The Banff Centre: Communications

Calgary Herald: “A patch of turf at The Banff Centre, between Glyde Hall and the Jeanne and Peter Lougheed Building, holds one of Canada’s most unusual works of art. It is a living entity that grows, changes and dies, only to experience rebirth. It sustains life. It has healing properties. It requires weeding, watering, digging and planting. Designed and planted by Mike MacDonald, an artist of Mi’kmaq, Boethuck, Irish, Portuguese and Scottish ancestry, it is a garden of native plants that attract butterflies.”

Westworld (Alberta Motor Association): “Art tour of the Bow Valley” by Thomas Wharton includes a brief description of a visit to The Banff Centre.”Today, the Walter Phillips Gallery at the centre presents ancient aboriginal craftwork alongside contemporary work, such as a recent exhibit of snowboarding-inspired art in various media.”

CBC News: Jungen will be at The Banff Centre this summer to create an outdoor sculpture for the Kinnear Centre for Creativity and Innovation.

Calgary Herald: Nancy Tousley reviews Ragnar Kjartansson’s The End: “Kjartansson’s brilliant, poignant piece about rustic simplicity and the romantic sublime, spatialized music and the space of images, camaraderie and collaboration, icons and reality, beginnings and endings, adventurous mountain men and pioneering artists is a little, or a lot, like life.”

Marketwire: The $25,000 Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Awards for outstanding achievement by a Canadian artist is awarded to Rebecca Belmore, while the winner of the $15,000 award for curatorial excellence in contemporary art is Anthony Kiendl, Director/Curator, Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art.

Belmore was a resident artist at The Banff Centre in the 1990s. (Belmore has also been selected by CBC as one of the 10 most significant visual artists of the 2000s [photo gallery number 3].)

Kiendl was the Director of Visual Arts, Walter Phillips Gallery, and the Banff International Curatorial Institute at The Banff Centre from 2002 until 2006.

Bad at Sports: A couple of resident artists in the Visual Arts Thematic Residency Why are Conceptual Artists Painting Again? interview Kitty Scott and Jan Verwoert. “Giving the institution back to the artists.”

Victoria Times Colonist: Review of current exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. “The two largest galleries are given over to The World Upside Down, an exhibit of contemporary art initiated by the Walter J. Phillips Gallery in Banff. For even the most casual visitor there is much to engage — bright paintings, figurative sculpture and a photo reconstruction of Da Vinci’s Last Supper.”

Toronto Star: “Baldwin, a Toronto artist, is leading the second installation of Reverse Pedagogy, an artists’ residency program-cum-social experiment. Winnipeg artist Paul Butler hatched the idea at the Banff Centre last summer; he handed it to Baldwin this year, who brought it here on the eve of the Venice Biennale, the art-world equivalent of the Olympics.”

Medicine Hat News: “I worked at the Banff Centre for the Arts for 25 years, and I went there because of the job. It’s one of the most exciting possibilities for an artist to have that kind of job, where you’re connecting with international artists at a high level.”

Edmonton Journal: “‘My brother and I were talking one day and decided that it would be interesting to bring together social critics like scientists, bioethicists, health-law specialists, philosophers and artists and have them look at the issues around science and art,’ says Sean Caulfield. He approached AGA senior curator Catherine Crowston and asked her if she would be willing to curate such a show. She brought 10 artists together with a group of social critics for a workshop at the Banff Centre of the Arts in August 2007. The result was a wild explosion of discipline-blurring conversation about the complex relationship that exists between art and science.”