Visual arts & new media

This week's Work of the Week is Piano Lesson by Vivian Herman. 

One of the more famous compositions for the piano is Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, better known as Moonlight Sonata, by Ludwig van Beethoven. It was composed in 1801.
 

Beethoven is one of the world's most celebrated classical composers, and 2020 marks his 250th birthday! He was born in December 1770, but the exact date is not known. However, he was batized on December 17, 1770, and the custom of the time was to have infants baptized within 24-hours of their birth.

Click the arrows above to scroll through the images. 

It's with great sadness that the AFA has learned of the passing of painter Harold Feist. 
 

Harold Feist was born San Angelo, Texas and was a dual citizen of Canada and the United States.

Feist received a B.F.A. (Honours), from University of Illinois (Champaign) in 1967 and an M.F.A. (Hoffberger Fellow) from Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, ML in 1969. He was mentored and championed by the influential New York art critic Clement Greenberg and painter Jules Olitski.

Feist eventually came to Canada to teach at the Alberta College of Art (now the Alberta University of the Arts) from 1968–74. He later taught at Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB and at the University of Guelph.

Beginning in the 1960s and continuing well into the 21st century, Feist was featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Canada and in the United States. He was an active and vibrant abstract artist, who was known for his large Colour Field paintings in acrylic and latex. His work can be found in public and private collections across and the United States and Canada including the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA) and Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton, AB). The AFA is also pleased to have three artworks by Harold Feist in our collection. You can view them in the slideshow above. 

Harold Feist was a father to four children, including singer/songwriter Leslie Feist, who uses her surname Feist as her stage name. 

AFA Art Collections Consultant Gail Lint was fortunate enough to have Harold Feist as professor at the University of Alberta in the 1970s, and she'd like to share a fond memory she has of him: 

“Harold Feist was a professor of mine for the visual art fundamentals course at the U of A during the 1970’s. He co-instructed the course with Graham Peacock – it was a very interesting summer!

Harold was an excellent instructor, and a story he shared with me was how he arrived at titles for his abstract paintings. He was standing on a street corner and a piece of paper blew against his leg. He rescued it only to discover a pamphlet from the horse races. He adopted the names of the horses to the title of his paintings. I believe the AFA painting ‘High a Silver’  (shown above) is one of those titles.”

Our condolences to Harold Feist's family and friends. 

Read Harold Feist's obituary. 

Read the Globe and Mail's tribute to Harold Feist. 

This week's Work of the Week is "Distant Mountain" by Annemarie Schmid Esler. 

Today is International Mountain Day! Designated in 2003 by the United Nations, International Mountain Day calls attention to the importance of mountains to life around the world. For example, did you know that mountains are home to 15% of the world's population and host about half of the world's biodiversity hotspots? They also provide freshwater for everyday life to half of humanity! Mountains are truly amazing, and Albertans are incredibly lucky to have one of the most beautiful mountain ranges in the world right in our province - the Rocky Mountains!
 

About the Artist: Annemarie Schmid Esler

The daughter of German immigrants, Annemarie Schmid Esler was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

She had an interest in art from an early age, attending Saturday classes at the Winnipeg Art School, but studied sociology at university. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Manitoba in 1959, and travelled in Europe for a year before enrolling at the University of Munich for additional courses in sociology. Returning to Canada in 1961, she worked for a year as a social worker and in 1962 enrolled at the Winnipeg College of Art in the ceramics program. In 1968, she completed a degree in ceramic sculpture at the Alberta College of Art (now the Alberta University of the Arts).

Her work expressed a highly developed knowledge of ceramic technique, and she utilized a variety of tools, including pencils, airbrushes, stencils, decals and photo-transfer to create her often humorous and ironic ceramic sculptures. She was interested in the opposing approaches of Modernist and Post-Modernist art, and also had a strong preoccupation with American blues music which, with its focus on themes of isolation and concern about the social condition, she saw as presenting an affinity with her own art.

Annemarie Schmid Esler's work was exhibited widely throughout Canada, the US, and Europe. A highly-regarded instructor and lecturer, she received several major grants and awards, and her sculptures are included in over two dozen public collections.
 

This week's Work of the Week is Opening Night by Petr Honcu.
 

On this day 128 years ago, one of the most famous ballets in the world had its opening night in St. Petersburg, Russia! Now a holiday tradition in many countries, including Canada, The Nutcracker made its debut on December 18, 1892. It was choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov with a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

In Canada, the National Ballet of Canada has been performing The Nutcracker for nearly 70 years! Learn more about the history of the National Ballet of Canada performing The Nutcracker. 

Closer to home, the Alberta Ballet has made The Nutcracker a holiday tradition in our province for the past several years now. While you won't be able to see the Alberta Ballet's annual performance of The Nutcracker this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, you can still enjoy this short film featuring Alberta Ballet Dancer Jennifer Gibson as The Sugar Plum Fairy.

