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Interior view, Art Gallery of Alberta / photo © Robert Lemermeyer |
The opening roster of exhibitions demonstrates the types of international shows and corresponding partnerships that the gallery is now able to support. The Art Gallery of Alberta’s deputy director and senior curator, Catherine Crowston, worked in consultation with Degas scholar Ann Dumas from the Royal Academy in London and Joseph S. Czestochowski of International Art in Memphis to bring together 50 mainly sculptural works from 24 international collections including the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian in Washington for “Edgar Degas: Figures in Motion.” Another significant institutional partnership between the Art Gallery of Alberta, the Canada Science and Technology Museum and the Portrait Gallery of Canada resulted in “Karsh: Image Maker,” a dramatic, if perhaps overdesigned, exhibition of photographs and studio paraphernalia that tells the story of famous Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh. Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War series (1810–23, edition 1863) and Los Caprichos (1797–98, edition 1799) is the first of 10 exhibitions sponsored by Capital Power and curated from the National Gallery of Canada’s collection that will travel to the Art Gallery of Alberta during the next three years and have specific resonance with the gallery’s program direction. For instance, Crowston was interested in Goya’s etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, from his Los Caprichos series, because it inspired Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s 2008 audio installation The Murder of Crows, which makes its North American debut in the expansive third-floor gallery. A second work by Cardiff and Miller, 2009’s Storm Room, was commissioned by the Art Gallery of Alberta for the RBC New Works Gallery on the second floor.
Cardiff and Miller’s return to Edmonton for these inaugural exhibitions seems entirely fitting given their long history with Alberta. Miller was born in Vegreville just east of Edmonton, and the two met while studying at the University of Alberta. Both were key figures in Lethbridge’s burgeoning art scene in the 90s, teaching at the University of Lethbridge and exhibiting extensively in Alberta and elsewhere before achieving international acclaim with the Paradise Institute at the 2001 Venice Biennale. In 1997, the Edmonton Art Gallery was first to buy one of their audio installations, To Touch. Significantly, Cardiff and Miller, who now split their time between Berlin and Grindrod, BC, built their careers in Alberta before becoming fixtures on the international scene. It’s a career trajectory that perhaps foreshadows what the Art Gallery of Alberta hopes to foster more of in the future.
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Edgar Degas Two Dancers 1896–9 / photo © 2009 International Arts |
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