Orion Series presents Patricia Bovey

by | Oct 27, 2023 | Art History & Visual Studies, Events, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research, Visual Arts, Writing

The Orion
Lecture Series in Fine Arts

Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria, is pleased to present:

Patricia Bovey

Visiting author & art historian 

3:00pm Friday, Nov 17

Bishop Theatre, Phoenix Building 

Free & open to all 

 

Presented by UVic’s Faculty of Fine Arts

For more information on this lecture please email: finearts@uvic.ca

 

 

The Honourable Patricia Bovey (LL.D, FRSA, FCMA), member of the Senate of Canada (2016-2023) and the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Director Emerita, is a Winnipeg-based art historian, museologist, author and professor. She will be speaking on “Western Voices in Canadian Art: The Land, Culture & Reconciliation.”

About Patricia Bovey

Bovey has lectured and published extensively on western Canadian art over many years, including Western Voices in Canadian Art (2023), Don Proch: Masking and Mapping (2019 Manitoba Book Awards’ finalist) and Pat Martin Bates: Balancing on a Thread (2015 Alberta Book Awards’ recipient).

Commencing her art gallery career in 1970 as Curator of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, she was Director of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (1980-1999) and Director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery (1999-2004). She was the founding Director/Curator of St Boniface Hospital’s Buhler Gallery, (2007-2016).  

An Adjunct Professor of Public Administration at the University of Victoria, and Adjunct Professor of Art History at the University of Winnipeg, she taught Canadian Art, Curatorial Practice, Cultural Resource Management, and in the University of Winnipeg’s MA Curatorial Practicum.

An independent consultant, she has assisted arts organizations across Canada with governance, funding and strategic planning, and has mentored emerging professionals in museum practice, art history, and arts administration.

As Senator, she served on many Senate committees including the Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets, and Administration, and its subcommittees on Budgets and Estimates; Human Resources; Diversity (as deputy chair); and was chair of the Senate Artwork and Heritage Advisory Working Group. She was deputy Chair of the Senate Transportation and Communications Committee; Deputy Chair of the Social Affairs, Science and Technology Committee; and Deputy Chair of the Special Committee on the Arctic. She also served on Foreign Affairs and International Trade; National Finance; Rules, Procedures and Rights of Parliament; Official Languages; and Oceans & Fisheries. She was the Senate Sponsor for Canada’s 2019 Oceans Protection Act.

In the Senate she gave voice to the importance of the arts throughout society initiating special Senate exhibitions, programs, reports and legislation. The Senate unanimously passed her Bills S202, Parliamentary Visual Artist Laureate,  and  S 208, The Declaration Respecting the Essential Role of Artists and Creative Expression in Canada; and adopted the Senate report she initiated, Cultural Diplomacy at the Centre Stage of Canada’s Foreign Policy. Her internal Senate work included contracting an external analysis of the Senate’s Indigenous art collection, and initiating programs such as Honouring Canada’s Black Artists; Galleries and Museums in the Senate; and Cultivating Perspectives, in which Canadian curators were invited to publish on aspects of the Senate collections.

Former Chair of the Board of Governors of the University of Manitoba, and Board Chair of Emily Carr University, she served on the National Gallery of Canada’s Board of Trustees; the Board of the Canada Council for the Arts; the Withrow/Richard Federal Task Force on National and Regional Museums; the Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation Board; the Board of the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra; and was a member of the Trudeau Foundation, and the Manitoba selection committee for both the Rhodes Scholarships and the Loran Scholarship. She is a past chair of the Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization.

Bovey received a University of Manitoba Honorary Doctor of Laws in 2021. She is a Fellow of the UK’s Royal Society for the Arts, and a Fellow the Canadian Museums Association. She is the recipient of the Canada 125 Medal; the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal; Winnipeg’s Woman of Distinction for the Arts; the Canadian Museums Association Award of Distinguished Service; the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal; the Association of Manitoba Museums’ Inaugural Award of Merit; and the Winnipeg Arts Council Making a Difference Award. In 2023, she was given the distinction as the first Honourary Member of Canadian Black Artists United, and, was also honoured as Kingston Ontario’s H’Art Centre’s inaugural Champion of Inclusive Arts.

She is a member of Ghana’s Pan African Heritage Museum’s International Curatorial Council and was recently appointed the Pan African Heritage Museum’s Special Museum Ambassador. She is a member of the Board of the Roberta Bondar Foundation, and of Diabetes Canada Government Relations and Advocacy National Committee. She continues her art history writing, as well as her work on international fraud against Canadian and Indigenous artists, and that for creative initiatives on climate change strategies with a number of international organizations.

About the Orion Fund

Established through the generous gift of an anonymous donor, the Orion Fund in Fine Arts is designed to bring distinguished visitors from other parts of Canada—and the world—to the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and to make their talents and achievements available to faculty, students, staff and the wider Greater Victoria community who might otherwise not be able to experience their work.

The Orion Fund also exists to encourage institutions outside Canada to invite regular faculty members from our Faculty of Fine Arts to be visiting  artists/scholars at their institutions; and to make it possible for Fine Arts faculty members to travel outside Canada to participate in the academic life of foreign institutions and establish connections and relationships with them in order to encourage and foster future exchanges.

