Whatever 2022 brings, there will be great art – and, fingers crossed, it will be safely accessible in galleries, museums and public spaces across the country.
Perhaps travellers will have to think twice about attending the Venice Biennale, where Vancouver artist Stan Douglas will unveil new work in the Canada Pavilion in April, but here are five enticing upcoming exhibitions closer to home.
Whether dressing as poodles or turning AIDS medications into pop-art icons, the trio of artists operating as General Idea proved themselves continually inventive social critics. Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson met on the 1960s counterculture scene and created a fictionalized group personality that could take on anything, from the celebrity marketing machine to the pharmaceutical industry. With more than 200 works, the National Gallery is mounting the first complete retrospective of their remarkable career, which ended when Partz and Zontal died from AIDS in 1994.
From June 3 to November 20
Helen McNicoll, Sunny September (1913).
Oil on canvas.
Collection of Pierre Lassonde.Idra Labrie/MNBAQ
Canada and Impressionism: New Horizons
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
The National Gallery is suffering an embarrassment of riches in 2022 because its large look at the Canadian Impressionists is finally back in Ottawa after a European tour prolonged by the pandemic. The show charts Canadian contributions to an international artistic movement, featuring both expat artists such as Helen McNicoll and James Wilson Morrice and those who made careers in Canada, such as Maurice Cullen and Lawren Harris. And, complicating triumphalist narratives about the Group of Seven, it demonstrates how these varied painters advanced modernism at home.
The Swiss-born international artist Nicolas Party is recognized for colourful figurative art that is both highly accessible and strangely discomforting. He paints landscapes, still lifes and portraits, although the biomorphic and anthropomorphic are sometimes indistinguishable in a surreal style where people turn into mushrooms or fruits gather like sheltering animals. The artist will also paint murals for this large show, promising to transform the museum’s galleries into an extension of his fantastical vision.
From February 12 to October 16
Kent Monkman, Study for the Sparrow (2021).
Acrylic on canvas.
Courtesy of the artist.Kent Monkman/Courtesy of Kent Monkman
Kent Monkman: Being Legendary
Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto
The Cree trickster Kent Monkman is curating an exhibition that will feature objects from the ROM collection and work of his own making that responds to them. After his 2019 success in creating murals for the Metropolitan Museum in New York that were inspired by works in that collection, expect another cheeky confrontation with colonialism as Monkman continues his provocative rethink of history painting.
From October 8 to March 19, 2023
Untitled. George Clutesi c. 1967.
UVIC Special Collections.
Permission given by George Clutesi Jr.Courtesy of the Bateman Gallery
George Clutesi was a seminal Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) artist and cultural activist from the Tseshaht First Nation who showed at Expo 67 and was among the first Indigenous artists to mount a solo show at the Vancouver Art Gallery. This overdue retrospective, featuring 20 artworks and pieces by contemporary Nuu-chah-nulth artists, is being mounted with help from Nuu-chah-nulth advisors and the Clutesi family. It also includes documentary material on Clutesi’s experiences at the Alberni residential school and discusses his work reviving Tseshaht song and dance. The show’s title is translated as “keep generous talented strong-willed treasure.”
From June 9 to October 22; touring to the Alberni Valley Museum in late spring 2023
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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