Introduction

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hi everyone and welcome to our curators tour by daniel siemens a making art building

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community 100 years of the edmonton art club my name is michael manson i am the public

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program and outreach coordinator at the art gallery of alberta to start this program i would like to do a land

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acknowledgement we are currently in the aga building which is in 3d6 territory in edmonton the traditional land of a

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diverse indigenous peoples including decree blackfoot metis nakota sioux iroquois

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inuit and ojibwe salto and nishinabe we acknowledge nixon gratitude to the

Welcome

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many first nations metis and inuit whose footsteps have marked these lands for generations and who continue to call

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this place home today we are very excited to be looking at the exhibition making our building community

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here at the aga that celebrates 100 years of the edmonton art club thank you so much for joining us this

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tour is made possible in part through the support from the heart and soul fund by epcor i would also like to thank the

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canada council for the arts for their support as well this is a hybrid program with people

QA

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tuning in virtually hello to the people on zoom and also in person if you’re attending

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virtually and would like to ask a question for the q a portion at the end of the tour please use the q a function

Introducing Danielle

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on zoom or the chat function on facebook to ask your questions without further

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delay i’m going to introduce danielle danielle siemens is the collection manager and curatorial associate at the

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aga she attained her m.a in art history from carleton university and has worked at the national gallery of canada in the

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national gallery of art in washington dc danielle has worked in the aga since 2017 in various curatorial roles she

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currently manages the aga’s collection of over 6 000 objects overseeing all new

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acquisitions and the administrative work for artworks that go on exhibition at the aga or on loan to other galleries so

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impressive well i’ll let you take it away danielle thank you

What is the Edmonton Art Club

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don’t need to clap um so thanks michael for the introduction um i’ll probably

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minutes and then we’ll do a q a um but feel free to ask me questions as we go along if there’s something you want to

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know more about or something you want to see that i’ve kind of skipped over um as michael mentioned i’m also the

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collections manager here so this uh exhibition uh i think about half of it is from our

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collection and then the rest is from other public and private collections mostly in edmonton

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um and you know i think this exhibition was almost two years in the making from my part i know

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the edmonton art club been thinking about this anniversary for a long time and

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so it took a lot of research and obviously we’re talking about 100 years so i’m going to try to

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touch on some highlights um but as i said if there’s anything you really want to know more about please feel free to

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ask me as we go along i recognize a few of you so i know that you will know about the edmonton art club but first i

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just kind of wanted to gauge um you know people’s knowledge of the club here so is anyone here familiar with

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edmonton art club is there anything you know about them something you might be able to tell us

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betty you can go ahead if you’d like

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and so part of what we did to get ready was turn those files all over to them

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now and we also went through them to gather information for a book that we

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published commemorating and it it was just a real question so

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yeah the evidence club is alive as well if anybody wants to look at joining that

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just go online just google if it’s an art club and you’ll get to our website then and

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send me an email if you want to or or just chat to the contact there um yeah

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be a pleasure to respond to any interest thanks betty so betty is a member of the

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club and um what she didn’t say is that the emptiness club is the longest running organization and arts

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organization in alberta um so they were founded in 1921 and they’ve been really instrumental to

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shaping the arts not only in the city but in the whole province um so this exhibition celebrates their

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100th anniversary which um with about 75 artworks from i think 56 artists

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so over that hundred year history they’ve had nearly 500 members so i could only showcase a pretty small amount but it kind of gives you a nice

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overview we have artwork spanning from about 1918 to the early 2000s

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and a various subject matter style and media

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um i also want to note off the top that we have an exhibition of their current members downstairs in the leadcore

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theater community gallery so if there’s time at the end of this evening you can check out their current members work

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downstairs um or return before the show ends um on january 23rd and that space

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is actually free so you don’t need to pay admission for the rest of the gallery to see that exhibition

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so i just want to start by stressing that phrase building community um and

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one thing i really tried to showcase in this exhibition is that the story of the edmonton art club is not about the club

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alone but about how they have contributed to sort of the arts climate or ecology in

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um the city and province so they were instrumental to actually founding or to starting this very

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gallery um in 1924 as well as the alberta society of artists

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their members in addition to being artists were also art critics for the journal they were art teachers

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in the public school district but also post-secondary they were important to establishing the

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fine art program at the u of a um to the banff school of fine arts which we now know as the bamf center

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and they worked as gallery owners and gallery administrators and so really

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kind of building this community um so let’s walk a little bit into the

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space and i’ll kind of stand in front of this wall here

History of the Edmonton Art Association

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don’t be afraid of the camera um helen can kind of move around us so gather close if you need to hear me