Visit our online events calendar at www.events.uvic.ca

Visiting artist: Farheen Haq

by | Oct 12, 2023 | Art History & Visual Studies, Events, Visual Arts

Our latest Visiting Artist is South Asian Muslim Canadian artist Farheen Haq. All are welcome to this free public talk, 7:30pm Wed, Oct 18, in room A162 of the Visual Arts building.

Informed by interiority, ritual & spiritual practice

Haq’s multidisciplinary practice — which often employs video, installation and performance — is informed by interiority, relationality, family work, embodiment, ritual and spiritual practice. Her current work focuses on understanding her family history on Turtle Island, caregiving and the body as a continuum of culture and time.

She has exhibited her work in galleries and festivals throughout Canada and internationally, including in New York, Toronto, Paris, Buenos Aires, Lahore, Hungary, and Romania. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Maternal Interior at the Ann Arbor Art Center (Ann Arbor, Michigan), I am my mother’s daughter at Campbell River Art Gallery, Sentirse en Casa at Casa Cultura Gallery (Medellín, Colombia), Fashionality at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (Kleinburg, ON), Collected Resonance at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and The Emperor’s New Clothes at Talwar Gallery (New York).

A Sobey nominee

Haq received her Bachelor of Arts in International Development from the University of Toronto, her Bachelor of Education from the University of Ottawa, and her Master of Fine Arts from York University (Toronto). In 2014, Haq was nominated for Canada’s preeminent contemporary art prize, the Sobey Art Award.

A South Asian Muslim Canadian artist who was born and raised amongst a tight-knit Muslim community on Haudenosaunee Territory in the Niagara region of Ontario, Haq currently lives and works on the unceded Lkwungen Territory of Victoria BC.

Orion Series presents Duncan McCue

by | Oct 12, 2023 | Events, indigenous, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research, Writing

The Orion
Lecture Series in Fine Arts

Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria, is pleased to present:

Duncan McCue

Visiting journalist

9:30am (PST) Tuesday, October 17, 2023 

Online class visit only

Presented by UVic’s Department of Writing

For more information on this lecture please email: writing@uvic.ca

 

 

Anishinaabe journalist and educator Duncan McCue is the author of Decolonizing Journalism: A Guide to Reporting in Indigenous Communities. His talk with Writing’s Environmental Journalism class will draw on his award-winning podcast Kuper Island for a thoughtful reflection on building respectful relationships with Indigenous communities and how Canadians can take meaningful steps toward reconciliation. 

McCue will also present the separate online talk “Beyond Kuper Island: A Journalist’s Reflection on Truth and Reconciliation”,  presented by the Department of Germanic & Slavic Studies and the Faculty of Humanities.

This talk happens at 7pm Thursday, October 19, online only via Zoom: register here to get the link. 

About Duncan McCue

Duncan McCue is an award-winning CBC broadcaster and leading advocate for fostering the connection between journalism and Indigenous communities. He was the host of Helluva Story on CBC Radio and was also the driving force behind Kuper Island, a remarkable eight-part podcast series on residential schools.

McCue was with CBC News for 25 years. In addition to hosting CBC Radio One’s Cross Country Checkup, he was a longstanding correspondent for CBC-TV’s flagship news show, The National, and continues to maintain an association with CBC.

He joined Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication on July 1, 2023 and is an associate professor, specializing in Indigenous journalism and storytelling. He has also taught journalism and created courses at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism and Toronto Metropolitan University and also as a visiting fellow at Carleton.

Over the years he developed a unique online resource, Reporting in Indigenous Communities, which inspired his latest work, a new textbook called Decolonizing Journalism: A Guide to Reporting in Indigenous Communities. McCue is also the author of The Shoe Boy: A Trapline Memoir, which recounts a season he spent in a hunting camp with a Cree family in northern Quebec as a teenager.

McCue studied English at the University of King’s College, then did his law degree at UBC. He was called to the bar in British Columbia in 1998.

McCue is Anishinaabe, a member of the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation in southern Ontario.

 

 

About the Orion Fund

Established through the generous gift of an anonymous donor, the Orion Fund in Fine Arts is designed to bring distinguished visitors from other parts of Canada—and the world—to the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and to make their talents and achievements available to faculty, students, staff and the wider Greater Victoria community who might otherwise not be able to experience their work.

The Orion Fund also exists to encourage institutions outside Canada to invite regular faculty members from our Faculty of Fine Arts to be visiting  artists/scholars at their institutions; and to make it possible for Fine Arts faculty members to travel outside Canada to participate in the academic life of foreign institutions and establish connections and relationships with them in order to encourage and foster future exchanges.

Visit our online events calendar at www.events.uvic.ca

Phoenix season kicks off with shows for the young & the young-at-heart

by | Oct 12, 2023 | Alumni, Events, Faculty, indigenous, Theatre

The cast of The Woman Who Outshone The Sun (photo: Megan Farrell)

Proving that experience matters when it comes to creating impactful productions, Phoenix Theatre is offering an all-alumni directed season—ideally matched to UVic’s upcoming 60th anniversary celebrations.

