Karen Whitney jumpstarted an artwork campaign to raise money for Ukraine when she called the Saskatchewan Network for Art Collecting to ask if she could use its auction platform. The project has now gone province-wide and hopes to raise at least $10,000.
“I got the idea that maybe we could gather donated art, and have an auction,” explained Karen Whitney, a member of the Moose Jaw Art Guild. She wanted to do something to help, and as an artist, an auction fundraiser made sense.
However, Whitney wasn’t sure how to do an auction.
She called Jennifer McRorie, the curator at the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery (MJMAG). McRorie suggested contacting Robin Schlaht at the Saskatchewan Network for Art Collecting (SKNAC).
“Initially, when I talked to him, he was like, ‘OK, who is this person?’” Whitney said. That lasted about a minute – then Schlaht saw the possibilities.
Schlaht, owner and founder of SKNAC, had already been wondering if his platform could do something to contribute to humanitarian relief in Ukraine.
His concern was that a normal auction has about two months of preparation – the consignment call gets sent out six to eight weeks before bidding starts, so people can notice it and have time to transport their art to Regina.
“Our worry was maybe that we wouldn’t have enough time (because) we would want to turn this around quickly,” Schlaht said. “And then when Karen contacted us, we realized that maybe we should work with the guilds and the art clubs and the coops.”
Art groups around the province are numerous and many-themed. Some are for watercolour painters, some are woodcarving groups, some do ceramics, and many accept any art medium.
“When she contacted us, I could see a way for us to pull it together quickly, because we can reach out to those groups and that hadn’t really occurred to me before,” Schlaht said.
The art world of Saskatchewan has been coordinating since then to gather and transport donated art from both artists and collectors.
SKNAC has a large platform with thousands of regular bidders and social media channels with plenty of visibility. With the extra help from art guilds and other groups, everything came together rapidly.
The Moose Jaw Art Guild has already collected 20-30 pieces. Whitney and her husband will be driving 11 or 12 of the larger pieces to Regina on Wednesday.
Schlaht said the project has gone province-wide. Pieces have been donated from artists such as Kathleen Slavin, Marge Jessop, Gerald Jessop, Richard Thatcher, Eve Barbeau, Michael Bromley, Bonnie McBride, Hillary Ryder, Brandi Hofer, Clifford Dubois, and many others. Schlaht estimates that the auction will have around 100 pieces in total.
The goal is to raise at least $10,000.
The deadline to donate art is April 7. The auction will run on the SNAC auction platform from April 13 to May 8, and 100 per cent of the winning bid for each artwork will go to the Canadian Red Cross Ukraine Humanitarian Crisis Appeal.
To donate art before the April 7 deadline, send pictures and details to Robin Schlaht at robin@sknac.ca. He can also be contacted by phone at (306) 569-9102.
The SKNAC website at sknac.ca has details on how to participate. Their Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts will be posting pictures of the available art as the auction approaches.
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.
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