Art
Edmonton cancels art installation over fears it may be perceived as celebrating colonialism
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The Buffalo and the Buffalo Fur Trader has been sitting in outdoor storage in Edmonton since 2016. The work by Ken Lum was commissioned with the intention of being installed on the Walterdale Bridge.Ken Lum/Handout
Governor General’s Award-winning artist Ken Lum is urging Edmonton to reconsider its decision not to install his work, The Buffalo and the Buffalo Fur Trader. The bronze statuary was commissioned more than a decade ago and was supposed to be installed on the new Walterdale Bridge, which was completed in 2018, but the artwork has remained in storage – and the city is now planning to remove it from its public art collection.
The city says there is potential for the work to be misinterpreted as a celebration of colonization.
“While some audiences may find the artwork thought-provoking, for others it may cause harm and induce painful memories. For this reason, it is not considered inclusive to all Edmontonians,” the city said in a news release.
Mr. Lum, who says he was kept in the dark about the status of the work since he delivered it in 2016, says he is deeply disappointed with the decision, and that safeguarding artistic expression should be sacrosanct.
“I think by the city shelving this project, it not only hurts artistic expression, but also hurts any ability to have a dialogue about the country’s colonial past and the conditions of coloniality that continue to mark the present,” said Mr. Lum in an interview this week from his home in Philadelphia, where he is chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. “A fundamental question is, whose interest is being served by the deaccessioning of this work? Is the work really that egregious?”
The $375,000 piece was commissioned in 2010, went through an extensive oversight and approvals process by the city, as well as consultations with an Indigenous advisory group, Mr. Lum explains. He made repeated inquiries for some time about the status of the installation and was finally informed last week that the city would be seeking to deaccession the work.
“There was no explanation other than a slightly coded ‘times have changed,’” said Mr. Lum, who was born and raised in Vancouver. He says he only learned of the announcement when he was contacted by reporters about the news release.
“This is an unwarranted breach of the city and arts council’s basic duty to my client,” says Mr. Lum’s lawyer, Paul Bain. “This decision to cancel the work damages the artist’s reputation. They are obligated contractually and as a matter of fairness to exhibit the work and not to self-censor. Ken will pursue all remedies.”
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The bronze statuary, consisting of a four-metre buffalo and a 3.5-metre man, inside Lum’s studio.Ken Lum/Handout
Nobody was available at the city or the Edmonton Arts Council (which was involved in the project) to speak with The Globe and Mail about this, but in an e-mail, a spokesperson said the city decided to pause the artwork after it was completed in 2016 and this August made the decision not to install it and to remove it from its inventory.
“In the time between the artwork being completed to now, our understanding of the impact of historical injustices on Indigenous peoples has deepened. After much deliberation, the City of Edmonton arrived at our decision not to install the artwork,” wrote Edmonton communications adviser Francis Asuncion in an e-mail to The Globe.
The Aug. 24 news release also raised concerns that the installation site is close to sacred ground. “The area north of the bridge, Rossdale, is protected by law as a historic cemetery/burial ground, and is one of the most historically rich sites in Alberta,” the release said.
But Mr. Lum points out the bridge was relocated away from the burial ground. And the sculpture was to be on the bridge, not the land.
The work was conceived as a criticism of humankind’s impact on the environment. Cast in bronze, it includes a four-metre buffalo and a 3.5-metre man – the fur trader. The intent was to have them stare warily at one other across the expanse of the river in a kind of tension, as Mr. Lum describes it.
The man is sitting on top of a huge pile of buffalo pelts, a scene inspired by a well-known 1874 photograph of a white man sitting on top of a huge pile of pelts. “It’s a really gruesome picture,” says Mr. Lum. The work was also informed by a slightly later photograph of an enormous pile of bison skulls.
“I would find it very hard to read this picture near the apogee of the bison trade [just] before the great buffalo population collapse and say ‘yeah, that was a great moment,’ ” says Mr. Lum.
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The $375,000 piece was commissioned in 2010.HO/The Canadian Press
That bison trade had devastating consequences – which should resonate today, says Mr. Lum. “That near-extinction of the buffalo should offer lessons for this anthropogenic global climate change moment that we’re unbelievably, scarily in right now.”
He says the work is meant to comment on this current critical moment in the world. “What I was trying to point out was that colonial history was not necessarily of the past.”
As co-founder and chief curatorial adviser for Monument Lab, Mr. Lum is well-versed in such controversies. Founded in 2012, the project re-examines public monuments – and the people and ideologies to whom they pay tribute – and reimagines how those monuments can better reflect the population.
Mr. Lum notes that as Edmonton was deciding his artwork was not appropriate, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney was announcing that a statue of Winston Churchill would be erected in Calgary. (Churchill, though a revered British Prime Minister during the Second World War, was a colonialist – and has been revealed to have held racist views.)
Mr. Lum says he hopes Edmonton officials will reconsider, and that he is willing to travel there and meet with the public to discuss the work.
“If people want to say something to attack the work or whatever, that’s fine. I’m open to that. I’d rather have dialogue.”
Candice Hopkins, a citizen of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation who has worked as a contract curator with the EAC, has given a lot of thought to this. “What the sculpture made me think of is the absent figure. That’s the figure of all those folks who would have gotten the pelts; the role of the Hudson’s Bay Company and all the trading posts in creating what needs to be better understood as an ecological disaster,” says Hopkins, whose own grandmother trapped fur as a way to support her family.