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um so i just want to start with a little bit more background the m smart club was not the first

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association art association in edmonton they were actually preceded by something called the

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edmonton art association in 1914. now just to set the stage a little bit

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um i want us to think about what edmonton would have looked like at the time so the city was established um in 1904 as a

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city in 1912 they amalgamated with strathcona across the river and the population at this point was really

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booming so i think about 72 000 prior to the war and that decreased significantly with

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world war one um but even after the war you know few streets were paved um

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electricity and phone service was fairly sporadic still um natural gas only became really

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available in the early 20s so just thinking about that setting it doesn’t seem maybe like the arts would

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be kind of top priority um but for a select community um

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they really strove to build up the arts in this city which is evidenced by the art

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association which formed in 1914 um as well as other earlier groups like the

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amateur dramatic club in 1896 and the women’s musical club which formed in

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1910 so we have the formation of all these clubs happening

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and the edmonton art association their goal was really to um

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combat this prevalent wartime attitude that art was an expendable frill and so

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they ran they operated really under the auspices of the edmonton public school board and they put on lectures uh and classes

8:50

on art and art history and they put on some of the very first exhibitions in edmonton so those included artwork by

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students um but also loans from the national gallery and from the us so they were bringing

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art from you know the biggest gallery in the country um into western canada which was just sort of

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growing its its art scene um so then some of those members from the

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association went on to form the edmonton art club and they wanted to continue that mission um of stressing the

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importance of art in everyday life they held their very first meeting on october 6 1921 so just about two months

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prior to today um in the studio of william johnston and this is william johnston who i’ll talk a

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little about a little bit more in a minute he is often talked about as the very

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first professional artist in the city um and he had a studio in the teglar building so some of you might remember

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the teglar building on 101st it then became the

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building and now it’s demolished it’s an empty spot but that’s where they had their first

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meeting so they started with 14 charter members

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that were selected by a local jury and the original constitution outlined

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three main aims so one of that one of those was a critical evaluation of each other’s work

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so coming together to look at work critique it to improve your practice

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the next was exhibiting so putting work on display for people to see in the city

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and last with sales so actually selling um making money from your work in labor

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and those three things the club continues to do today so it’s really shaped their kind of mandate for the hundred years

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so this wall here um is about their charter members and i have set work by seven of their 14

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originals so first is william johnston

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um he was born in scotland and he was trained there as an artist

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so sometimes you’ll see or quite a few of the other artists in the beginning are what we might call

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amateur so in that sense they often didn’t have a formal art education um

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and maybe didn’t work as an artist as their full-time career but we have to remember about edmonton at the time

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there weren’t really opportunities for a formal art education we didn’t have the bfa program at the u

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of a yet or anything like that but he was an exception he was trained in england

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and he came to edmonton in 1912 and as i mentioned established a really successful studio in the teglar building

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he also taught so he taught at the edmonton technical school which would be

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kind of an early version of what is nate today as well as at in watasco in high school

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and many of the early the first the charter members were some of his students so he was a really important educator in the city

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um and one thing i do want to stress as well is that his wife was very important

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to the club so she wasn’t an artist or a member but she was sort of nicknamed the club’s mother and she was really important to

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their administrative functions and i just wanted to touch upon that because i think there were a lot of women especially in the history of

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museums and uh western canada that we’re contributing to the arts as volunteers

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and fundraisers and don’t always get sort of the spotlight or the credit um

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so johnston drew his inspiration from lakes and

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mountains in alberta he was a really avid mountain climber and does anyone recognize this scene

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it might not be completely obvious it’s not lake louise

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it’s um but it is in the rockies it’s mount robson and lake kinney and um what’s great is that he wrote a

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lot of diaries so we believe this painting was likely made on a trip he took to mount robson camping and hiking

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in 1918 with um harry bullia that is the artist who

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made those portraits there so they would have traveled together and made sketches and then he likely made this painting

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and um he’s really kind of influenced by a british watercolor tradition um so he’s

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using these kind of delicate colors creating this kind of hazy light on the mountains

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um sort of just capture this peaceful summer day in the rockies

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i’m going to talk now about this painting here

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so there were three of the 14 charter members that were women

Barbara Mercier

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and that’s a key part of this history women have been important to the club since its earliest days they were

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members and artists they were also presidents part of the executive um and important teachers in the city

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so i was only able to include one but we have the work of barangay mercier

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um so she was born in quebec and came to alberta around 1909

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she was primarily self-taught but she actually also studied with johnston um

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and she had a degree in music actually and was important to establishing the

