Galleries West is being recognized for the excellence of its editorial content last year as an eight-time finalist in five categories of the Alberta Magazine Awards.
The awards from the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association, a voice for the province's periodicals, recognize "extraordinary content" by editors, writers, illustrators, photographers, art directors and other producers in 30 categories, including a new COVID-19 category.
Two Galleries West stories are finalists in the COVID-19 category – Sarah Swan's essay about artists in the early days of the pandemic, Art in a Time of Pandemic, and Portia Priegert's survey story, Digital Dash, which looks at how galleries pivoted to online platforms.
Swan is also a finalist in the Essay category for In Defence of Art from Small Places. In Feature Writing (Short) our finalists are Dorothy Woodend, who explores Vancouver artist Julius Csotonyi’s dramatic dinosaur art in Age of Extinction; and Fish Griwkowsky, who reviews an exhibition by Curtis Talwst Santiago at the Art Gallery of Alberta.
Galleries West has two finalists in the Digital Project category: Mark Mushet's videos about Vancouver artists Fei Disbrow and Stephen Waddell, and a three-part series, Art & Healing, which includes Paul Gessell's story about two Western Canadian hospitals with their own art galleries, as well as a story about art therapy and a Q & A feature with Dick Averns, who led a recent social practice project about mental wellness.
Also recognized was the the 2020 arts book issue, a finalist in the Service: Journalism category. Along with a roundup of Canadian art books published last year, the issue featured reviews of five international books: Paul Gessell on Young Rembrandt by Onno Blom; John Thomson on The Art of Banksy, edited by Gianni Mercurio; Sarah Swan on How to be an Artist, by Jerry Saltz; Agnieszka Matejko on The Obama Portraits by Taína Caragol, Dorothy Moss, Richard J. Powell and Kim Sajet; and Portia Priegert on Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels, which documents a project by British writer Toby Ferris to see all extant paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Winners will be announced at an online awards ceremony on June 3.
The awards were expanded beyond Alberta's borders this year to include Best Provincial Story and Western Magazine of the Year categories in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Source: Alberta Magazine Publishers Association