2024/2025 Fine Arts Speaker Series

Eli Bornowsky has been practicing as an artist in Vancouver over the past decade and has accomplished an impressive and diverse body of abstract paintings. The exhibition catalogue features a number of large canvas ‘doubles’ which mirror each other with their almost-but-not-quite identical forms. With transcribed texts and email exchanges between artist and curator, as well as an artist’s statement.

“This catalogue is for an exhibition of the same title, organized and circulated by the Burnaby Art Gallery, and co-curated by Ellen van Eijnsbergen and Jennifer Cane, which focuses on the artwork by Vancouver artist Anna Wong (1930-2013). This catalogue includes essays by the exhibition curators as well as from notable scholars Keith Wallace and Zoë Chan, and features over seventy of Wong’s artworks from a lifetime of travel and cultural influence: from Vancouver BC’s Chinatown to New York City, and from Quadra Island to Beijing.”

Looking Through a Hole in the Earth is an exhibition publication produced by the Burnaby Art Gallery in February 2020, focusing on three bodies of work: Language for the Wrack Zone (2017-2019), Carbon Study: Walking in the Dark (2018-2020), and Seachange (2019). The publication features an intro by curator Jennifer Cane titled Unearthing the Sun and an essay by artist Marina Roy titled Holes within the Whole.

Oblique Trajectories is a survey exhibition of the work of artist Gary Lee-Nova. In the 1970s, as Canada prepared to leave behind the Imperial system of measurement for the metric system, Lee-Nova acquired hundreds of wooden yardsticks. The yardsticks were first used to make picture frames for several of his two-dimensional art works, as well as a door for a fragment of a room that appears to be a physical manifestation of a two-dimensional drawing known as an architectural cut-away. This exhibition features works from a period spanning from 1965 until 2007, including large-scale paintings, lithographic prints based on paper collages, digital collage, sculpture, and a silkscreen series of prints.

Trespassers/Intrus focuses on Lemieux’s evolving engagement with the body. Through sculpture and drawings in ink, paint, and fabric, transformation is shown through a choreography of hybridized elements— through animal references, appendages, and articles of clothing that both obscure and reveal. The catalog features essays by Jennifer Cane, Robin Laurence, and Otoniya J. Okot Bitek.

This publication features 40 drypoint prints from Dan Starling’s Unsettled Histories series and texts by Jennifer Cane, Daniel Adleman, Sanem Güvenç, and the artist. It was published in conjunction with the exhibition Unsettled Histories at the Burnaby Art Gallery, which ran from February 4 – April 17, 2022.

Linda Nochlin is one of the most accessible, provocative, and innovative art historians of our time. In 1971 she published her essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"--a dramatic feminist call-to-arms that called traditional art historical practices into question and led to a major revision of the discipline.

Born in 1960 in Vancouver, Stan Douglas is an internationally acclaimed contemporary artist working in photography, film, music and installation, often organizing complex cinematic and environmental projects that integrate aspects of each of these mediums. Investigations of race, urbanism, social alienation, modernity and development surface in much of Douglas's work, which has been strongly influenced by the work of Samuel Beckett.

Civilizing Rituals merges contemporary debates with lively discussion and explores central issues involved in the making and displaying of art as industry and how it is presented to the community.

A poet and post-punk heroine writes on subjects ranging from Bjork to Robert Smithson, from traveling in Iceland to walking in Thoreau's footsteps on Cape Cod Poet and post-punk heroine Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur.

Museums are changing from forbidding bastions of rare art into audience-friendly institutions that often specialize in "blockbuster" exhibitions designed to draw crowds. But in the midst of this sea change, one largely unanswered question stands out: "What makes a great exhibition?" Some of the world's leading curators and art historians try to answer this question here, as they examine the elements of a museum exhibition from every angle.

An anthology of writings on exhibition practice from artists, critics, curators and art historians plus artist-curators. It addresses the contradictions posed by museum and gallery sited exhibitions, as well as investigating the challenge of staging art presentations, displays or performances, in settings outside of traditional museum or gallery locales.

For the past fifteen years, Hans Haacke's work has been concerned with issues that are at the core of postmodern investigations - the nature of art as institution, the authorship of the artist, the social behavior of the art world, the network of cultural policies such as the role and function of the museum, the critic, and the public, and many other sociological problems. This book is based on a major retrospective exhibition of Haacke's work, the first in an American museum.

The beginning of global commerce in the early modern period had an enormous impact on European culture, changing the very way people perceived the world around them. Merchants and Marvels assembles essays by leading scholars of cultural history, art history, and the history of science and technology to show how ideas about the representation of nature, in both art and science, underwent a profound transformation between the age of the Renaissance and the early 1700s.

In The Authenticity Industries, journalist and scholar Michael Serazio combines eye-opening reporting and lively prose to take readers behind the scenes with those who make "reality"—and the ways it tries to influence us.

Women and Migration(s) II draws together contributions from scholars and artists showcasing the breadth of intersectional experiences of migration, from diaspora to internal displacement. The collection shows how women's experiences of migration have been articulated through art, film, poetry and even food.

This companion demonstrates how art, craft, and visual culture education activate social imagination and action that is equity- and justice-driven. Specifically, this book provides arts-engaged, intersectional understandings of decolonization in the contemporary art world that cross disciplinary lines. Visual and traditional essays in this book combine current scholarship with pragmatic strategies and insights grounded in the reality of socio-cultural, political, and economic communities across the globe.

Communities and Museums in the 21st Century brings together innovative, multidisciplinary perspectives on contemporary museology and participatory museum practice that contribute to wider debates on museum communities, heritage, and sustainability. Set within the context of globalisation and decolonization, the book draws upon bi-regional research that will enrich our understanding of the complex relationships between Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean through museum studies and practice.

How do participatory museum projects with forced migrants impact both the museum and the participants? What happens during these projects and what is left of them afterwards? Based on interviews with museum practitioners, facilitators and project participants, Susanne Boersma brings together unique insights into museum work with forced migrants. Her study of participatory projects in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK reveals museums' limiting infrastructures, the shortcomings of their ethical frameworks, and the problems of addressing forced migrants as 'communities'. Outlining the diverging objectives, experiences and outcomes of participatory projects, she suggests how these might be united in practice.

This book explains the work of museums--collecting, preserving, displaying, and using collections--by considering their remarkable history. Museums make choices about what's worth saving. It explores those choices, and the processes--from donation to purchase to expedition--that shape collections. Once collected, museum objects are numbered, cataloged, and conserved, and sometimes deaccessioned--processes that have their own hows and whys. Museums display art and artifact in many ways, from dioramas and period rooms to paintings on white walls and visual storage. This book reveals the meanings of those choices, and the ways that they have changed and continue to change, shaped by new technologies and ideologies. It also argues for the the value of museum collections for research, teaching, and community-building. Woven throught this book is the story of the Jenks Museum of Brown University, a nineteenth-century museum of natural history, anthropology and "curiosities" that disappeared a century ago. The Jenks Museum's history, and a recent effort to re-imagine that museum as art, science and history, serves as a framework for understanding museums' long record of usefulness and service. Inside the Lost Museum considers the lessons museum history holds for museums today and tomorrow.