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edmonton civic opera society and the reason i bring that up is because many of these artists were also involved in other cultural endeavors um

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so taking part in music or drama and professionally she actually worked for the postal service

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um but this work is quite different than the john stone even though they um

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potentially she trained with him um so it’s of the hoodoos but it’s this really kind of icy wintery feel it’s a little

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odd i feel like i haven’t been able to completely pin down this painting um

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and it’s almost getting into a little bit of abstraction of the scene kind of paring down the elements and the shapes

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um then we’ll look at one final work on this wall

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feel free to interrupt me if you have questions this is jay gordon sinclair um

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again he was a really important educator so he taught for over 25 years with the edmonton technical school

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and he was one of the people who started the edmonton art association and then went on to become a charter member of

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the club um but he was born in ontario and trained in toronto and so

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he came to edmonton i believe 19 um [Music]

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probably 1911 or 12. and so that would have been before the group of seven’s time but he

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was um kind of in that community of some of those artists that would go on to form the group of seven and their

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associates so we can see some influence in that kind of beginnings of

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sort of modern art trends in canada and he really wasn’t interested he mostly did

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landscapes but this is a nice kind of industrial scene it kind of counterparts just some of these landscapes we’re seeing here

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and he really wasn’t interested in like a high realistic kind of painting um he wanted looser sort of paint application

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and brush strokes so we can see you know it is fairly detailed but you don’t have the really

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fine kind of details we have in some of those earlier paintings um

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and yeah this nice sort of industrial scene to get the sense of what um things would have been happening at that time

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okay we’re gonna go to these cases

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you know what i’m actually not quite sure do you think it is [Music]

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it’s untitled so i’m not sure

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[Music]

17:02

mm-hmm yeah very geometric um

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so i apologize if not everyone can see this but as we walk through you can kind of take a look

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so as betty mentioned at the beginning i in putting together this exhibition had access to the edmonton art club’s

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archives which was pretty um amazing and so i’ve included a sampling of their

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catalogs from their art exhibitions starting with their very first one in 1922. so shortly

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after they formed in the fall of 1921 they put on their first art exhibition around easter time and that became an

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annual tradition that continues to this day exhibitions throughout the year as well

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and often these were in really formal spaces like at the edmonton art gallery um for many years but sometimes in um

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spaces like hospitals or shopping malls as well um what i like about this display though

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is that it really shows you sort of the progression of graphic design over the years so we have this early 20s it’s a

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bit more like art deco and then you can tell in the 2000s they’re obviously using

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digital technologies and computers um but exhibiting as i mentioned has been a

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really important part of their mandate in that last 100 years then i’ve also included two exhibition

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brochures from the edmonton museum of arts which is now the art gallery of alberta

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so one of these is the very first exhibition we had and that was in 1925 and before we had a permanent space

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this show was at in one of the rooms at the hotel mcdonald and you’ll notice

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for sure is that there was a whole section showcasing edmonton art club artists

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and why this is so important is that the edmonton art club and the aga have had a

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very close working relationship for a long time so not only there’s exhibit here but some of them

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were directors of the gallery several of them taught in our education program

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um capacities or on the board of directors they also helped to build our collection

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so they donated works of art to our collection or donated acquisition funds

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um an example of which is on the wall behind us

Alvin Cartmell

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so this work is from 1925 and it’s by alvin cartmell and this was the second

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work to be donated to the aga and it was from the edmonton art club so this really kind of inaugurates our

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collecting program which as michael mentioned is now over 6000 works of art

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carmel was also from england and came to canada in 1923 and he really fell in love with the

19:56

vastness of the country but he was particularly enamored with winter so winter scenes were his specialty and a

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lot of these winter scenes actually ended up being given to royalty or to diplomats

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one went to a political figure from pakistan so we see kind of like the johnston but

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not in watercolor this very atmospheric scene a limited color palette really capturing

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that kind of cold fighting air and like a prairie summer prairie day

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um but one kind of treat uh being able to access the archive is that there were all these handwritten biographies and

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lots of um quotes from people who knew the artist at the time so i’m going to read you one

20:42

that i liked about cartmel because it really kind of captures his dedication to painting in the winter

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so painted winter landscapes as no one else could poor frost was one of his specialties

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one afternoon in 20 temperatures i found him standing in a snow drift near florence mortimer studio on 5th street

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and florence mortimer was another art club artist he was doing charcoal sketches of the

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anglican cathedral with its burden of snow and hanging icicles there was an artist who loved his work

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and was determined to get it right it just kind of gives you that image of him painting outside in these really cold

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temperatures and then florence mortimer who was just mentioned is whose work we’re going to look at next

