Nicholas de Grandmaison: Recent Acquisitions

May 2 – June 27, 2013
Main Gallery
Reception: May 2, 6 – 8 pm
Extended viewing hours: Saturdays 10 am – 5 pm

Information concerning the de Grandmaison Oral History Project.

Curator: Josephine Mills

Drawn from the 67 artworks donated by BMO Financial Group, this exhibition features 28 pastel portraits that provide a range of the Aboriginal subjects represented in the gift. The works demonstrate de Grandmaison’s deep respect for the people whom he painted and his exceptional skill at capturing the individual character of his sitters. The exhibition will include a resource area focused on a newly launched oral history project. The U of L Art Gallery and the University Archives are partnering to gather stories on the artist and on the subjects of his paintings. These oral histories will be added to the existing research holdings of archival material on the artist and will help provide context for future audiences attending exhibitions of his works. Information on the oral history project will be provided and people can contact the research team if they wish to participate.

Check the U of L Art Gallery’s website — ulag.ca – for details on a planned informal series of presentations “Conversations about Nicholas de Grandmaison”. These will occur on select Thursday evenings throughout the exhibition. As well, the gallery has extended hours for the run of the exhibition and is open every Saturday along with being open until 8:30 pm on Thursdays in addition to the regular 9 am – 4:30 weekday hours.

Closing Reception & Hoop Dance Performance
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Main Gallery

The closing reception featured a hoop dance performance as well as information about the U of L Art Gallery’s ongoing Nicholas de Grandmaison Oral History Project. Through this project we are collecting stories from First Nations people about their relatives portrayed in de Grandmaison’s work. The art gallery hopes to bring past and present generations together by discovering the story behind the subjects in the portraits. The hoop dance performance showed that First Nations’ cultures are still as proud and strong as they were when de Grandmaison first captured his visual documentation of the subjects.

Recent Acquisitions

June 8 – July 13, 2012
Curator: Jane Edmundson
Works from the U of L Art Collection.

The University of Lethbridge Art Gallery houses one of the most significant art collections in Canada. Numbering over 13,000 objects, the holdings include works from Canada, America and Europe, span the 19th and 20th centuries, and continue to grow with 21st century additions. The collection’s major strength is its diversity, which not only represents a wide range of geographic locations, but also the full spectrum of media, artistic movements, genres and approaches. Initiated at the earliest stages of the University’s development to help facilitate the liberal education of students on campus, the collection stands as the backbone of the Art Gallery’s exhibition programming, with rotating collection displays accompanied by contemporary exhibitions in various Gallery spaces and public site installations throughout campus. The art collection continues to grow today through the generous gifts of artists and art collectors and focused, grant-funded purchases. In recent years, efforts have been made to strengthen the holdings of artworks of specific movements or genres that were formerly underrepresented within the collection.

Recent Acquisitions features a selection of works from the University of Lethbridge Art Collection that have been acquired over the past three years. These works were chosen for their historic, conceptual and geographical links to Lethbridge. Artists Chai Duncan and Len Komanac both have ties to our campus community; Duncan worked as a Technician in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Komanac is an alumnus of the BFA program. Carl Granzow was one of the earliest instructors in Visual Arts at the University, and animated campus for over 30 years with his vision for the Papokan Sculpture Park and Gushul Studio Residency Program before his untimely passing in 2009. Prairie artists Joe Fafard, Don Proch and Russell Yuristy are associated with the Regina Clay movement, which sought to depict everyday objects and scenes from rural life with humour, colour, and quirkiness. George Hunter’s photographs of mining operations in Lethbridge and urban life in burgeoning, post-war Albertan towns have documentary merit while also being beautifully composed and visually compelling. Finally, Calgary painter and printmaker John Will is one of the artists that the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery has committed to collecting in-depth; the collection holds over 120 works by Will, spanning over 45 years of his self-deprecating, neurotic and expressive art practice.

- Jane Edmundson

Recent Acquisitions

Main Gallery

Art galleries regularly include Recent Acquisitions exhibitions in their exhibition schedule. It provides an opportunity to display newly arrived works and to acknowledge the generous donations of artists and private collectors who have given these works to a public collection.

For The University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Recent Acquisitions exhibitions are particularly important. We are well known for our large and significant collection. However, it is equally important to demonstrate that collecting is an active process and that our collection is not static.

The focus of this exhibition is to provide a sense of the diversity of the contemporary aspects of the collection and on-going developments with acquisitions. There are Canadian artists as well as an American and a German artist; several types of media; and a range of interests within the works selected here. The variation within this exhibition is but a small sample of the breadth and scope of The University of Lethbridge Art Collection.

Josephine Mills
Director/Curator

Artists:
Elvira Bach
Jon Baturin
John Hartman
David Janzen
Richard Kerr
Martha Townsend
Tom Wesselmann
Robert Young

Main Gallery

Highlighting recent generous donations, this exhibition features new works in the U of L Art Collections.