The opening reception for Sasha Pierce’s Shippo at the Zalucky Contemporary Gallery. (Zalucky Contemporary Gallery)
Gallery Weekend Toronto started last year with the goal of getting people back into Toronto’s commercial art galleries after an extended shutdown. It featured artist talks and guided tours and gallerists on hand to help talk crowds through the exhibitions. It’s an idea that had been successful in other cities, including Berlin and Paris.
“I think to everyone’s surprise, it was a huge success,” says Juliana Zalucky of Zalucky Contemporary Gallery, who was part of a group of gallerists who came up with the idea to bring a Gallery Weekend to the city. “I think overall the event drew about 5,000 visitors. There seemed to be a lot of excitement to get out, to discover the city again and for people to engage with art in interactive, meaningful ways.”
This year it’s back, with more galleries — it’s increased from 22 to 26 — and with an eye to getting people who don’t usually go to Toronto’s small galleries to come out.
“I think there’s no secret that [Toronto] has this amazing visual art scene,” Zalucky adds. “I’m speaking mainly about the major institutions and even the street art. But I don’t think a lot of people in the city know about the network of independent art galleries, specifically dedicated to contemporary art. They’re doing really interesting programming and that access to these spaces are free and open to the public.”
Maria Hupfield’s show Protocol Break at the Patel Brown Gallery in Toronto. (Darren Rigo)
Maria Hupfield’s exhibition Protocol Break will be at Patel Brown Gallery as part of Gallery Weekend. She’ll also be giving a talk in the gallery on Sept. 24.
Hupfield credits her Anishnaabe heritage as an influence on her approach to art — she’s a member of the Wasauksing First Nation.
“I’m looking at these other, more ancient, enduring practices of making that are really informed by my background,” she says. “And that sense that connect us to movement, to ceremony, to land and place. So I’m really thinking of art as living and putting things in relation.”
Hupfield is a trans-disciplinary artist, whose work often includes both performance and visual art, and that’s something that’s hard to re-create virtually.
“I just love that freedom and liberation that comes from performance art,” she says. “So I make an object and then I often activate them in my performance, or I might give them to someone else who then performs with them. I’m really thinking of art as being alive, and having other people [present] is a part of that.”
A felt chair, part of Maria Hupfield’s show “Protocol Break” at the Patel Brown Gallery in Toronto. (Darren Rigo)
Protocol Break features, among other things, everyday items that Hupfield made out of felt, including a chair, a telephone and a traffic cone. She says her time inside during the pandemic inspired the pieces
“I made a felt chair because I was like, ‘Oh, I’m sitting so much in a chair. Like, I’m becoming a chair. Like, my life is about a chair,'” she says. “So I work with felt, so there’s a felt chair, and then there’s a photo series of this chair in different iterations on the wall, as well.”
Hupfield adds that, more than anything, she’s looking forward to watching people respond to her work.
“I love seeing children come in, or the unsuspecting public, because everyone has a very honest reaction to art,” she says. “I feel like that’s genuine. That’s a truth.”
Part of Maria Hupfield’s Protocol Break exhibition at the the Patel Brown Gallery in Toronto. (Darren Rigo)
For her part, Zalucky says the thing she’s most excited about is showing the breadth of Toronto’s commercial galleries. She points out that Gallery Weekend features both galleries that have been in business for decades, and DIY spaces that started during the pandemic. Zalucky says that getting more people into these small galleries is what will help the city’s art scene grow and evolve.
“Canada offers a very robust granting program to assist artists at various stages of their career,” she says. “But public funding alone can’t do all the work. What’s really required in a thriving art ecosystem is an equally robust art market, where artists can make a living from the sale of their work. And this is what commercial galleries are going to do.”
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.
