When Métis artist Kenneth Lavallee designed The Square Dancers — a large-scale painted steel sculpture of jigging dancers anchored deep into the ground — he meant for it to be a permanent fixture of Air Canada Window Park.
So he was surprised when his piece and three other art works by Indigenous artists in the park were absent from the $2.5-million redesign plan shared with the public and media on Monday, raising concerns that they might be removed.
Lavallee’s sculpture, along with works by Rebecca Belmore and Osvaldo Yero, Julie Nagam and Roland Souliere, were installed in the park in 2018 as part of This Place, a permanent public art commission by the Winnipeg Arts Council.
The Square Dancers by local Métis artist Kenneth Lavallee pays tribute to the culture and spirit of the Métis people.
“It hasn’t even been a full five years yet,” Lavallee said in a phone interview. “The paint is still drying, I feel. I see these (new) designs and it’s like, OK, great. You did some work, some consultations, I guess. But where’s all the stuff that I worked on for many years?
“I can’t speak for the other artists, but I didn’t hear anything about that or, ‘Hey, we’re gonna incorporate your thing into a new park.’”
Both the Downtown Winnipeg BIZ and the Winnipeg Arts Council responded to a post Lavallee made on his Instagram page, saying the existing public art will be integrated into the redesign. What that will look like has yet to be revealed.
But Lavallee isn’t so sure. “Really? Why isn’t it in the plans, if it’s so important?” He also doesn’t see space for the artworks in preliminary plans.
Landscape architect Meaghan Pauls of Scatliff+Miller+Murray, which won the contract for the redesign, said via email the plan shared this week “is a high-level schematic design that does not illustrate all of the park details. The four public art pieces are intended to be included…”
The Winnipeg Arts Council also confirmed to the Free Press on Wednesday that it has been assured the art is part of the redesign plan and will not be removed.
“The public art currently featured in the park (is) part of the plans,” Downtown BIZ CEO Kate Fenske said in an email. “While the concept plans shared this week are still preliminary, Indigenous culture and art are key components of the community-informed design directions.
“Both the existing art and new seasonal art projects have been noted in the early design documents and the project team will consult with all artists before confirming final locations for these important pieces of work.”
Lavallee, however, takes issue with rolling out preliminary plans with ceremony. Monday’s event started with a blessing by elder David Budd and included a hoop dance by the Mason Sisters.
“If you already know it’s not going to be anything like that and there’s a lot of reality you have to deal with — there’s gonna be traffic boxes and parking signs and all this utilitarian stuff — why present that to the public? Why have a ceremony when you know it’s gonna look nothing like that, when it’s all said and done?” he says.
“There’s something very, I don’t know, weird and disingenuous to present that and then later be like ‘Oh, sorry, that was an early version.’ And then doing a ceremony, too, and the whole park is based on a turtle design, and the turtle (signifies) truth. Already, you’re lying.”
The public art manager at the Winnipeg Arts Council, tamara rae biebrich, says she was pleased to see the public’s support for Lavallee’s concerns about the artwork.
“It reinforces what we already know about how appreciated those artworks are by the city, and by the community specifically that gathers in that park,” she says. “We’re really looking forward to the redevelopment of the park being informed by the sense of place provided by those existing artworks.”
jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com
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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.