Florence Mortimer

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so as you’ll notice we’ve seen a lot of landscapes this wall kind of begins one of the thematic sections of this

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exhibition which is about landscapes and the natural world and as we move through you’ll see um

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how artists have applied different styles to the landscapes we move from a

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kind of more impressionist influenced landscape um to pretty much full abstraction by sort of the when we round

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the corner which we’ll see in a moment um this is florence mortimer um she was one

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of the earliest art educators in the city and was really important to teaching a lot of the artists in this

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show actually she was born in south africa and trained in england and then she moved with her

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family to northern alberta but eventually they came to edmonton and settled here and

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her husband was really ill so she returned to teaching art to support her entire family and she had an art career

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an art educator career in edmonton for over 30 years and taught as i said many

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of the people in this show and elsewhere in the city another thing about mortimer and several

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of the artists in the show is that they were part of lots of clubs other local regional and national groups so she was

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a part of the alberta society of artists which we’ll talk a little bit more about in a moment

22:56

another club which i haven’t been able to find too much information about but they have this great title they were

23:01

called the women’s sketch hunters of alberta um and then also the federation of

23:06

canadian artists so a national group that had local chapters um does anyone recognize this vantage

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point so now we’re looking at a scene of edmonton right on that’s exactly it yeah

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and it’s it’s a pretty similar view today um so yeah this is this is a view from

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highlands um but this painting is quite a bit later it’s around 1940 than the

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earlier ones we looked at so we can see how mortimer is you know using a little bit more

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expressive color um some kind of looser brush stroke she’s not using a ton of detail um to

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depict the scene um but you know with capturing that sense of place um

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through her through her painting well i looked at this before

23:59

thanks for letting us look more closely

24:05

so let’s shift to that wall

24:11

[Music]

Fred Kajip

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i’m just going to touch briefly on this painting here um this is by manfred or fred

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kaijip or kiak i’ve actually never um i should find out how he pronounced his

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own last name but the reason i want to look at this is that he was um part of a small group of

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edmonton art club members that were polio patients and um became

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painters after they learned to handle the brush with their mouths so fred

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contracted polio in 1960 and spent really long periods of time at the u of a hospital where he met two other

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artists who were also club members and he was mentored by them as well as by jb taylor who was an important

25:00

professor at the u of a and he learned to paint and he went on to have a really prolific career and

25:07

he mostly did landscapes as well and again kind of specialized in winter scenes um

25:14

like cartmel before him who we saw so i just mentioned jb taylor who was

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one of um hijack’s mentors and we’ll look at a painting by jb taylor right here

JB Taylor

25:43

so in addition to artists teaching in the edmonton public school board and the primary system

25:49

several of them also taught in post-secondary and jb taylor is really a key figure to the professionalization

25:56

of artists in this province so for a bit of background prior to the establishment of

26:02

department of fine art in 4647 you could only take art classes in the

26:08

city through the faculty of extension so you couldn’t get a bfa but you could take courses through

26:15

extension an extension actually was um they helped to start the banff school

26:21

of fine art which we now know as the banff center in 1934 so there were art

26:27

education opportunities um but you couldn’t do like a full you know degree

26:32

program until the late 40s so jb taylor was born in charlottetown

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and he studied in new york and during the second world war he worked as an artist for the war

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um and he had an interesting job he painted illusionistic landscapes for

26:48

the purpose of recognition so he would paint enemy planes um so that the military could

26:55

recognize like practice recognizing them and then he would also paint the base canteens um to paint murals on their

27:01

walls and following the war he was to edmonton to teach in the newly

27:07

established department of fine art um and a key part of his

27:12

education responsibilities were also bringing art elsewhere in the province so he spent a lot of time traveling

27:18

throughout rural alberta and the northwest territories to teach in those places and also in

27:25

mental health facilities and to incarcerated people so you know he was really focused on trying

27:30

to bring art elsewhere to people where where they might not have such readily act

27:36

might not such readily access an art education

27:42

before i tell you a little bit about this painting i’m curious um if there’s what you think it might be or

27:48

what you see in it i’ve heard people say all sorts of things when they look at this painting

28:06

[Music] does anyone see anything different

28:16

well you are right he was definitely inspired by ice and mountains so

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he spent several summers teaching at the banff school and he was particularly interested in

28:30

the rock surface and glacial ice so he started his career working in kind of these romantic landscape images and

28:38

then during the war obviously this really highly realistic scene but near the end of his career he really

28:43

started experimenting with abstraction so he started using newly available acrylic paints

