An existing space at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights has become a new home for local artistic statements.
The museum announced its new Community Corridor on Tuesday, a main-floor space near its classrooms area, and is accepting submissions for art or projects until May 13, with plans for its first official exhibition scheduled for July.
The museum hopes the Community Corridor will allow the museum to amplify messages about human rights from artists, students or groups whose voices have gone unheard.
“We do hope to see a variety of groups coming in. This is really about building a relationship with the community, building trust with the community,” says Chandra Erlendson, the museum’s director of Indigenous relations and community engagement.
“It’s not a traditional exhibition space but it’s a very inviting, visually appealing space for this kind of interaction.”
“We do hope to see a variety of groups coming in. This is really about building a relationship with the community, building trust with the community.” – Chandra Erlendson
The Community Corridor location has odd aspects that have made it a challenge for showing art.
It is dominated by a large concrete wall, and since hooks can’t be fastened to it, works must be hung on a wire, restricting how heavy they can be.
Lengthy exposure to sunlight from a bank of windows opposite the wall can also damage paintings and photographs.
In New Beginnings, a series of photographs by young newcomers to Canada that is using the corridor space, the pictures are reprinted as a collage on four white corrugated boards that are light enough to be hung on the wire while keeping the original photographs away from the rays and heat of the sun.
The Community Corridor concept has been in the works since 2018 when the space hosted the National Story Blanket, an installation that represented future visions for Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth.
“We’ve literally had hundreds of requests by communities wanting to present their ideas, whether those are rights–themed, arts–based programs or student work.” – Chandra Erlendson
Erlendson says plans to unveil the space in 2020 had to be put on hold, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’ve literally had hundreds of requests by communities wanting to present their ideas, whether those are rights-themed, arts-based programs or student work,” she says.
The pandemic hasn’t been the only difficulty the CMHR has faced in the past two years though. An external investigation revealed in August 2020 the museum suffered from a culture of racism that had gone unaddressed by management for years.
A year later, a further report by Winnipeg lawyer Laurelle Harris found a culture of discrimination continued to affect the museum’s Black and Indigenous employees.
“This project is not born out of that and is not a response to it,” Erlendson says. “But I do think it is quite timely and it works well, and we have taken into consideration some of the things we have learned from those recommendations of the Harris report.”
Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com
Twitter: @AlanDSmall
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Alan Small Reporter
Alan Small has been a journalist at the Free Press for more than 22 years in a variety of roles, the latest being a reporter in the Arts and Life section.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
