on Aug. 1, officially designated by the House of Commons two years ago to mark the date in 1834 that legislation to abolish slavery came into effect across the British Empire. We are all familiar with the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, which brought some 12 million African captives to the Americas. Less known is Canada’s complicity in this history. Marcel Trudel, a Quebec historian, estimates some 4,200 people, both Indigenous and Black, were enslaved between 1671 and 1831 in Nouvelle France and what became known as Upper and Lower Canada.

This issue of Galleries West also includes reviews of an intriguing Calgary exhibition by Bill Rodgers, who responds to Giotto’s work at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy, and a Winnipeg exhibition by Grace Nickel that marks her recent Saidye Bronfman Award, the country’s leading honour for craft artists. Other articles focus on Vancouver-based Parviz Tanavoli, who has been dubbed the father of modern Iranian sculpture, Edmonton artist Becky Thera, who explores Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition from a feminist perspective, and a group show that engages with play in a backyard gallery launched during the pandemic.

Looking ahead, we will feature a few major exhibitions from further afield, including German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans at the Art Gallery of Ontario and Mohawk artist Shelley Niro at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

Until next time,