New Legacy exhibit encourages community to curate and create
If Michael Williams were alive today, he’d be very pleased to know that his extensive collection of Pacific Northwest art is helping build community and inspire the artists of tomorrow.
It was just over a decade ago when Williams bequeathed most of his estate to the University of Victoria, including a collection of over 1,000 pieces of art. Williams expressed his wish for UVic to make the collection available to the public at a downtown location. In 2007, the university honoured his request and opened the Legacy Art Gallery and Café at the corner of Broad and Yates streets.
Dr. Carolyn Butler-Palmer, of UVic’s Department of the History in Art, was hired in 2008 to create and produce exhibits for the Legacy Gallery, conduct research on the art, find ways to engage the public with the collection and create learning opportunities for students. This position, called the Williams’ Legacy Chair in the Modern and Contemporary Arts of the Pacific West, honours Williams’ passion for community and education.
“The purpose of the Legacy Chair is to engage the community in art and create experiential learning opportunities for students,” explains Butler-Palmer. “Michael Williams was very engaged with the community and this chair is meant to build upon his good works.” Butler-Palmer has worked hard to honour Williams’ community spirit through the exhibits she creates.
One of the areas that Williams was openly passionate about was helping Victoria’s homeless. A past exhibit examining wealth, for example, involved bringing people together to speak and learn about homelessness through a conversational café. As part of the exhibit Butler-Palmer invited four speakers who specialize in issues of homelessness to speak at the gallery.
Another project in support of Williams’ concern for the homeless is an exhibit Butler-Palmer and her students are currently working on with the Cool-aid Community Health Clinic. They plan to install pieces from the UVic collections at the health clinic as a way of showing support to the homeless.
Butler-Palmer has also succeeded at providing educational opportunities for students through the Legacy Gallery. The latest exhibit, starting Jan. 24, entitled “Connect the Blocks” was created with Butler-Palmer’s students from her fourth-year advanced seminar course called “Researching and Curating the Williams Collection.”
Connect the Blocks focuses on providing space for community members to become the creators and curators of the exhibit. The intention of this exhibit is to encourage people to think about the ways that artistic exchanges between people help create community. Its purpose is to build bridges between members of the different sub-communities in the Victoria area by helping to educate people about the similarities between them.
“People who visit the exhibit will be asked to express themselves through writing a poem or drawing a portrait,” explains Lyn Atkinson, one of five students working on this project. “We will have a large sheet of plexiglas on the wall with rows of velcro stuck to it. Visitors will write or draw on felt-backed, coloured cardboard squares and stick them to the velcro creating a mosaic. Our hope is that people from different sub-communities will read other peoples’ squares and learn about the similarities they share with people from different groups. I see this mosaic as a metaphor for community.”
Connect the Blocks starts January 24 at the Legacy Gallery located at 630 Yates Street. The gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5p.m. Admission is free. More information: http://legacygallery.ca/index.htm
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