The Main Gallery at the Yukon Arts Centre opened on Monday for the 40th exhibition of the Permanent Art Collection.
This year’s exhibit, titled Collective Memory, celebrates the last four decades with all of the changes, evolutions and developments seen in the territory’s artistic community.
This piece by Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé is part of the Yukon Permanent Art Collection since 2018. (Sissi De Flaviis/CBC)
Garnet Muething, the art curator for the Department of Tourism and Culture, said there’s a wide variety of artistic mediums, from beadwork to carvings, sculptures, large canvases and more.
“For the first time, we’re showing more than 20 new acquisitions to the collection that haven’t been shown before. So, people get to see these brand new pieces alongside pieces that have been collected since the early 1980s,” she said.
The Alaska Style Dancing Slippers by Marla Charlie are part of the new acquisitions at the Yukon Permanent Art Collection. (Sissi De Flaviis/CBC)
The Permanent Art Collection was founded in 1981 to preserve, honour and share the visual artwork by local artists.
With the new acquisitions, the collection now has more than 500 works by 275 artists, most of which are Yukoners.
“We also have artists who have either had an encounter with the North or come and spent time here,” explained Muething.
The collection also includes a range of artists, from established talent to people who are in early stages of their careers.
A few pieces from this year’s new acquisition list come from artists never featured before like Cécile Girard from the Association Franco-Yukonnaise (AFY).
In 2017, for Canada’s 150th, Girard and the AFY created De fil en histoire, a community project that recreated, in the form of dolls, the Francophone characters who marked the history of the territory.
De fil en histoire, a doll collection by Cécile Girard from the Association Franco-Yukonnaise (AFY), are part of the new acquisition artwork. (Sissi De Flaviis/CBC)
“When we started the project we didn’t know how it was going to turn out, but they were so beautiful we wanted to keep them together,” said Girard who moved to the Yukon four-decades ago.
The 14 dolls include characters from the Gold Rush and other historic moments and they will now be preserved permanently at the collection.
Landscape with Horse by Veronica Verkley is made of a combination of metal, plastic, wire, wood, leather and stone. It was integrated in the collection in 2009. (Sissi De Flaviis/CBC)
“These dolls celebrate the history of the French community and the French history here in the Yukon, so to know that it’s in the permanent art collection has a really beautiful meaning to me and I’m sure for the community, too,” said Girard.
Although the Permanent Art Collection includes hundreds of pieces, Muething the art curator, said only one third of the art is on display at all times. That includes about 80 pieces at the Main Gallery, a few in the communities across Yukon, and the others are stored in a climate-controlled storage vault at the Yukon Art Centre.
“This is a really unique opportunity to see this much of the collection because normally we’re able to curate smaller pieces of it,” said Muething.
The Collective Memory exhibition will be open to the public until Feb. 25, 2022.
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.
