Local Gallery Receives Award

Received a press release from the MacKenzie Art Gallery today announcing that it had received the 2009 York Wilson Endowment Award. The Award is administered by the Canada Council for the Arts, and is worth $30,000. The gallery secured the money with its proposal to purchase six works from Ruth Cuthand's brilliant Trading series. If you caught a show called Coming to Presence at the Dunlop Art Gallery last fall you probably remember them. In the series, Cuthand replicates through intricate beadwork the microscopic images of viruses and bacteria that Europeans introduced (sometimes deliberately) to Aboriginal people during colonization. Lacking immunity to the foreign bugs, millions of aboriginal people succombed to diseases like chicken pox, typhoid fever and bubonic plague (pictured above).

Look forward to seeing the works on display sometime soon.