She says there has been a huge shift in Canada since 2010, with the findings of mass graves at residential schools and other evidence of the extreme harm of colonial history.
“The thing that I’m always concerned about, though, is I feel that art is the face of freedom of expression, so what do we do when something is essentially censored?”
Ms. Hopkins, who is now executive director and chief curator of the Forge Project in New York State, says she understands both perspectives. “One of the ways this conversation can be productive is to talk about the role of public art, the role of public history, what it might mean if we suppress that, but also the role of privileging Native voices in an era of reconciliation.”
When asked what she thinks should happen to the work, she mused about installing just the buffalo part of the work and explain that decision.
“What might it mean to install a work that actually honoured the animal? And then how this work, or even this debate, can call attention to that absent figure? And that absent figure is the figure of the Native trader.”
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Unique art collection on display CTV News Vancouver
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This N.B. artist joined an online movement. Now her art is being shown across the world. – CBC.ca
Since joining a community that dreams of an internet free from giant corporations that can exploit users’ time and data, Victoria West’s digital artwork has been exhibited across the globe.
West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, 30 kilometres southeast of Fredericton, has had her work shown in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Townsville in northeastern Australia, Miami, New York City, and even a museum in Albuquerque, N.M., — all through connections she’s made in Web3.
West warned it was a “rabbit hole,” but what she found in wonderland she doesn’t believe she’d find anywhere else.
Web3 is a future version of the internet.
The work of Victoria West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, was recently showcased at an immersive exhibit in the Big Apple.
Web1, West said, was the first version of the internet, in which users passively consumed information.
As the 2000s dawned, Web2 emerged, and users could now post their own content — think Twitter, blogs, YouTube. People are now creating more and more in digital spaces, but the downside of Web2 is that corporations are technically still the owners of all that creation, and they could take your data and potentially do with it as they please.
Enter Web3, which still exists more in theory: nobody and everybody owns the internet. This version aims to be decentralized. It doesn’t eradicate the distrust some people have in mega companies like Google and Meta — it just removes the need for it, because no one person or organization can own the blockchain Web3 operates on.
West said within Web3 there’s an art movement, with artists working together and taking control of their work. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had an internet connection, as well as Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello. It’s the renaissance all over again, West said, except it’s happening with digital art.
“And it’s happening online on a much bigger scale.”
Before learning about W3 in 2021, West said she was in a photography bubble.
Photography isn’t the art form West imagined herself pursuing when she was younger. But when she bought a camera after the first commercial digital models arrived on the market in the mid-2000s, she was hooked.
“I was bothering everybody around me to take their portrait,” she said.
She built up her portraiture business, becoming involved with the Professional Photographers of Canada and competing in photography contests. Still, West didn’t want to just capture moments — she wanted to make them.
That’s when artificial intelligence came on the scene.
West was using Midjourney, a generative AI program, when it was still in beta testing. Around the same time she became involved with Web3, she experimented with blending AI-produced textures into her photography. In her business, AI quickened her workflow and allowed her to change backdrops and furniture.
While creating a piece in 2023 called When I Die, West wanted to design a man underground with roots blossoming into a tree. Well, there aren’t any blossoming trees in Canada in February, West joked — so she made the tree using AI.
“I feel like someone took handcuffs off me, and I’m free,” she said.
Lauren Cruikshank, an associate professor in culture and media studies at the University of New Brunswick, has spoken about the use of AI in universities, but she also thinks about it through an artistic lens.
From the camera to spell check, Cruikshank said the same discussion happens with each new medium: how much of the artistry belongs to the artist, how much to the tools they’re using?
“For some people where it gets uncomfortable is where the role of the human is minimal compared to how much the AI tool is creating or having creative influence,” she said.
With AI, Cruikshank agreed there are degrees — there’s a difference between prompting an AI to generate an image of a beautiful sunset and claiming it as your artwork and what West is doing, combining AI with her own artistry.
“That sounds really compelling to me,” Cruikshank said.
When West first saw Lume Studios on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the place she’d eventually display Eden’s Dye, her immersive art exhibit, she knew she wanted it immediately.
She collaborated on the exhibit with some of her Web3 friends. Los Angeles actors and poets Laurence Fuller and Vincent D’Onofrio wrote poetry to accompany each piece of art, which West created using both photography and AI. A coder friend joined the crew, and the result was a floor-to-ceiling immersive exhibit. West’s collaborators also choreographed performances to complement the art, using music produced by AI.
“Why wouldn’t I do that if I can?” West asked. “It’s freeing, I think, and lets you push the boundaries of photography and what you can do with it.”
While the exhibit leaned heavily on romantic, classical themes and Baroque aesthetics, Eden’s Dye is almost a premonition: minted, digital artwork taking up entire walls in people’s homes, flowers growing from code, experiencing art in virtual realms.
Demand will only grow, West said. Technology will progress and the internet will change. But what she really wanted was for people to walk into Eden’s Dye and be amazed by the art they were experiencing.
“They came because of the art, and they were there enjoying the art. You don’t really need to understand anything beyond that.”
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These aren’t your grandma’s quilts.
Being a grandmother herself, Lorna Costantini said she’s not a huge fan of the above phrase, but she can’t help but use it to describe modern quilting.
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