COMMUNITY CURATING
1 of 3
Griffith Aaron Baker
Griffith Aaron Baker, director / curator, Estevan Art Gallery & Museum, Saskatchewan. PHOTO: MELANIE HISKE.
2 of 3
Paul Crawford
Paul Crawford, director / curator, Penticton Art Gallery, British Columbia PHOTO: YURI AKUNEY.
3 of 3
Griffith Aaron Baker
Griffith Aaron Baker, director / curator, Estevan Art Gallery & Museum, Saskatchewan. PHOTO: MELANIE HISKE.
COMMUNITY CURATING
In smaller cities, art galleries are flying the flag for culture in challenging times.
BY: Margaret Bessai and Portia Priegert
Driving Highway 39 through Southeastern Saskatchewan on the way to the Estevan Art Gallery & Museum (EAGM), it’s tempting to link the wide sky and grid of farmland with the abstraction made famous by the Regina Five. Nearing Estevan, the sweeping ranchlands are dotted with industrial installations, oil derricks and pumping stations. Industry gives this small city of 11,000 big-city pressures, like the two-month waiting-list for a hotel room. What role does a public gallery play for these practical people, a hard-working mix of farm families and immigrants, who ranch and mine?
The gallery opened in 1978, one of 35 publicly funded national exhibition centres initiated by the federal government. Residents remember diverse touring exhibitions, from science and nature displays to works by Picasso. Recently, the EAGM has been adopted by the City of Estevan. Volunteers maintain the park surrounding the gallery, and two permanent staff do the rest. The collection includes works by high-ranking Canadian artists, including David Thauberger, Ernest Lindner, Michael Lonechild, and Vic Cicansky, and wood block prints and circus posters by historic local printer Andrew King. North West Mounted Police artifacts include an adjunct historic site — the two-storey wooden Post is the oldest building in Saskatchewan’s colonial history, built for the 1874 mounted police’s march West to secure the 49th parallel against whiskey traders.
Griffith Aaron Baker, the gallery’s energetic Director/Curator, also works as an artist, exhibiting nationally. He received his MFA in sculpture at Concordia in 2009, and has been working in Estevan since then.
Galleries West: What do you think an art gallery like yours should be to your community?
Baker: We have a dual mandate, to show contemporary art and heritage displays. We bring in new exhibitions bi-monthly, and I try to find a balance between traditional art-making and new techniques and ideas that challenge our viewers to expand their social and cultural horizons. It’s absolutely vital to create an inviting experience, so I use a variety of strategies to make our community feel welcome — the atmosphere is informal and friendly. Whenever possible, we bring artists in to speak about their work, and the dialogue that follows is a fantastic way to engage the community.
GW: What have been the highlights for you of your work at the gallery?
Baker: The people in Estevan are very open to new ideas, and very supportive of the work we do. We’ve been able to share a number of exhibitions with our local community that challenge the stereotype that contemporary art is only for certain people. In 2010 we exhibited Art at Home by Rob Bos — paintings that trace the artist’s heritage through the elms in Regina (where he grew up) to his ancestral trees in Holland. We didn’t show the paintings in the gallery. Instead, we placed them in homes throughout Estevan. Bos’s photographs, and interviews with each host became the gallery display. It was a great way to exhibit traditional subject matter, in a new way. The meaning of art is found in the relationship between the viewer and the work. Culture is a living practice — the artifact is only an object.
GW: What are the greatest challenges of working in a smaller community?
Baker: There’s so much work that can be done, I’d love to hire more staff, but I don’t want to cut down on our programming. Our previous director, Cheryl Andrist, worked hard to secure funding for the gallery, so I’ve been able to upgrade many of our facilities. Renovations increased our education area by 50 per cent, and created space for a community gallery to showcase local work. We’ve been able to fully document our historical collection and we’re redesigning the first floor of the museum.
GW: Who are the artists or concepts on your exhibition wish list?
Baker: Collaboration is a tool we’d like to use more in the future — to work with institutions like the local Souris Valley Pioneer Museum and jointly fund a series of artist residencies. As far as exhibiting is concerned, it doesn’t matter who you are, as long as your work is good. I’d like to continue studio visits, CARFAC mentorships and Organization of Saskatchewan Arts Councils tours, working with local artists like Corinne Trebick-Gibson. She also works as a lab tech, which influences her subject matter — viruses and bacteria. Wade Kotelo has recently documented the lonely hotel life of a transient worker in the oil field, through his large-scale oil paintings. Lindsay Arnold, our previous gallery educator, mentored with Saskatchewan artist Martha Cole. Her new drawings, exploring mental and physical borders, were inspired by her childhood experiences living close to the US/Canada border. It’s great to see this local work touring Canada. Lindsay Arnold’s work is in a Prairie Scene show in Ottawa this spring.
