A symbol of Mi’kmaw culture will be front and centre when the new Art Gallery of Nova Scotia opens on Halifax’s waterfront in the coming years.
The winning design for the new $130-million gallery includes a peaked hat shape at the entrance of the building, reminiscent of the headdress worn by Mi’kmaw women.
Halifax architect Omar Gandhi said the team wanted to design a building that tells a story about where it is from.
“I think we did a really good job of taking that symbol, which really is unique to Mi’kmaw culture,” he said.
“We chose to celebrate that. I think what will strike people and I hope they take away, is that something like this could happen here, and it was in part done by people from here, and it was to honour people that have always been here.”
The design team, led by KPMB Architects, was one of three groups that submitted competing proposals for the new gallery. The winning proposal was the unanimous choice of an international jury.
The art gallery is expected to be completed in 2025. (Art Gallery of Nova Scotia/Twitter)
Mi’kmaw elder Lorraine Whitman was part of the design team, which also included Jordan Bennett Studio, Public Work and Transsolar.
“It is such a diverse province,” said Whitman, who serves as president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada.
“To know we are the first people and to be included in this project is so inspirational, and I truly feel humbled to be part of it.”
An engineering firm specializing in storm water management was consulted as part of the design of the 142,000-square-foot building, which factored in storm surge and sea level rise due to climate change.
A harbour view of the planned new art gallery. (KPMB Architects)
The gallery will be slightly above ground level on Lower Water Street, with no subterranean spaces for displays.
“It’s not going to be a bathtub down the road,” said Gandhi.
Public consultations leading to a final design will begin in the new year.
The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia expects to break ground on the 1.6-hectare site in the fall of 2021, with the building completed in the spring of 2025.
The project is being funded with $70 million from the province, $30 million from the federal government and $30 million from an Art Gallery of Nova Scotia fundraising campaign.
Sobeys donating $10M
That got a big head start thanks to two Sobey family foundations — the Donald R. Sobey Foundation and the Sobey Foundation — which will donate $10 million toward the new gallery.
Speaking on behalf of the foundations, Rob Sobey said the family was happy to continue its contributions to the visual arts. It has long sponsored an annual artists award.
“The very fact that there is a great opportunity to do something as profound and exciting globally here in Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada really struck a chord with us,” he said.
Sobey acknowledged speculation in recent years that the family may donate its remarkable collection of paintings to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, but then gently dampened hopes.
“We actually took that off the table and we went down this route of monetary funding for the art gallery instead,” he said.
“Now, you know, the future is unwritten. I don’t want to put a pin in it, you know, maybe down the road.”
‘A symbol of a city’
For the design team, winning a commission like this presents a rare opportunity to transform a cityscape with a singular piece of architecture.
The most powerful example is architect Frank Gehry’s gleaming and curvaceous Guggenheim Museum in the Spanish seaside city of Bilbao.
“I think it absolutely has as much, if not more, prospect of doing that,” said Gandhi of the Halifax project.
“I think it’s much more deep and meaningful than just an extremely elaborate, beautiful building like Bilbao. This is a symbol of a city and a symbol of people.”
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.