28:49

and tools other than paint brushes to really work at the surface create texture

28:54

you know you can see things like drips happening and then rather than the

28:59

mount robson for example where it has a view of the mountains we have this really kind of close

29:05

view of rocks or ice um and the and the surface tension that might

29:11

happen with it melting and freezing

29:16

so we’re going to look at the wall right behind us

Highlights Magazine

29:29

so this showcases um work from the alberta society of artists but these were all

29:34

edmonton art club members so the asa formed in 1931 and several

29:40

art club members were original members of the society and this was really important to connecting edmonton and calgary and to

29:46

artists across the province and one really fantastic thing that asa did for a number of years was publish a

29:52

magazine called highlights and you know if we think about um this is a really kind of

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um time in alberta where there’s intense growth in the arts the magazine was an

30:04

important form of communication so people would publish essays in it oftentimes they would write letters back and forth around the same topic over

30:11

several editions you know debating something about the arts and for a period of time

30:18

they included original prints in the magazine so this is a pretty novel idea for the time

30:23

so sometimes they were covers like this one or like the third one

30:29

and then they also included several prints in the magazine and these were made at the artist’s own

30:34

expense so on one hand it was a really generous thing um but it also allowed some of these

30:41

artists to work kind of really experimentally um you know they’re on a smaller scale in a reproducible medium

30:47

and so it allowed them kind of like ruth haley for example to do things that they might not otherwise do on a larger scale

30:53

in an oil painting um but also i think this is really important because it shows us

30:59

a keen interest in printmaking in alberta which we know has continued i mean the u of a has a really important

31:06

print program and snap the print studio um so we have this really robust history

31:11

of printmaking in in the province and i think a lot of that kind of starts with these prints included in highlights

31:17

magazine okay so we’ll go around the corner

31:25

[Music]

Mushroom Imagery

31:42

so these two rooms continue the kind of landscape and nature theme but we have

31:48

rural landscapes over there and then over here we have floral and uh mushroom or fungi

31:55

imagery so this is an artist whose name was lenny shelkwook and she was born in the netherlands and

32:01

received a master’s degree there in horticulture and then when she came to edmonton she

32:07

had an amateur interest in mushrooms so she would go out looking for them but didn’t really have the ability to

32:13

identify them so she would pick specimens write really detailed notes and send them to ottawa to be identified

32:18

at a lab there but then she also produced these amazing paintings um and you know clearly photographic

32:25

technology would have been available to her these were made in the early 70s but she really wasn’t interested in

32:30

photographing the mushrooms and i think this was because you know painting them necessitated that she really spent more time with them got

32:36

up close paid attention to their details and colors and layers

32:42

and then she translated these paintings into watercolors that illustrated her

32:48

book mushrooms of um of western canada and that was published in 1991 and

32:55

for any mushroom enthusiasts out there this really remains one of the definitive sources about mushrooms of

33:00

the northwest region of north america um [Music]

33:05

you might remember her because she she only passed away in 2010 she was often featured in the edmonton journal and was

33:11

always called the mushroom lady and there were often recipes of hers for different mushroom mushroom dishes

33:18

and she was a really long time member of the club and served as part as president for a few years and as far as i’ve seen she only painted

33:25

mushrooms i’ve never seen anything else so this is a plate

33:31

it then became you know a smaller image that was included in the book

Still Life

33:40

so this is a watercolor and you might be as surprised as i was to learn that this is also a watercolor

33:49

so this is by an artist named vivian tierfelder and after she obtained her bfa at the u of a

33:57

she actually began her career working for the provincial museum now the ram

34:02

on diorama design and production so that leads me to believe that she’s always had a really kind of keen attention to

34:08

detail to texture um and then eventually she

34:15

started you know working full time as an artist and she pretty much exclusively works in watercolor

34:21

and some of her images are these intimate views of leaves or blades of grass or a little

34:27

pile of stones and others are these really impressive and elaborate still

34:32

life compositions um so you can see how she combines flowers and objects and um

34:40

fabrics to build up these kind of complex compositions and often times they also include tropical flowers

34:46

inspired by extended periods of time she spent in hawaii um

34:52

and so you know the still life genre we often know and associate with kind of 17th century dutch painting um and often was

35:01

you know a display of the material pleasures of life which i think we’re seeing something similar here um

35:07

or a commentary on the kind of brevity or fleetiness of life

35:12

but then later at the turn of the 20th century we see modern artists using still life too

35:18

as a kind of neutral basis for more formal experiments so if you think about the cubists for example um taking a

35:24

still life composition and chopping it up into planes of shape and color um so we can

35:31

see here this painting is from 1988 so still life continues to influence you know be a genre that a lot of artists