— Margaret Bessai
Paul Crawford, director / curator, Penticton Art Gallery, British Columbia
The Penticton Art Gallery has one of the most beautiful locations of any public gallery in Canada. Perched on the edge of Okanagan Lake, it has a panoramic view of orchards and vineyards, backed by craggy mountains dotted with sagebrush. Under Paul Crawford’s leadership over the last five years, the gallery has seen an eclectic range of exhibitions and activities — from Tibetan monks creating an elaborate sand mandala to skateboarders trying out a quarter pipe built inside the gallery by artist Keith Langergraber. Crawford himself is an avid collector of Canadian art, with a personal collection of some 1,500 works, many acquired at garage sales and second-hand shops.
Galleries West: What do you think an art gallery like yours should be to your community?
Paul Crawford: We constantly re-evaluate how the community perceives us, and make every effort to ensure the public sees the gallery as inclusive, inviting and fully accessible to all, regardless of social or economic standing. That’s not to say programming should be dumbed down to appeal to the lowest common denominator but, rather, that we need to develop a balanced exhibition schedule and engaging outreach programs to inspire, educate and challenge the public, while giving the community a sense of ownership in the organization. In these economically challenged times, and with a move to the right politically, the arts are increasingly under attack and are seen by some in power as being elitist, and a frill. If cultural organizations are to survive, they need to work harder and smarter, providing meaningful engagements that illustrate the importance of the arts to the well-being of their communities. Conversely, public galleries that continue to be seen as elitist, and provide little opportunity for community engagement and education, provide fodder for those who support funding cuts.
GW: What are the highlights for you of your work there?
Crawford: One gratifying aspect of working in a smaller community is the immediacy of the impact of programming on the public. I love the freedom to get out and connect with the community in a way I couldn’t in a larger organization. It’s exciting, but also nerve-wracking, to bring in exhibitions that challenge my views about art and then have to articulate artists’ ideas to the public.
The opportunity to see first-hand the incredible power the arts have to challenge and transform people is enlightening — it inspires and educates me. Every time I think I have it figured out, the unlikeliest of people will give me greater insight, showing again that one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. It’s always amazing to see and hear how an exhibition has impacted someone’s life. Ultimately, this is the biggest reward for what I have the great fortune to do for a living.
GW: What are the greatest challenges of working in a smaller community?
Crawford: The greatest challenge is the constant pressure to go out to the community time after time to raise funds. This is further compounded by continuing cuts to public funding. Penticton has a limited economic base, so there are few opportunities for corporate sponsorships. The pressure, then, is to find new and creative ways to raise money and to look outside the community for potential sources of new revenue. It’s also hard to constantly rely on the generosity of artists for fundraisers — who, by percentage of donations compared to income, must be the largest single group of benefactors — and then see their works sell for a bargain price. The endless pursuit of money takes us away from focusing our time and limited human resources on programming.
This does, however, present one benefit in that it forces us to be creative in our endless pursuit to find new ways to maximize what funds we are able to raise. With this in mind, this year we are launching a new fundraiser calledA Brush With Greatness, which will see an auction in September of used paintbrushes from some of Canada’s best-known artists. The brushes will be displayed in the gallery over the summer along with videos about participating artists. Proceeds will support our Creative Kids art program.
GW: Who are the artists or concepts on your exhibition wish list?
Crawford: This is a hard question to answer, as I’ve enjoyed working with all the amazing artists whose work I have had the good fortune of exhibiting. My only regret is that, inevitably, I have had to say no to a substantially higher number of artists.
Blockbuster exhibitions are rewarding in the sense that they allow you to handle and live with, if only for a short time, works of cultural significance whose value is already established. Conversely, it’s much more rewarding being the first to bring an emerging artist’s work to light or to rediscover an artist whose legacy has somehow fallen through the cracks. I am lucky to have the freedom and the opportunity to share the creativity of so many, and to work collaboratively with artists and cultural organizations from across the province.
— Portia Priegert
— Margaret Bessai