Creighton Barrett, the Digital Archivist for the Dalhousie Libraries, and Peter Dykhuis, Director/Curator of the Dalhousie Art Gallery, have curated an exhibition about artist-run culture in Halifax. The exhibit will run in the Dalhousie Art Gallery (6101 University Avenue) from January 22 until April 17, with an opening reception on Thursday, January 21 at 7 p.m.
Mariah Blackmore, a Dalhousie Libraries’ intern who is based in the Dalhousie Archives, will be providing archival reference service in the gallery on Fridays from 12–4. Brennan Dempsey, a graduate student in the History Department, will be providing reference services on Tuesdays from 12–4.
Special thanks to Dalhousie Libraries staff members Dianne Landry and Kelly Casey who have provided assistance throughout the project, and to Shirley Vail who scanned a variety of material from both of these archival fonds.
Here are the full details about the exhibit:
“Why are we saving All these artist publications + Other Galleries stuffs?”
THE EMERGENCE OF ARTIST-RUN CULTURE IN HALIFAX
Curated by Creighton Barrett, Digital Archivist, Dalhousie University
Archives, and Peter Dykhuis, Director/Curator, Dalhousie Art Gallery
OPENING RECEPTION Thursday 21 January at 7 PM
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Canadian artists began to self-organize and establish independent spaces for creating and presenting contemporary art. These spaces were called “parallel galleries” or “alternative spaces” and are now known as artist-run centres. Halifax is home to some of the oldest artist-run centres in the country: between 1970 and 1975, Charlotte Townsend-Gault organized the artist-run Mezzanine Gallery at NSCAD. In 1972, a group of female artists established the Inventions Gallery, but the gallery closed after a fire in 1973. A few former members of Inventions Gallery collaborated to found Eye Level Gallery in 1974. The burgeoning interest in video and installation art led to the establishment of Centre for Art Tapes (CFAT) in 1978.
The emergence of artist-run culture is part of a larger historical narrative of 1960s counterculture, cultural policy debates, and widespread interest in communications and technology. This exhibition explores the formative years of artist-run culture in Halifax, from 1970 through the mid-1980s, by presenting posters and invitations from the Mezzanine Gallery fonds, Eyelevel Gallery fonds, and the Centre for Art Tapes fonds in an integrated chronology. The order is periodically disrupted by thematic groupings of textual records and ephemera clustered around quotations from these early archival documents that capture the growing pains and aspirations of this nascent culture.
“Why are we saving All these artist publications + Other Galleries stuffs?” is the only question scrawled on a list of Eyelevel Gallery members present at a board meeting sometime in 1979. There is no record of an ensuing conversation (unless it remains to be discovered among the linear metres of administrative records). The exhibition will also feature a temporary Archives Room with the archives of Eyelevel Gallery and the Centre for Art Tapes presented in the way in which they are permanently stored in the Dalhousie University Archives. These materials will be available for supervised consultation on Tuesdays and Fridays from 12 to 4 p.m. Visitors are invited to perform research in the gallery and craft their own answer to this everlasting question.
Eyelevel Gallery and the Centre for Art Tapes have been invited to present contemporary programming alongside this historical retrospective, which complements the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s exhibition The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design 1968-1978.