Audain Art Museum

The media tour of the new Audain Art Museum at Whistler is an hour from now. Had the weather turned out better, I would have driven up for it. Instead, some pictures I took last fall.

The entrance to the museum begins with a long gangplank, similar to the one God instructed Noah to build. A vestibule separates the front door from the lobby. The interior panelling is hemlock.

Here is a picture of artist Paul Wong telling people how to install his commissioned lobby piece, No Thing Is Forever (2015). Standing with his hands behind his back is museum curator Darrin Martens.

Here is the main hallway as you step from the lobby and look north. The first gallery complex (to your left) is a story of BC art that features a room dedicated to the paintings of E.J. Hughes. The galleries at the end of the hallway are larger and, in the spirit of NAFTA, are scheduled to open with paintings by Mexican moderns Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros, and a sculpture by Rufino Tamayo.

A week has passed since the opening of "to show, to give, to make it be there": Expanded Literary Practices in Vancouver, 1954-1969. Most of the (living) artists were in attendance --Tom Burrows, Judith Copithorne, Stan Douglas, Maxine Gadd, Glenn Lewis, Ian Wallace -- while Al Neil, whose legs "ain't what they used to be," dropped by the reception.

The walking tour was well-received, though exhausting: fifty minutes non-stop. I invited Judith and Maxine to say a few words, which they did. Ian Wallace too. I repeated the tour on Wednesday, for the SFU Graduate Student Society's Correspondences series, and managed to knock off a few minutes. A good discussion after.

This past weekend saw a number of openings. Today I visited Presentation House Gallery for Laid Over to Cover: Weaving and Photography in the Salishan Landscape, then the Helen and Morris Belkin for Backstory: Nuuchaanulth Ceremonial Curtains and the Work of Ki-Ke-In (aka Ron Hamilton). Last night I attended the opening of the new Woodward's complex, which featured, among other things, the unveiling of Stan Douglas's Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 and the "lighting" of the Woodward's W, a structure that looks more like two Vs -- one for Vancouver the Rich, one for Vancouver the Poor. Following that, a mostly affirmative discussion involving Douglas, community activist Jim Green, developer Ian Gillespie, Liz Evans from the Portland Hotel Society, Owen Underhill from SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts and architect Gregory Henriquez in the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, led by that most conceited of arts commentators, Robert Enright.

So another busy weekend -- with more on the horizon. But after the Olympics, what then? Seems the next three years of provincial arts funding has been advanced to us. Why didn't we see this coming?