35:38

are interested in working in and can carry so many different meanings um so i like showcasing this one because

35:43

it’s quite just quite impressive so we’ll go to that back wall and kind of our last section of the show

35:53

oh actually i meant to talk about this work here do you mind flipping around

Thelma Menari

36:03

okay sorry so i’m gonna talk about these really small work so you’ll have to come

36:08

through and kind of get close to them after i’m done talking um these are some of my favorite works

36:14

in the show actually so these are my thelma menari and um

36:20

she was born in edmonton and started learning studying art really young with

36:25

florence mortimer whose work we looked at earlier and throughout her career she’s experimented with a lot of styles so we

36:31

actually have a really kind of cubist influenced portrait painting in the back room that you’ll see

36:38

worked in abstraction but at some point she almost entirely worked to painting art to working on these small etchings

36:44

these are little prints and she very much admired the alberta landscape as several of the artists

36:50

we’ve talked about and was interested in human and man-made icons so something like grain elevators often

36:56

show up in her work um and so these are views that she would have seen in

37:01

alberta traveling through her car traveling in her car seen through uh through a window and you really get that

37:07

sense when you can kind of get up close and look at them but one reason i i quite like this work

37:13

is that there are all these threads in the exhibition um connections from one artist to another

37:19

and these networks and i’ve tried to tease those out by um visual connections

37:24

or through the labels um and one that isn’t obvious by just looking at this piece is that

37:31

she acquired her printing press from another art club member named carolyn kaufman who’s also in this show

37:38

and carolyn kaufman inherited it from an artist named george brown um and so it got passed down through the

37:44

generations and if any of you recall there was a plaque at the very beginning of the show that was by george brown he

37:50

was a metal worker but also a printmaker and was known for some really innovative etching techniques so

37:57

that was kind of the beginning of some what i was talking about with this printmaking community in edmonton um so

38:02

that’s this nice kind of uh display of artists um sharing their materials and

38:09

um and their knowledge from one to another we also have much but those two paintings at the end

38:16

of the wall by rosemary reeves and k may they’re of the same scene

38:21

or the same place entirely know this to be true but it leads me to think that they were likely

38:26

sketching together which was very common still a lot of edmonton clubs do that together go somewhere and have a day

38:32

sketching and then produce their work from that so that’s another kind of one of those um

38:38

connections so it was nice when i found both those paintings okay so now we’ll go to this baffle

38:55

so this is the last thematic section of the show um so here i’ve included works

39:03

showcasing urban scenes a lot of edmonton scenes um or the figure or

39:08

portraiture and some of the artists obviously are doing those things together like louelle and petley jones

39:14

um i believe this is a view of the river thames so i’ve talked a lot about um

39:21

kind of a network in edmonton but several of these artists were also um you know traveling abroad and bringing

39:27

those ideas back into their practice and back into edmonton so llewellyn petley jones was born in

39:33

edmonton had an interest in art from a very young age

39:38

he started a brief career in banking i think that only lasted about three years and then he gave that up and dedicated

39:44

his life to not being an artist um but he spent a lot of time learning

39:50

and having a studio throughout europe so in england in paris and italy

39:55

and he was influenced and learning from a lot

40:00

of modern art trends happening there so i think we see kind of reference of things like fovism

40:06

this painting is much later um but has that really kind of expressive color um

40:12

and yeah this quite lively lively scene here um

40:17

okay so we’ll move to the back wall of this space

Thelma Walker

40:47

so i wanted to look at these two paintings here by lma walker

40:52

she was a pretty fascinating figure and really important to edmonton’s culture and heritage

40:58

so she was born in the u.s and studied art and music in chicago she actually started her career in music so when she

41:04

settled in edmonton um she was first performing and teaching music she was also really interested in

41:10

history so she wrote a lot of articles about the history of edmonton eventually she published a book called fortress

41:16

north which kind of traced the history of the city from fort edmonton to around the time of the establishment of

41:23

the city airport um in 1930 or in the 30s she met arthur

41:28

lismer who was a member of the group of seven and she ended up turning her

41:33

so she did illustrations for her book and then also made paintings and she was really fascinated and inspired by the

41:40

mexican muralists and people like diego rivera and how they painted history

41:46

in the present day and had this you know socially infused art and so these paintings um are not

41:52

historical scenes they’re painting um industry they’re really forward-looking

41:58

um industry that’s happening at the times we see the city airport which many of you will know

42:04

and the oil refinery and what i like about these um you know kind of compared to some of these earlier watercolors we

42:10

looked at is these are much less romantic and a lot grittier and really capturing that kind of industrial scene

