The Banff Centre: Communications

The Globe and Mail – November 28, 2003 (Page R14).  
The closure of the Dunlop Arts Gallery, a small but vibrant gallery located in the Regina Public Library, has sent waves of shock and dismay through the national visual-arts community.

“It is truly a public art gallery,” says Anthony Kiendl, now director of visual arts at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre. “It’s the leading national example of an art gallery in a library context, which is an incredibly rich combination. It considers art work as information, as opposed to the traditional model, which looks at art work as connoisseur objects. More than any other gallery, it provides contexts for the public to understand art and understand art in new ways. This is a drastic loss to the national arts community.”

The Globe and Mail – November 25, 2003.   Columnist Roy MacGregor inverviews Fil Fraser (founder of the Banff Television Festival), whose new book Alberta’s Camelot is “a celebration of the Peter Lougheed years, 1971 to 1985”,

It was a time when the Banff Centre became a year-round, world-class facility…. “The genius of the era, was the matching grants program… that made people not only have to go out and raise their own money but it forced them to account for it. We created an atmosphere of accountability in the arts. It’s no accident that so many good arts administrators come from Alberta.”

Montreal Gazette – November 23, 2003. &nbsp
Johanne Blouin has turned out three Christmas albums and is now “up to her keester in Christmas” at the Casino in Montréal.

She worked in cabarets to earn money for her education: she got a BA in music before studying dance at the Royal Academy and theatre at the Banff School of Fine Arts. Blouin hit the studios soon after with her 1988 tribute to Félix Leclerc.

Wirearchy – November 22, 2003.   “Friday afternoon spent in continued dialogue and discussion, along with a session around an outdoor kiln with a temperature of a white-hot 1000 degrees Celsius (while the temperature of the Banff mountain air was minus 25 degrees Celsius – brrrr!)”