Video courtesy of Alberta Ballet..

Group of Seven.

Three words that thrill Canadian art lovers everywhere. And while much of the work produced by the Group of Seven focused on eastern Canada, did you know there was a strong connection between Alberta and members of the Group of Seven?
 

This connection is explored in an exhibition now on view at Government House in Edmonton. Aptly titled Alberta and the Group of Seven, it was developed by independent curator and writer Mary-Beth Laviolette in partnership with Gail Lint, Art Collections Consultant with the Arts Branch.  

If this exhibition sounds familiar, a version of it, curated by Laviolette, travelled around Alberta from 2016 through 2018. The AFA Art Collection team installed the exhibition in Government House, made up of work from the Government House art collection, the collection of the Government of Alberta and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts art collection as part of our exhibition loan program. Click the arrows above to see a short slideshow of images of select artworks in the exhibition. 

Click on an artist’s name to see their work in the AFA art collection.*

Artwork ready to be installed at Government House. Far right: Illingworth Kerr, "Forest Reserve, Spring". 1973. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. 

I had an opportunity to ask Mary-Beth Laviolette a few questions about this exhibition and the connection between Alberta and the Group of Seven.

AFA: What is the connection between Alberta and the Group of Seven?

MB: A number of early Alberta artists like H.G. Glyde and Catharine and Peter Whyte sketched and painted alongside members of the Group such as A.Y. Jackson and J.E.H. MacDonald. Jackson, for instance, did not drive, so artists like Glyde and members of the Lethbridge Sketch Club drove him to different sites to sketch or paint outdoors. Banff’s Peter and Catharine Whyte knew MacDonald and Lawren Harris from their outdoor excursions in the Rockies.

AFA Art Collections staff, Gail Lint and Jackie Flaata, install an artwork in Government House

AFA: Why do you think these artworks still have so much resonance today?

MB: First of all, they are memorable works of art. I mean, Euphemia McNaught’s oil of Monkman Creek simply glows, while Jackson’s small 1935 oil titled Foothills, Alberta captures so much of the distinctive character of the coulees. There are a lot of striking artworks from this period that are not only landscapes but also depictions of small-town Alberta and especially their grain elevators. Most of those [the grain elevators] are now gone and were not admired as artistic subjects at the time. Annora Brown of Fort Macleod was even advised in her own town there was nothing worthwhile to paint, and she should go to Europe where they had windmills, such as France! I guess there was a feeling that art happened somewhere else.

AFA Art Collections staff, Neil Lazaruk (left) and Duncan Johnson (right) install on Government House H.G. Glyde’s "Stream Under Grotto Mountain, Near Canmore". 1948. Oil on board. Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

AFA: What do you want people to take away from this exhibition?

MB: There is such a thing called ‘Alberta art’, and it has a very fine legacy that connects into Canadian art. That may sound like an obvious thing to say, but it needs to be said.

AFA: How do these artworks fit into the story of Alberta art?

MB: They all do. For example,  A.Y. Jackson’s 1943 painting of the newly constructed and remarkable Peace River Bridge was done at a time when the Alaska Highway was being built for reasons connected to the Second World War. H.G. Glyde, then of Calgary, accompanied him as an artist on this trip north.

Installed in Government House, Left: Euphemia McNaught’s "Monkman Creek". 1985. Oil on board. Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts;  Right: A.Y. Jackson’s "Peace River Bridge". 1943. Oil on panel. Collection of Government House.

AFA: Do you have a favourite artwork or artist in the exhibition?

MB: I have a lot of admiration for all of the early artists no matter where they were based, like Euphemia McNaught and Annora Brown. It’s good to know that next year Brown will be one of the artists featured in a national touring exhibition being organized by the McMichael Collection of Art in Kleinburg, Ontario in connection with the Group of Seven’s centenary. Everyone will be asking who is Annora Brown and where is Fort Macleod?

Interested in seeing these artworks and more in Government House? Free, guided tours take place on Sundays and holiday Mondays.

Mary-Beth Laviolette is an independent art writer and curator based in Canmore, Alberta. She specializes in Albertan and western Canadian art.

*Note: Two artworks mentioned in this article are not part of the AFA art collection. A.Y. Jackson's Peace River Bridge and Foothills, Alberta are in the art collection of Government House.

Written by: Kimberly Van Nieuvenhuyse, Writer/Social Media Officer

Absence Inhabited is curated by Ashley Slemming, and Dear Alan is curated by Natasha Chaykowski and Yasmin Nurming-Por. Both exhibitions have been generously funded though the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Emerging Curator Fellowship.  
 