42:17

um but she also experimented and she took some workshops at emma lake um

42:23

which is sort of this modernist hub in saskatchewan and

42:29

she ended up work experimenting a lot with abstraction as well so back in that rural section if you’re walking back

42:35

through there’s a painting of hers of a plowed field

42:40

but it’s really quite minimal and pared down um and this sort of lovely abstracted

42:46

scene of rural life she was also um important to

42:52

her for her work with the archives and landmark committee which is what the edmonton archives has become

42:59

so she worked really hard to preserve local landmarks in the city and including heritage trees which was a

43:05

pretty novel idea at the time to kind of preserve trees in the city and the city of edmonton um has a really

43:12

great online exhibition about lma walker if you’re interested in learning more and they have more images of her work but also

43:19

historic photographs and and that so we just have two more stops because i

43:24

know i’ve taken up quite a bit of your time i wanted to look at these scenes of edmonton which are many years later

43:31

by george weber a printmaker um so

43:37

these were done about 40 years later than these and you can see the city is more

43:42

developed they’re mostly downtown views of the river um

43:48

we have several of these i think these are about four four of i think 15 we have in the collection

43:54

and george weber was born in germany but in the 1920s um you know he was really

44:00

sensing a dangerous political climate so he came to canada and he first settled in toronto and he worked in

44:07

commercial wallpaper design so he was making wallpaper he was also studying at the ontario college of art um learning

44:14

more about silkscreen techniques which was fairly new and then he came to edmonton and he’s

44:20

really credited with bringing silkscreen kind of technology to the area and he taught a lot of people

44:27

silk screening and he also was importing papers from europe and from japan

44:32

for the benefit of printmakers in the city um so kind of another print connection

44:39

there and then our last stop to sort of bring us back to the aga

44:44

is just on this wall

44:54

so nice this person

Rod Bowman

45:04

it is not emily carr no no good guess so there’s another bronze

45:10

bust of the same woman on um the promenade above victoria golf course

45:16

no not group of five so this woman is named bowman and rod bowman was the very

45:21

first president and director of the aga or what was then the edmonton museum of arts

45:27

so she um came here from england

45:33

and she was part of something called the uh the women’s art association of canada so

45:40

they had local chapters across the country and that really gave her access to um kind of an artistic group of

45:45

like-minded people um and to something called the local council of women and so she solicited

45:51

the support of the edmonton art club and political and financial leaders in the city to establish the very first art

45:57

gallery here and the very first permanent collection the bust is made by an art club member

46:04

named frank norbury um he was from england as well and he had a

46:10

really booming business in liverpool making um sculptures or carvings for buildings

46:16

um but then he enlisted in the war and when he came back his business was completely overrun and he realized it’d be so expensive to re-establish himself

46:24

so he moved to canada and he became quite well known here for his war memorial so he has one in red deer and

46:30

one in lacombe and um this painting by llewellyn petley jones

46:36

the same artist on the opposite side of the wall is a portrait of norbury the sculptor of

46:43

the bust so these are two works from the collection and they have this really nice visual connection that we don’t get

46:48

to kind of display often together i’ve looked at a lot of historic photographs of norbery and this seems to

46:54

capture him exactly um i mean he’s never smiling in them and always kind of has these bushy furrowed eyebrows and is

47:01

doing one of his um war memorial pieces um so this is a nice kind of connection

47:08

back to the gallery and again the importance of women in the history of of the arts here in edmonton and alberta

47:16

so that brings me to the end i think i talked for a long time and i missed a lot of artwork so if you

47:22

have any questions please feel free to ask me um in person or from the crew online yeah

47:30

so yeah we’re in our the q a section so you’ll notice that there’s people online so if you have a question in the

47:36

audience here or if you have a question online you can put in the chat but if you’re in the audience here me or

47:41

danielle will probably repeat your question so it gets in the mic so people online can hear it so any questions from

47:47

the audience

47:58

someone said online thank you great tour thank you that is the painting i mentioned when we

48:03

were looking at those tiny etchings so you know think about how those are like this big and now we have this other

48:10

representation so we have a few examples of artists working in totally different styles

48:15

within this exhibition yeah

48:20

uh i guess i have a question what was your approach to deciding the artwork was it mostly the thematic tying

48:27

everything together or was some artwork that you’re like oh i have to include this that was a challenge

48:33

um because we had about 500 members and i looked them all up part of it is availability um you know

48:39

so what could i find in collections um so it was a big part i really wanted to have as kind of a many of the charter

48:46

members as i could um the edmonton art gallery so prior to the aga did another a 65 anniversary show of

