CURATING TRAFFIC
Panel Discussion

Saturday, April 21, 2012 at 1 pm
J.A. de Sève Cinema, LB-125
Concordia University
1400 de Maisonneuve West
Guy-Concordia metro station
FREE ADMISSION, in English

Curators Grant Arnold (Vancouver), Catherine Crowston (The Prairies and the Arctic), Barbara Fischer (Toronto), Michèle Thériault with Vincent Bonin (Montreal), and Jayne Wark with Peter Dykhuis (Halifax) will discuss Traffic as a collaborative curatorial model, providing insight into the process of bringing together an exhibition of this scale and scope.

Grant Arnold is currently Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where he contributes to the Gallery’s exhibition and collecting activities. He was previously Senior Curator at the Art Gallery of Windsor and Extension Coordinator at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon. He holds an M.A. in art history from the University of British Columbia. Over the past twenty-five years he has organized more than forty exhibitions of historical, modern and contemporary art. Recent projects have included Ken Lum; Reece Terris: Ought Apartment; Mark Lewis: Modern Time; Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs; Real Pictures: Photographs from the Collection of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft; Rodney Graham: A Little Thought (with Jessica Bradley and Connie Butler); and Robert Smithson in Vancouver: A Fragment of A Greater Fragmentation.

Catherine Crowston is currently Acting Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Alberta. From 1994 to 1997, Crowston was the Director/Curator of the Walter Phillips Gallery and Editor of the Walter Phillips Gallery Editions at The Banff Centre. From 1986 to 1994, she was Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of York University. In 2002, Crowston served as the Canadian Commissioner for the Sydney Biennale of Contemporary Art and was awarded the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for Outstanding Achievement. In 2005, she received the City of Edmonton Salute to Excellence Award and is currently Vice-Chair of the City of Edmonton Public Art Committee.

Barbara Fischer is the Executive Director/Chief Curator of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery as well as Senior Lecturer in Curatorial Studies in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto. She has held curatorial positions in galleries and museums across Canada and has curated major solo and group exhibitions of Canadian and international artists. She was appointed commissioner and curator of Mark Lewis’ project for the Canadian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. She was the recipient of the 2001 OAAG Curatorial Writing Award in the Historical category for Love Gasoline; the 2004 Melva J. Dwyer Award for Excellence in Canadian Publishing from ARLIS for General Idea Editions; and the 2008 Hnatyshyn Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art.

Michèle Thériault is a curator, writer and editor and is currently Director of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University where she has developed a program that reflects upon contemporary artistic production and curatorial activity in relation to the recent history of contemporary art. In addition to her curatorial work, her essays and articles have appeared in exhibition catalogues, anthologies and journals. She is interested in translational issues in art, in reflexive frameworks, knowledge in art and in the site of exhibition. From 1988 to 1996 she was a curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and has taught contemporary art and curatorial studies at the University of Ottawa. She is adjunct professor with the Department of Art History at Concordia University.

Vincent Bonin lives and works in Montreal. He organized Documentary Protocols (1967-1975), dealing with the history of artist-run spaces and parallel galleries in Canada in 2007 and 2008 at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery of Concordia University in Montreal. He edited the accompanying publication which was launched in 2010. Materialization of “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergene of Conceptual Art, organized by Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin, opens at the Brooklyn Museum in September 2012. Alongside curating exhibitions on the 1960s and 1970s, he has organized exhibitions with artists (Jon Knowles and Sophie Bélair-Clément) in which professional categories are challenged. His writings have been published as chapters in such anthologies as Ouvrir le document: Enjeux et pratiques de la documentation dans les arts visuels contemporains (Les presses du réel), and Institutions by Artists (Fillip).

Jayne Wark is Professor of Art History at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Her book, Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America, was published in 2006 by McGill-Queen’s University Press. She has published articles and exhibition catalogue essays on contemporary performance, video, feminist and conceptual art and is currently working on a monograph on the history of conceptual art in Canada.

Peter Dykhuis has been the Director/Curator of the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia since 2007 and was previously Director of the Anna Leonowens Gallery at NSCAD University. Prior to that he lived in Toronto and worked at various galleries, notably the Art Gallery of Ontario where he installed their touring exhibitions. Dykhuis is also an internationally exhibiting visual artist and critical writer.

Garry Neill Kennedy, My Fourth Grade Class, 1972. Lithograph. Collection of NSCAD University. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Leonowens Gallery.

Tour with JAYNE WARK
Curator of the Halifax section

Saturday, March 17th at 3 pm
At the Gallery, in English
FREE ADMISSION

Jayne Wark is Professor of Art History at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Her book, Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America, was published in 2006 by McGill-Queen’s University Press. She is the curator of the Atlantic section of the exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980, which opened in Toronto in September 2010 and is touring to Halifax, Edmonton, Montreal and Vancouver until 2012 and then to the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Germany in 2013. She has published articles and exhibition catalogue essays on contemporary performance, video, feminist and conceptual art and is currently working on a monograph on the history of conceptual art in Canada.