1 of 7
Sandra Meigs explores foundations and crawl spaces in "The Basement Panoramas"
Sandra Meigs explores foundations and crawl spaces in "The Basement Panoramas" from Nov. 1 to Dec. 14 at Open Space, a Victoria artist-run centre. Installation view of Blue. 1000 Mountain Rest (Breath), 2013, acrylic on canvas, 6' x 18'.
2 of 7
"Damaged files removed after the Calgary flood swamped Stride Gallery’s archives"
Damaged files removed after the Calgary flood swamped Stride Gallery’s archives.
3 of 7
"After the Calgary flood, Stride’s volunteers set documents and other material out to dry as other volunteers worked to repair basement walls"
After the Calgary flood, Stride’s volunteers set documents and other material out to dry as other volunteers worked to repair basement walls.
4 of 7
"After the Calgary flood, Stride’s volunteers set documents and other material out to dry as other volunteers worked to repair basement walls"
After the Calgary flood, Stride’s volunteers set documents and other material out to dry as other volunteers worked to repair basement walls.
5 of 7
"After the Calgary flood, Stride’s volunteers set documents and other material out to dry as other volunteers worked to repair basement walls"
After the Calgary flood, Stride’s volunteers set documents and other material out to dry as other volunteers worked to repair basement walls.
6 of 7
"After the Calgary flood, Stride’s volunteers set documents and other material out to dry as other volunteers worked to repair basement walls"
After the Calgary flood, Stride’s volunteers set documents and other material out to dry as other volunteers worked to repair basement walls.
7 of 7
Sandra Meigs explores foundations and crawl spaces in "The Basement Panoramas"
Sandra Meigs explores foundations and crawl spaces in "The Basement Panoramas" from Nov. 1 to Dec. 14 at Open Space, a Victoria artist-run centre. Installation view of Blue. 1000 Mountain Rest (Breath), 2013, acrylic on canvas, 6' x 18'.
ARTIST-RUN CRISIS
Non-profit arts organizations cope with stagnant funding, high rents and, now, even natural disaster.
By Anthea Black
As the country watched news of the Calgary flood last June, dramatic pictures and reports confirmed that Stride Gallery, one of the city’s oldest artist-run centres, had been caught in the fast-flowing water. Even from afar, I knew the downtown gallery and its basement archives, which document three decades of artist-run history, were in danger.
At the same time, it struck me that the flood was an apt metaphor for how I had experienced artist-run culture when I was Stride’s director from 2003 to 2006: as a series of small (and, sometimes, large) crises mediated by the care, hard work and persistence of the local arts community. But, of course, independent artist-run centres are not in the crisis-management business. Their aim – although mandates and programming are impressively diverse from centre to centre – is to support artists and their communities by providing a critical forum for creating and engaging with contemporary art.
After Calgary’s swollen rivers started to recede, Stride’s staff and volunteers sprang into action, lugging muddy catalogues and waterlogged files out of the basement and then working to clean and dry them. “The cracking of the archives – moving them, opening them and restoring them – seemed, by some accounts, to be a good exercise in revisiting and exposing the community to some of Stride’s amazing work over the years,” says Diana Sherlock, a curator and writer long involved with Stride. “Too bad it had to occur under such terrible conditions.”
Indeed, younger artists – as well as the general public – often know little of the pivotal role artist-run centres have played in transforming the arts in Canada since the 1970s. Centres have been vital in the research and development of contemporary art, particularly emerging practices in performance, new media and hybrid forms, and have given artists important alternatives to hard-to-access public galleries and a conservative art market. Over the years, emerging and established artists have presented experimental and politically challenging work that otherwise might not have been seen.
Many of Canada’s best-known artists had their first exhibitions at artist-run centres and continue to be involved as board members and mentors to new generations of artists. Artist-run culture has also helped transform the arts economy. For instance, CARFAC – Canadian Artists’ Representation / Le Front des artistes canadiens, a non-profit group that has advocated on behalf of professional artists since 1968 – demanded that galleries pay artists fees to exhibit their work, a principle most artist-run centres honour.
