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.

School Workshop, Snapshot: Mandalas, Music and Movement

By Alex Chen

“I don’t sing.” That’s what a majority of students admitted to me during a school workshop.  However, perhaps to their surprise, by the end of our hour-long workshop, the students were not only using their voices and bodies to make art, they were taking chances expressing their artistic observations, collaborating with their peers, and having fun doing so! In this year’s iteration of the AGGV’s School Workshops, spanning October to December, Jennifer Van de Pol (AGGV Educator for School and Family Programs), a class of UVic Indigenous Education Students headed by Dr. Carmen Rodriguez de France, and myself visited young learners in schools across the Greater Victoria Area to delve into the works by local visual artist Dylan Thomas (Qwul’thilum) as well as my own artistic practice as a classical musician and opera artist in Victoria.

Holding Ground: Intergenerational Legacies of Art and Resilience 

By Nikki Sanchez 

Before a global pandemic sent the world into wave after wave of lockdowns, there was a different wave of change rolling across Canada — a unified solidarity that was shutting down business as usual. It was a wave of solidarity with the Wetsu’wet’en communities of Unist’ot’en and Gidimt’en, who were under military occupation in their own territory as they stood in opposition of the Coastal Gas Pipeline. When Wet’suwet’en matriarchs called for the country to stand in solidarity with them, their call was heard from Vancouver to Winnipeg, Tyendinaga to Tkaranto. 

The Story of Blue and White

By Audrey Wang, AGGV Volunteer

Did you ever wonder why fine porcelain is called “china”? Or why the habit of pouring milk into a porcelain teacup before pouring the tea became outdated? It all harks back to the origins of blue and white porcelain from the Yuan and early Ming Dynasties and its far-reaching influence on the rest of the world.

Serendipitous technologies: a human-human-machine collaboration

By Marina DiMaio, Digital Potentials Advisory Coordinator

Sometimes the projects that we do at the AGGV do not always ‘fit’ within the standard white-cubed gallery spaces you will find in our building on Moss Street. Sometimes our curatorial projects take place in remote communities, deep in the basement archives, in collaboration with other arts institutions, or in this case, within a kind of algorithmic museum!

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