Thanks to a robust and always changing visual arts scene you can easily fill a weekend with visits to any number of small, medium and large galleries.
Advice on what to see is a bit of a fool’s errand as the breadth of the offerings is as big as the empty lot where the new VAG is supposed to go.
That in mind, here are a handful of shows that may pique your interest:
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Sculptures & Paintings Macaulay & Co. Fine Art
On until March 25
This is a chance to see one of the most exciting local artists working today. Coast Salish contemporary artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun’s paintings and sculptures are wonderful combinations of explosive, vibrant colour, Coast Salish imagery and storytelling.
Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun’s work is as breathtaking as it is thoughtful as it explores issues over land ownership, residential schools — which he is a survivor of — and the destruction of the environment.
Alanis Obomsawin filming Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Metis Child (1986).Photo by National Film Board of Canada
Alanis Obomsawin: The Children Have to Hear Another Story
Vancouver Art Gallery
April 7 to Aug. 7
Celebrated around the globe, Abenaki filmmaker and activist Alanis Obomsawin has notched 50 films in the past 50 years. Her body of work includes the documentaries Incident at Restigouche (1984) and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). Over her half-century career Obomsawin has pushed to gain social and political agency and has used public platforms to tell Indigenous stories.
This show is a survey of Obomsawin’s work from the 1960s to the present, and demonstrates her remarkable achievements in education, music, documentary cinema and activism.
Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait in a Cap, Laughing, dated 1630, is an etching from the collection of doctors Jonathan Meakins and Jacqueline McClaran.Photo by Denis Farley
The Collectors’ Cosmos: The Meakins-McClaran Print Collection
Audain Art Museum (Whistler)
On until May 15
The Collectors’ Cosmos: The Meakins-McClaran Print Collection provides a look at the building of one of the foremost private collections of European prints in Canada. Amassed over four decades, the heart of the collection is a wealth of 16th and 17th century Dutch and Flemish prints.
Doctors Jonathan Meakins and Jacqueline McClaran recently donated a significant portion of these works to the National Gallery of Canada, doubling the NGC’s collection of early Dutch and Flemish prints.
Now the touring version of The Collectors’ Cosmosis is at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler and features over 170 works, including prints by European masters such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Hendrick Goltzius and Jacob van Ruisdael.
The Show, Emily Carr University’s annual show of student works, runs at the ECU campus May 11 to 21.Photo by Emily Carr University
The Show
Emily Carr University of Art & Design
May 11 to 21
The Show is the annual unveiling of works from across all disciplines represented at ECUAD at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. So basically, every discipline in art and design will be on display in the always popular — it’s been running for decades — show.
If you need another reason to attend this glimpse at potential greatness keep in mind that many, many successful artists count ECUAD as an alma mater with the likes of Brian Jungen, Karin Bubaš, Sonny Assu, Geoffrey Farmer, Attila Richard Lukacs and Ola Volo showing in their graduating year.
Kennedi Carter’s work will be part of the As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic, on at The Polygon Gallery until May 24.Photo by Kennedi Carter
As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic
The Polygon Gallery
On until May 14
The international touring exhibition As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic is curated by Elliot Ramsay and features more than 100 images selected from Aperture’s recently published book by the same name, and features photographs from the Wedge Collection — Canada’s largest privately owned collection committed to championing Black artists.
Bold type works include images by iconic civil rights photographer Gordon Parks, Hasselblad Award-winner Malick Sidibé, influential portraitist Carrie Mae Weems, contemporary photographer Texas Isaiah (the first trans photographer to shoot a Vogue cover), among others.
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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.
