Audain Art Museum

In April, 2015 a press release announced that the new Audain Art Museum at Whistler would open with an exhibition by Vancouver artist Jeff Wall in November of that year.

Here is what Wall had to say:

“I accepted the invitation to exhibit in Whistler out of respect for Michael Audain’s long standing commitment to the visual arts, and also because I am interested in seeing my work in the context his collection creates—a historical view of art in B.C.”

It is now November of that year, and though we have known for some time that the Audain Art Museum would not open until January, we are told that a number of Wall works “turned out to be unavailable.”

What’s a museum to do?

Thinking quickly, chief curator Darrin Martens decided that the second best way to open a British Columbia museum that boasts one of the largest and finest collections of British Columbia art is with the work of Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siquieros and José Clemente Orozco, a group affectionately known as Los Trés Grandes, or The Three Prostates.

Clearly there is a bigger story here. But I am not the one to tell it. Let it trickle from the brows of these men. Let it crack at the corners of their dry and distant mouths.