Vancouver Art Gallery unveils 2024 exhibition calendar, spanning posters, zines, and a new force in painting
Lawrence Weiner’s poster archive, a colour-coordinated ode to monochrome, the first career survey on Dominican-American painter Firelei Báez, and more
Robert Ford with Trent Adkins and Lawrence Warren, Thing, no. 4, Spring 1991, offset zine, Collection Steve Lafreniere, Courtesy Arthur Fournier, Photo: Brooklyn Museum, Evan McKnight
Firelei Báez’s Untitled (Temple of Time), 2020, Wilks Family Collection, Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle, © Firelei Báez
THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY last night unveiled an ambitious program of exhibitions for the rest of the year, with shows covering everything from underground zines to “ravishing” grand-scale paintings. One group exhibit mixes different works by colour; another hangs diverse landscape paintings so their horizon lines match.
Most of the exhibitions were announced, and shaped, by the VAG’s new deputy director & director of curatorial programs, Eva Respini, who has served as deputy director and Barbara Lee chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (ICA/Boston), and as curator at the Museum of Modern Art in the department of photography. She was also curator for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale.
Late this year, she’ll curate a solo exhibition of Dominican-American artist Firelei Báez, whom Respini called “one of the most important artists of the 21st century”. The show opening November 24, and organized with ICA/Boston, will mark Báez’s first career survey, and first major showing in Canada. “This is a painting show with a capital ‘P’,” Respini said at the media announcement at the gallery, describing the works as vibrant and large scale, often overlaying colonial maps with lush painted imagery, addressing issues of colonialism, African diaspora, and recorded history, albeit with vibrant brushwork. “As a viewer you are immersed in them,” she says of Báez’s paintings. “They are ravishing in that beauty and pleasure.”
On March 9, the gallery will open two new shows. One is HORIZONS, a conceptual art project first conceived by Garry Neill Kennedy, that will find landscape works from the gallery’s collection hung so that their horizon lines all match at eye level. The other is OF AND ABOUT POSTERS: The Lawrence Weiner Poster Archive (1965–2021), showing about 275 works from the American conceptual artist who often worked with typographic texts.
Opening on May 11, Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines marks the first exhibition dedicated to the history of artists’ zines in North America from the 1970s onward. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, it traces zines’ essential roles to subcultures like punk, queer, and feminist culture, and covers nearly 1,000 zines and artworks.
Black and White and Everything In Between: A Monochrome Journey, meanwhile, opens June 8, exploring monochrome as a practice, and drawing more than 100 works from the gallery’s permanent collection, from over 75 local, national, and international artists. Though monochrome is often associated with painting movements, Respini stressed the show, curated by Diana Freundl, senior curator, with Joanne So Jeong Chung, curatorial assistant, would encompass many other forms, moving from white to greys to works grouped by colour.
Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch opens September 21, the first major retrospective for the multidisciplinary artist who is a member of the Six Nations Reserve, Turtle Clan, Bay of Quinte Mohawk. Much of her work explores gender imbalance, cultural appropriation, and self exploration.
Opening December 14, Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s-1980s gathers innovative works from six central-eastern European nations that sat behind the Iron Curtain under varying degrees of oppression.
Amid other initiatives announced by Respini is a new program called 1:1 Artists Select from the Collection, in which well-known Vancouver artists choose a work to hang alongside one of their own. The series starts with Stan Douglas on June 8, and includes artists from Russna Kaur to Douglas Coupland. The pop-up-style project will be hung in the gallery’s forecourt. “We need to put artists at the forefront,” Respini said.
In other news at the event, Vancouver Art Gallery's chief executive officer and executive director Anthony Kiendl said excavation was set to begin on the site of the facility's new building on March 4. It anticipates opening the doors to the public in 2028.
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