48:55

the club so there are some repeats from that show but i really wanted to also bring this up in time and so it was

49:01

important to me that we had some artists who are working in the 90s and 2000s um

49:06

and then um so partially availability and

49:12

anyone who i really kind of picked artists often who had um kind of this broader story this

49:18

contributions to the arts in other ways and then shaped it through

49:24

these themes so there were some works that i think could have been interesting in the show but um were sort of outliers

49:30

in terms of fitting into some of the main ideas i saw um so really that was the figure the city and the landscape

49:37

were kind of the things that kept popping up over that hundred years it’s hard to obviously bring

49:43

together a show of such a long history so yeah i have a kind of a comment from the chat uh it’s asking you to speak a

49:50

little bit more about the portrait artist with the club since we’ve seen a lot of landscapes sure

49:55

yeah um okay so this artist is quite interesting

50:01

[Music] so this is dorothy hensel willis and we

Dorothy Hensel Willis

50:08

actually have two of her works so this one and then that blue painting over there

50:13

and there’s she was really well known in edmonton um at the time she was working

50:19

um and she’s kind of a fascinating character because she really embodied or at least the media portrayed her as this

50:25

really bohemian artist type and she also studied and traveled widely

50:30

through europe and she had a pretty i think unique approach to painting for the edmonton scene at the time and so

50:36

she was often painting her dreams fear subconscious um the u of

50:42

a has a really lovely collection of her work as well as the afa and so there’s a lot of kind of more surrealist

50:47

influenced work and um she often incorporates strong colors

50:52

bold shapes and would experiment with her painting application so in this case other than the outlines the rest of the

50:59

painting is actually finger painting um so she was doing kind of interesting things like that

51:04

and then she moved to vancouver eventually near the end of the 40s and taught at ubc

51:10

um and she was really interested in art therapy and from what i understand of

51:15

the history of art therapy this would have been sort of the beginnings of becoming more formalized in europe and the us

51:21

um so she was kind of forward thinking in that way we also have this grouping of portraits

51:27

over here

Self Portraits

51:41

um so this is i think the only self portrait we have in the show this is by

51:48

an artist named dr edgarton pope so he was a doctor at the u of a um and then was a member of the art club

51:55

um and is really depicting himself as more of an academic and a doctor

52:00

rather than his sort of artistic self painting here um is by someone named

52:07

esther scar freeman and it is a portrait of another art club member named murray mcdonald and we

52:14

didn’t look at marie mcdonald’s work but he is in the show twice and he

52:19

was for several years um the head of art for edmonton public schools

52:26

for edmonton public school board and so he taught a lot of artists and she actually studied with him she went

52:32

um to queen alex school um in grade nine and had him as a teacher

52:38

so this is years later kind of her homage to him and we have a few examples of artists painting other artists in

52:43

this show and then this painting here is by ilda loubane and um

52:49

she was another teacher shot at the bamf school um but she was born in latvia and

52:55

immigrated here and so here’s an example of where i think we’re seeing some of you know people’s influence from

53:00

elsewhere when they’re coming so um working in this kind of which is um

53:07

you know unlike anything else in this show does anyone have a question from the

53:12

audience okay well i see another question from the chat so the chat is taking over as

53:21

abigail asks how can we learn more about the club members so how can we learn more about

53:27

the numbers well there’s a few ways um as i mentioned we did a show of theirs

53:33

for the 65th anniversary and there was a really great um catalog produced and

53:38

that’s kind of there’s an essay in it by the art historian joan greer and that really has

53:44

a great history of the club up until that point um and i think the club might even have

53:49

a scan of it on their website um

53:57

and then if you want to learn more about their current members um you can go to their website or you can come see the

54:03

show and they also produced a commemorative publication for this hundred years so

54:09

each one of their members is showcased in there um i think with a one or two page spread showing their artwork their

54:15

bio and then there’s interspersed some history in that book as well

54:20

and where can people get that that’s available

54:31

yeah so i think you around you know 40 is pretty average yearly yeah yeah

54:48

oh that’s fantastic yeah yeah it’s really interesting i well certainly

54:54

increased with the uh awareness created by the show yeah yeah so for those online you might not

55:01

have heard there’s 44 members currently right and they’ve actually had a boost in

55:06

membership since covid so yeah [Music] well that’s fabulous i see that there’s

55:12

no more further questions we have time for one more question does anyone have anything that they want to ask

55:20

no well maybe we’ll just cut it then so people have a chance to see the exhibition downstairs thank you so much

55:26

danielle

55:33

and thanks to everyone watching online that’s it for us thanks again

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