It all kicks off with two productions that speak to Phoenix’s past and present: Applied Theatre professor Yasmine Kandil directs SETYA, the latest in the continuing Staging Equality series, while sessional instructor Alistair Newton offers The Importance of Being Earnest—Oscar Wilde’s 128-year-old classic comedy that (surprisingly) has never been presented before on campus.

Staging Equality: Theatre for Young Audiences

SETYA offers a double bill of The Woman Who Outshone the Sun and Shi-shi-etko, two children’s stories ideally suited to Staging Equality’s mandate of offering IBPoC-focused performances. “We wanted stories by and about Indigenous and people of color to be accessible to our young audiences and their families, and I think this show will deliver,” says Kandil. “These two stories both talk about important issues facing Indigenous communities in Canada and in Latin America.”

With four productions staged over the past two years (Journey to Mapu, Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story, Im:print and It’s Just Black Hair), SETYA sees the return of previous Staging Equality partners as narrators here: Paulina Grainger of the Inter-Cultural Association of Greater Victoria (The Woman who Outshone the Sun) and Kwakwaka’wakw performer and UVic En’owkin School alum Krystal Cook (Shi-shi-etko).

“Krystal has amazing stage presence and an ability to bring tenderness as well as strength to carry the enormity of the story she is telling. And Paulina has a magical way of drawing the audience into the narrative,” says Kandil. “I’ve enjoyed their approach to creating art and engaging with our students. I felt both stories required actors who were strong performers who could also embrace the community awareness element of the work we are carrying out.”

While theatre for young audiences is a style more often presented by alumni in the community, Kandil believes this is yet another way to welcome diverse audiences into the Phoenix. “We know the audiences who have attended our previous Staging Equality programming will return, and we also wanted children and their families to come to our theatre,” she concludes. “Audiences, young and old, will be able to engage with these topics in a manner that allows them to digest the material, and hopefully the stories might last with them a while.”

SETYA director Yasmine Kandil (photo: Megan Farrell)

“Krystal has amazing stage presence and an ability to bring tenderness as well as strength to carry the enormity of the story she is telling. And Paulina has a magical way of drawing the audience into the narrative,” says Kandil. “I’ve enjoyed their approach to creating art and engaging with our students. I felt both stories required actors who were strong performers who could also embrace the community awareness element of the work we are carrying out.”

While theatre for young audiences is a style more often presented by alumni in the community, Kandil believes this is yet another way to welcome diverse audiences into the Phoenix. “We know the audiences who have attended our previous Staging Equality programming will return, and we also wanted children and their families to come to our theatre,” she concludes. “Audiences, young and old, will be able to engage with these topics in a manner that allows them to digest the material, and hopefully the stories might last with them a while.”

Earnest director Alistair Newton (photo: Catherine Lemmon)

Feeling Earnest

While SETYA focuses on young audiences, The Importance of Being Earnest is a perennially popular production that has never gone out of style since its 1895 debut. What’s the appeal for a very contemporary director like Alistair Newton?

“Aside from the obvious answer that it has got to be one of the greatest works of comic writing in the English language, it’s also a work coded with all sorts of transgressive satire—much of which would only have been legible to those members of the audience with the right ear to hear it,” he says. “Populism with a wicked satirical edge has always been irresistible to me.”

Newton, who is also teaching Theatre’s fall elective on drag culture and was just announced as a director for the prestigious Shaw Festival’s 2024 season, says he enjoys “excavating the hidden histories and secret codes” of what’s often described as classical theatre.

“Earnest is so constantly revived that it almost feels like a meme at this point, rather than a play,” he explains. “True, the 19th century gave us hysterical sexual repression and the codification of rigid gender roles, but it also gave us radicals who rebelliously pushed back—like the pioneering sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the Danish artist and trans woman Lili Elbe, and William Dorsey Swann, an enslaved black activist and drag performer who was likely the first person to refer to himself as a ‘queen’.”

Much like SETYA, Newton feels Earnest will also resonate with Phoenix audiences.

“Oscar Wilde loved a paradox, and both his legacy and the history of Earnest has sort of become one: at the time of his arrest for ‘gross indecency’, Wilde had two hit shows running in the West End and had completely conquered mainstream boulevard entertainment in London—but, at the same time, his queerness was considered so scandalous by his society that they had to forcibly remove him from their midst.”

Finally, as a returning alumni, how does it feel for Newton to be back at the Phoenix—both directing and teaching? “A lot of things change in a couple of decades, but some things are exactly how I left them: the graffiti on the scene shop wall and the very particular smell as you first enter the Roger Bishop Theatre,” he quips.

“But I think my favourite change is something I perceive in the students: they seem much more willing to advocate for themselves and to challenge orthodoxies, ideas of canon and the educational status quo. At the risk of sounding like an old queen, the kids definitely seem alright to me.”

SETYA runs October 12-14 + 19-21 while The Importance of Being Earnest runs November 9-25, both at UVic’s Phoenix Theatre.