Notice Board

In February 2014, Shawn Van Sluys gave the first lecture in a series on sacredness and the imagination—on the world-shaping role of the arts. Drawing on examples from literature, theatre, the visual arts, and music, he shows how the arts are an insatiable pursuit for expressions of the imagination that strengthen our embodied spirit; that set up defences against the onslaught towards the loss of the world; and that indicate what spaces of possibility exist in the world. We enact this pursuit through contemplation, improvisation, deep listening and deep reading.

At noon in Art NOW, Van Sluys will give the second lecture on sacredness, and in the evening in Architecture & Design NOW he will deliver the third and final lecture in the series.

Shawn Van Sluys is the Executive Director of Musagetes, a philanthropic foundation that experiments in small Canadian and European cities with ways to connect communities more deeply with the arts and creativity. The foundation’s mandate is to make the arts more central and meaningful in people’s lives, in their communities and societies. He joined Musagetes as its first Executive Director in January 2009. Prior to that, he was the first Executive Director of the Canadian Art Museum Directors’ Organization, a national arts-service organization that represents 85 museum directors. Shawn studied art history at the University of Lethbridge before taking his first position as the Public Relations Manager at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. He is the Vice-President of the Guelph Jazz Festival and of the Ammirato Culture House in Lecce, Italy. As a member of the Executive Team of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) at the University of Guelph, he leads the Practice-Based Research working group. His research and writing encompasses the relationship between art and the imagination; the role of the arts in transforming society; and the contemplative, poetic, and lyric frames of the arts.