Rethinking Emily: The Responsibility We Carry

By Mel Granley, Guest Curator

Emily Carr has become almost synonymous with the Pacific Northwest; her work being displayed year-round in different exhibition contexts to ensure the satisfaction of visitors to the AGGV. This drive to see her work is directed by the idea of checking off a list of great and thoroughly known artists within the artistic canon. The issue? The “art canon” is heavily Euro-Western centered and very keenly demonstrates a bias for settler-European art, while largely failing to acknowledge the artistic merits of historic and contemporary BIPOC artists.

Kit Pearson’s Emily Carr in A Day of Signs and Wonders

This is the imagined Emily Carr as a child, dreamed up by the award-winning Victoria-based children’s author, Kit Pearson, in her book A Day of Signs and Wonders (Harper Collins, 2016). We visited Pearson at her Oak Bay home which she shares with artist Katherine Farris and their two dogs, Piper and Brio, for a discussion on her book, and the two protagonists who lived in Victoria in 1881 – 9-year-old Emily and 13-year-old Kathleen O’Reilly.