Mowry Baden & Roland Brener: Part 2

Mowry Baden & Roland Brener: Thirty Years in Victoria explores the sculptural influence of two internationally prominent, Victoria-based artists through a major two part exhibition. Part one, presented in Spring 2005, showcased significant public art projects: Radioville, a commission for Context Development International in Toronto by Roland Brener and From Wild Celery to the Fulcrum…

LAB 5.4: Wish You Were Here (At Odds with Emily) d. bradley muir

d. bradley muir revisits the Vancouver Island sites of Emily Carr’s paintings, in particular Odds and Ends (1939) and Above the Gravel Pit (1937), to create a series of large-format colour photographs…

Looking at Patronage: Recent Donations of Asian Art

Over the past five years the Gallery has received an abundance of Asian art donations worth well over one million dollars! These, combined with earlier donations, have made our Asian art collection the second most comprehensive Asian collection in Canada, second only to the Royal Ontario Museum….

Looking At Patronage

New Emily Carr Donations

Patronage. It seems like a word from the past. A patron, defined in the dictionary is ‘one who countenances, protects or gives influential support to something, especially the arts’. Interestingly, its other meanings also include ‘a regular customer’, with other references to patron saints, ‘the special guardians of somebody or something.’

The Art Gallery of Greater…

Images from the Tomb

Chinese Burial Figurines

Throughout China there was a belief that at death man simply changes the scene of his existence and that his needs and desires in the afterlife are, in fact, the same as during his lifetime. Therefore, many funerary figurines were placed in the deceased?s tomb. It was believed these figurines were surrogates for real people…

LAB 5.3: Multitasker Megan Dickie

Megan Dickie worked with the Art Gallery’s Collections Department to create Multitasker. She says “I had imagined that the employees performed orderly, precise tasks, walked around with white gloves all day and fantasized about their favourite object in the collection. I soon found out that working in the Collections Department was about working.” After interviewing…

Takao Tanabe

Experience land, sea and sky as painted by the internationally renowned Vancouver Island artist and Governor General award-winner Takao Tanabe. His expansive and gorgeous landscape paintings employ a sense of quiet atmosphere and formidable size to create an awe-inspiring vision of the West coast and Canadian country.

As a recipient of the Order of BC in…

The Discerning Eye

The George & Lola Kidd Collection, Part 2

Following the death of our good friend George P. Kidd last summer, we were informed that the Gallery would be a major beneficiary of his estate. In effect, George has left us the single most important bequest ? in number and quality of works of art ? in the history of our institution. Further, he…

Faces: Character & Wisdom in Shiwan Ceramic Sculpture

Even though the ceramics in this exhibition are from only a single collection, they present quite a wide range of subject matter, shapes, glazes and styles of China’s Shiwan art pottery.  
 
Shiwan ceramics play a significant role in understanding the culture of the Guangdong people (Cantonese) of south China.  To a large extent, this pottery…