But in recent years, a new climate of fiscal austerity has stretched some centres’ ability to stay afloat. The threats come in various guises: dramatic cuts to arts funding in British Columbia; stagnant federal funding; shortages of affordable space in most urban centres; the very real issue of staff burnout; and a brain drain from smaller cities. With limited budgets and rising operating costs, artist-run centres, like many other non-profit groups, are often understaffed and over-extended. It may not be evident to outsiders, but every exhibition and public program demands a suprising amount of staff and volunteer time. But it’s the need to respond to systemic issues such as under-funding or the gentrification of low-rent neighbourhoods – or crises like the flood at Stride – that really grind away at organizational capacity.
One of the biggest events to celebrate artist-run culture in Western Canada is SWARM, a Vancouver-based festival that runs Sept. 12 and Sept. 13. Thousands of people come out each year for the latest exhibitions and special events. It’s a way to make artist-run culture more visible, says Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, services and outreach development coordinator for the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres, an umbrella organization of more than 20 groups. An artist and curator, she is helping promote SWARM with a poster campaign that includes eye-catching snippets about the historic achievements of artist-run culture. This year’s festival celebrates the 40th anniversary of two of Canada’s oldest centres, The Western Front and VIVO Media Arts Centre, along with the regular mix of exhibitions, video screenings and site-specific projects.
One of the big challenges for Vancouver centres is affordable space. VIVO, for instance, is under pressure to find new digs by May due to a dramatic rent hike. These days, there’s also buzz in Vancouver around a new partnership between three centres – 221A, UNIT/PITT and Access Gallery. While each maintains its distinct mandate and programming, they are working together to develop a new 10,000-square-foot commercial building that includes gallery space and affordable artist studios. It’s slated to open in October.
Brian McBay, co-founder and executive director of 221A, sees enormous potential in the type of partnerships the centre has built since it was founded in 2005. He observes that artist-run organizations established within the last 10 to 15 years are applying to maxed-out grant streams, meaning any increase to one organization “must come from another organization’s pocket.” Instead, his gallery has diversified its funding model and acquired space by working closely with others in the community.
“Self-generated revenue does seem to be the buzzword right now,” says Biliana Velkova, a former Vancouver resident who’s now executive director of PAVED Arts, a media arts centre in Saskatoon. She describes the “amazing benefits” of owning the two-storey building where PAVED and AKA Gallery are housed. The two, which have shared infrastructure since buying the space together eight years ago, recently hired a facilitator to help identify new streams of self-generated revenue. The move, Velkova says, responds to funders’ expectations that centres do more with less, stretching every dollar even further.
Although people often assume artists are disorganized or bad at managing money, artists often excel at research, planning and financing as they work with community and civic partners to create sustainable organizations that maintain their critical and artistic values. Artists, says McBay, become “good with money” because their survival – and the fiscal health of the artist-run organizations that support them – is at stake. And if the creative capital of artist-run centres has put them at the vanguard of new art forms, their work to generate new financial models for artist-run culture also deserves recognition.
Back at Stride, it’s hard to do much but cope with the aftermath of the flood. Exhibitions are on hold, at least until December, and director Larissa Tiggelers worries that staff and board members are burning out from the stress of dealing with the crisis. More than half the gallery’s archived material was lost and there’s been talk both about moving and about eventually donating what’s left of the archive to a larger organization that’s better able to protect it. In the meantime, Tiggelers is hoping she can soon return to planning exhibitions – the real work of the gallery. Artists, she says, have been working toward their shows for months. “The artists are obviously why we’re here. They are why we do what we do.”
Some shows to check out at artist-run centres this fall:
WINNIPEG: Sanksanni´ca, the Dakota word for dress, features works by Lita Fontaine that incorporate traditional patterns and designs. Sept. 13 to Oct. 19 at Urban Shaman.
SASKATOON: Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen offers a time portal to 1967 in A People Kind of Place at PAVED Arts from Sept.13 to Oct. 19.
CALGARY: After the Flood runs at Pith Gallery and Studios from Oct. 11 to Dec. 6.
VANCOUVER: Due to Injuries ..., by Vancouver artists Jamie Hilder and Brady Cranfield, considers the aesthetics of the economy. Sept. 13 to Oct. 19 at 221A.
VICTORIA: University of Victoria professor Sandra Meigs explores foundations and crawl spaces in The Basement Panoramas from Nov. 1 to Dec. 14 at Open Space.