Absence Inhabited

This exhibition represents 29 artworks by 27 Alberta artists. These artists all highlight unique perspectives on object-hood and have contributed to a rich survey of domestically-situated artworks. These works ring into focus notions of intimate home spaces within a continually growing and interconnected relational world. 

Curator's Statement (excerpt)

The works featured in this exhibition all tell different stories. The represented objects all appear to hold a patina or residue of life, yet all the objects presented are inanimate lifeless forms. Absence Inhabited consequently serves as an examination of absence representing presence and the inherent states of being that are reflected in these various artworks. The range of objects represented allows for consideration of the concept of home and being from a variety of viewpoints - and challenges us to think about how we live, communicate and function on a day-to-day basis. 

Ashley Slemming, curator, Absence Inhabited

About the Curator: Ashley Slemming

Ashley Slemming is a Canadian embroidery and print artist based in Calgary, AB. Her work invites curiosity into our sentimental connection with repetition, pattern, and colour in both nature and textiles.  In her conceptual art practice she often explores the parallels between human and animal behaviours that are revealed by our relationships to our living environments, both man-made and natural.

In addition to the AFA's Emerging Curator Fellowship, Ashley has explored curatorial avenues as a Curatorial Intern with the Illingworth Kerr Gallery. She has completed her BFA with distinction in Printmaking from the Alberta College of Art and Design.

Dear Alan

This exhibition represents 32 artworks by 31 Alberta artists. 

Curators' Statement (excerpt)

Dear Alan brings together a dizzying number of landscapes from the AFA permanent collection, displayed in a digital gallery, salon style. Rather than present works within a cohesive curatorial theme, based on typical modes of exhibition-making that rely on continuities such as concept, form, or historical period, this exhibition seeks instead to show varied, and at times disparate, artistic approaches to landscape representation, across time and medium—a curatorial methodology that speaks to an impulse to approach art through a productive un-knowing, a state of wonder, that eschews the reliance upon expertise in a given area of research. Like the permanent collection itself, which in all institutions shifts and morphs with changing leadership, access to funds, and artistic vision, Dear Alan chronicles the ebbs and flows of the AFA’s ever-changing collecting ethos and the evolving artistic and political sensibilities in Alberta more broadly.

Natasha Chaykowski and Yasmin Nurming-Por, curators, Dear Alan

About the Curators: Natasha Chaykowski and Yasmin Nurming-Por

Natasha Chaykowski

Natasha Chaykowski is a writer and curator based in Calgary. Currently, she is Director of Untitled Art Society. She has organized numerous exhibitions, discursive programs and arts-based events. Chaykowski held a curatorial assistant position at Art Gallery of Ontario, co-curated the annual Emerging Artist Exhibition at InterAccess in Toronto with Nancy Webb and is the co-recipient of the 2014 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators. She was Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Curatorial Studies and the Editorial Resident at Canadian Art magazine in 2014. Her writing has been published in Carbon Paper, the Art Gallery of York University, esse: arts + opinions, Canadian Art, Gallery 44, and the Journal of Curatorial Studies.

Yasmin Nurming-Por

Yasmin Nurming-Por is a curator, writer and educator currently based in Toronto, Ontario. In 2017, she was the recipient of the 5th Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators, and an Alberta Foundation. In addition to the Emerging Curator Followship exhibition, Dear Alan (co-curated with Natasha Chaykowski), 2018, other recent and upcoming projects include In shadows of the individual (2017); My curiosities are not your curios (2017); TV Dinner (2017); ARCTICNOISE (2015); At Sea(2015); and Blind White (2015). In 2015-2016 she was a sessional faculty member at Humber College in Toronto. In 2017 the position of Assistant Curator at the Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and currently holds the position of Research Assistant at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Both exhibitions are available to view on Google Arts and Culture. 

About the Emerging Curator Fellowship

This fellowship is designed to support the growth and development of curatorial talent by contracting an individual or ensemble of individuals to develop content for an online exhibition of Albertan visual art. 

This initiative is intended to bring a new perspective to the artworks and artists featured in the AFA collection.

Jim Picco's Plastic Bag is part of the exhibition Absence Inhabited. 

Alan's Untitled is part of the exhibition Dear Alan.

This week’s Work of the Week is Fifty-51 by Edmonton artist Alayne Spafford.
 

Alayne Spafford is an abstract artist whose work attempts to reconcile her natural tendency to organize and polish, with her strong desire to reject those principals in favour of chaos and disorder. Her paintings begin with a spontaneous and unstructured first layer of collage, drips, and spray paint. In the second layer, Spafford adds more depth and mark-making, then tries to find the shapes within. Her process mirrors her internal struggle to find balance between the opposing but complementary aspects of life.

