Mount Allison University’s Owens Art Gallery is unveiling a new digital exhibit that places art from its collection on an interactive map that encourages people to explore the town of Sackville.
It’s called You Are Here and each link includes an image of the painting or photograph, along with information about the work of art, the artist and the site.
Lucy MacDonald, curator of education and community outreach at the gallery, said the goal was to find a way to continue to connect people with artwork even though the gallery has been closed to the public because of the pandemic.
“We’re also really interested in finding ways to connect the online virtual digital world to the real world at a time when we’re spending so much time online,” she said.
“These works, by putting them into real space, people can explore the artwork by exploring Sackville.”
Lucy MacDonald, curator of education and community outreach and Rachel Thornton, curator of digital engagement at the Owens Art Gallery at Mount Allison University helped create the project. (Tori Weldon/CBC)
There are 38 works posted on the map. Some are more than 100 years old while others are new and haven’t been seen by the public yet.
Rachel Thornton, curator of digital engagement at the Owens Art Gallery, said people using the map are invited to add their own entries.
“That could be by making a drawing, a collage or painting or some other sort of visual response and then you can submit it right through the map,” she said.
“That really is an amazing opportunity to kind of broaden our views of Sackville and add a diverse range of views of Sackville.”
Thorton said people have already started contributing including local artist Madeline Hanson, who created a comic about going for a picnic at the landmark Sackville Swan Pond.
A number of photos of the Tantramar Marsh taken over the course of many years have also been submitted.
Foundry at Sackville, NB, is a watercolour on paper by Tom Forrestall. The work was done in 1956 and is an example of a street scene that looks very different today. The foundry is no longer there but the map will lead you to where it once stood. (Roger Smith)
An example of how much things changed can be seen in Tom Forrestall’s, Foundry at Sackville, NB. It was painted in 1956, when the Fawcett Foundry was a major employer in the town. The building is no longer standing.
New flag by Mi’kmaq artist to be flown
Included in the new exhibit is one work of art commissioned by the gallery that has yet to be installed.
It is a flag by Mi’kmaq artist Pauline Young called Wabanaki/People of the Dawn. MacDonald said it is expected to be flown from the roof of the gallery near the end of the month.
Pauline Young’s Wabanaki/People of the Dawn, 2020, is a sketch for bespoke appliqué sewn nylon flag. The work is part of the Owens Art Gallery collection. It is a flag that will be flown from the roof of the gallery in the coming weeks. (Pauline Young/artist)
According to MacDonald, while the project focuses on a sense of place and how places change, it is also an effort to acknowledge Indigenous people who lived in the area long before any of the works were created.
“At the core of You Are Here is this idea of engaging with place and reflecting on what it means to be here and how here has changed.”
MacDonald said the flag is symbol of “ongoing land acknowledgement.”
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.
