VANCOUVER, BC (PNAN) – Closing on January 8, 2023, “Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment” is an exhibition of more than 200 works of art by a generation of painters, photographers, weavers, bead workers and sculptors at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Focusing on the 1920s-40s, viewers will see the work of women from all parts of our nation as they respond to a period of dramatic and traumatic changes by women artists from across the country, providing a broad and diverse accounting of female creativity in Canada a century ago.
Rather than pursuing the calling of landscape painting prevalent among their male peers, settler women artists in this period are notable for tackling themes such as, human psychology, urbanization, industrialized resource extraction, Indigenous culture and displacement, environment desecration and the immigrant experience.
The exhibition includes artwork by members of the Beaver Hall Group of painters of Montréal, Québec (among them Anne Savage and Lilias Torrance Newton), shown alongside the paintings of artist Emily Carr, from Victoria, British Columbia, and sculptures by Toronto-based artists Elizabeth Wyn Wood, Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.
Also featured are the works of a number of Indigenous women from this period, including Attatsiaq of Arviat, Nunavut; Sewinchelwet (Sophie Frank) of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation); Mi’kmaq quillbox maker Bridget Ann Sack of Shubenacadie, NS; and Rose Runner of the Tsuut’ina First Nation, near Calgary, Alberta.
In addition, Uninvited also includes the contributions of women from immigrant communities such as, the painters Regina Seiden Goldberg and Paraskeva Clark as well as the work of Canadian expatriates such as, avant-garde photographer Margaret Watkins, who left her home in Hamilton, Ontario for the United States and Scotland.
For more on this exhibition and current programming see: www.vanartgallery.bc.ca.