This artwork came into the AFA’s collection via the Art Acquisition by Application (AAA) program last year and is now on loan, through the AFA’s Extended Loan program, to the new, award-winning YW Hub facility in Calgary.

About the Artist: Alayne Spafford

Alayne Spafford received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking and drawing from the University of Saskatchewan. After studying textiles at Concordia University and the Centre des Metiers d’Art en Construction Textile (CMACT) in Montreal, she worked for many years in the costume department of Cirque de Soleil, dying, printing, and hand-painting costumes.

Spafford was awarded a Pouch Cove residency in Newfoundland in 2019 and has exhibited throughout Western Canada and the USA including Moberg Gallery in Des Moines, Iowa, Sopa Fine Arts in Kelowna, Zinc Contemporary Arts in Seattle, and the Front Gallery in Edmonton. Her work is in the collection of the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Alberta, and the PCL Corporation. Spafford resides in Edmonton, and concentrates on painting full time.

This week’s Work of the Week is January by John K. Esler.

Did you know: The month of January is named after the ancient Roman god Janus? Janus was the god of beginnings and transitions. He also had two faces – one looking forward into the future and one looking back towards the past.

About the Artist: John K. Esler (1933 – 2001)

John K. Esler was born in 1933 in Pilot Mound, Manitoba and attended the School of Art at the University of Manitoba, graduating in 1960. He continued studies there, receiving a Bachelor of Education degree in 1962, and in 1964, after a period of travel in Europe, took a teaching position at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary (now the Alberta University of the Arts). He joined the faculty of the University of Calgary in 1968 where he taught intaglio printmaking, staying there until his retirement in the 1980s.
 

Esler was well-known in the Calgary arts community, and did much to raise the profile of printmaking in the province. He played a major role in the expansion of the printmaking department at the Alberta College of Art and Design and at the University of Calgary and in partnership with artist Ken Webb, established Trojan Press to provide a facility for local printmakers to develop their skills. Esler's works were exhibited widely throughout Canada and abroad and he is represented in many public and private collections. His awards included the C.W. Jefferys' Award from the Canadian Society of Graphic Arts and the G.A. Reid Memorial Award from the Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers.

John Esler had an irreverent, somewhat Dadaist sensibility which he expressed in his art and in his teaching methods. He encouraged his students to experiment, to make art with a mind open to unexpected possibilities. A series of artworks that offered a typical example of his approach were called Relics of the Twentieth Century and involved the use of cast-off garbage and refuse that he ran through the press to create relief prints. Objects that became fodder for the creative process for this series ranged from a squashed lunch box to the flattened chassis of a television set.

This week’s Work of the Week is Ancestor by Indigenous artist Florence Shone.

About the Artist: Florence Shone

Florence Shone is a mother of two and self-taught artist who uses acrylic and canvas as her medium.
 

She is originally from the Piikani Nation in southern Alberta, but has resided in Edmonton most of her life. She has a degree in Native Studies from University of Alberta in Edmonton. 

Shone says that she has always been an artist. She began drawing at an early age, but it was only when she was almost finished university that she took an art class and learned that painting allows her to visually express and release her emotions onto canvas. Subjects include Blackfoot people from archival photographs, portraiture, landscape work and other intuitively created pieces.

She regularly participates in local exhibitions in Alberta and has had work on display at the Royal Alberta Museum.

This year, National Indigenous Peoples Day also coincides with Summer Solstice on June 21. It is a great way to celebrate the unique culture and achievements of the First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples of our country.
 

During National Indigenous Peoples Day and June's National Indigenous History Month, explore:

• amazing artwork by Indigenous artists in the AFA's collection
• upcoming events throughout the province
• resources and events across Canada

About the artwork:

Poitras enjoys working in a variety of media including painting and mixed media collages that incorporate historical and contemporary symbols, newspaper clippings, and painted elements. In her work, 'Legacy of a Liberated Culture', she uses mixed media to create a colorful collage to highlight her diverse culture.

View the artwork in Augmented Reality. And click on the pink 'AFA virtual museum' below to discover other artworks by Poitras from 1984 to 2019.

About the Artist:

Jane Ash Poitras was born in the northern Alberta Cree community of Fort Chipewyan. Even though it was recommended for her to pick another career, as it was perceived it would be impossible to make a living as an artist, her resiliency helped her achieve a successful career. 

She has garnered her many accolades and achievements through her career, including being a recipient of:

• the Alberta Centennial Medal (2005)
• Order of Canada (2007)
• Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Award (2011).

Image description

Multi-color images of an Indigenous person wearing a black and red feathered head dress, brown dog-like animal, yellow and red bird-like animal, black and red and turquoise abstract faces, and various black and white historic symbols. Four tipis with various colors including brown, yellow, whilte, red, green, blue and pink are at the bottom of the painting.