Calendar
June 2010
June 1- July 6; Tuesdays, 6-9 pm
$180 | $162 AGA Members
Instructor: TBA
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: TIMELAND: Culture & Colour Time
Free with Admission
June 2-July 14; Wednesdays, 2:30-4:30 pm
$80/session | $72/session AGA Members
Instructor: Ruth Anderson Donovan
June 2-June 23; Wednesdays, 6-9 pm
$120 | $108 AGA Members
Instructor: Stephanie Jonsson
Drop-in classes for families and kids aged 3-5
Wednesdays 10 am-11:30 am
Free with Gallery admission
Colour Time
Red and yellow and pink and green, come and sing a rainbow with us!
Explore hot and cold, dark and light and learn how to make your own
colours with this colour investigation.
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: TIMELAND: Body Time
Free with Admission
Open Studio Drop-in Workshop
Every Thursday, 7-9 pm
Summer Season: June 3-August 26
$12 / $10 AGA Members
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: TIMELAND: Land Time
Free with Admission
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: TIMELAND: Culture & Colour Time
Free with Admission
Imaginary Architecture
In-Gallery Sketching Hour: Imaginary Architecture
First Saturday of every Month, 3-4:30pm
June 5, July 3, August 7
Free with Admission | Sign-up at Guest Services beginning at 2 pm
Led by local artist Paul Freeman
12:30 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Exhibition Tour: TIMELAND: 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art
Free with Admission
12:30 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Exhibition Tour: TIMELAND: 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art
Free with Admission
Presented by TIMELAND artist Lyndal Osborne
Tuesday, June 8, 6-9 pm
Free
Join 2010 Alberta Biennial artist Lyndal Osborne in the studio to create unique sculptural forms related to nature. Explore transformative sculptural processes using found and collected materials, glue, tissue paper and paint.
This workshop is presented by the AGA in partnership with the 2010 Creative Age Festival.
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: TIMELAND: Culture & Colour Time
Free with Admission
Drop-in classes for families and kids aged 3-5
Wednesdays 10 am-11:30 am
Free with Gallery admission
Story Time: Land Stories
Story searching, story telling and puppet making are all part of Story
Time at the AGA! Listen to stories in the gallery before creating your
own puppet characters in the atrium.
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: TIMELAND: Body Time
Free with Admission
Sandra Bromley
5:30-6:30 pm
Free
Listen to RBC New Works artists in conversation with Deputy Director/Chief Curator Catherine Crowston. It’s happy hour with the artist, at this casual event featuring RBC New Works exhibitions.
Open Studio Drop-in Workshop
Every Thursday, 7-9 pm
Summer Season: June 3-August 26
$12 / $10 AGA Members
Thursday, June 10, 6:30–9 pm
Free
This documentary follows Ry Cooder on a trip to Cuba in search of musicians who had performed at the Buena Vista Social Club, a famous nightclub in Havana in the 1940s. It includes footage from Cuba as the musicians share stories about their lives and their love of music, along with concert footage in Amsterdam and New York City. This documentary compellingly (and joyfully!) explores the idea of recovery of creativity in old age.
Wim Wenders, Germany | USA | UK | France | Cuba 1999/105 min/English
Organized and sponsored in part by the Arts & Humanities in Health & Medicine Program at the University of Alberta.
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: TIMELAND: Land Time
Free with Admission
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: TIMELAND: Culture & Colour Time
Free with Admission
Saturday, June 12, 1:30–3:30 pm
Ledcor Theatre, AGA
Free admission
Eric Ellena and Berna Huebner, France | UK | USA / 2009 / 54 min / English and Spanish
This documentary illustrates the positive impact of art and other creative therapies on people diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Among those featured in this film are noted physicians and Yasmin Aga Khan, president of Alzheimer's Disease International and daughter of Rita Hayworth, who had Alzheimer's and took up painting while struggling with the disease.
This film begins by considering the story of Hilda, a 90 year old woman with Alzheimer’s who had been a painter in her earlier years. When she was reintroduced to art in the nursing facility she lived in she became calmer, more focused, more receptive to communication and connecting with others. Physicians and others interviewed in the film consider the question of whether art therapies should be considered a core treatment option for Alzheimer’s patients – and why?
Organized and sponsored in part by the Arts & Humanities in Health & Medicine Program at the University of Alberta.
12:30 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Exhibition Tour: TIMELAND: 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art
Free with Admission
Second Sunday of every month, 12–4 pm
Free with admission
Time for Land
Explore the Alberta Landscape and search for treasure with our Art Explorer Leaders before creating your own contemporary art inspired by TIMELAND: 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art. Join in to create a large scale landscape installation on the sculpture terrace or learn more about Alberta art with Family Fun Tours.
HSBC ALL DAY SUNDAY
12 pm Family Fun Tour
12:30 pm AGA Architecture
1:30 pm Family Fun Tour
2 pm Exhibition Tour: TIMELAND: 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art
2:30 pm Family Fun Tour
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: TIMELAND: Culture & Colour Time
Free with Admission
Drop-in classes for families and kids aged 3-5
Wednesdays 10 am-11:30 am
Free with Gallery admission
Me and My Community
What is a community? What things can we find in our community? Explore
art inside and outside of the gallery in order to investigate art in the
community! (Outside explorations weather permitting)
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: TIMELAND: Body Time
Free with Admission
Open Studio Drop-in Workshop
Every Thursday, 7-9 pm
Summer Season: June 3-August 26
$12 / $10 AGA Members
12:10-12:50 pm
Free
The Alberta Scene: Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Art?
2 pm Exhibition Tour: TIMELAND: Land Time
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: TIMELAND: Culture & Colour Time
Free with Admission
12:30 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Exhibition Tour: M.C. Escher: Mathemagician
Free with Admission
Organized by the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Alberta.
Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) is one of the world's most famous and recognized artists. Images of his work are reproduced and appreciated by millions of people around the world, yet few have a sense of the depth and details of the artist’s career.
This exhibition features 54 works selected from the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, and includes prints that represent the different themes and areas of study that fascinated this extraordinary artist. The works selected for the exhibition trace Escher’s work from his earliest prints, works such as Eight Heads (1922), the first work that shows the artist’s experimentations with the regular division of a planar surface, which was produced during the artist’s enrollment at the School of Architecture and Ornamental Design in Haarlem, Netherlands.
After graduating in 1922, Escher traveled to Italy, eventually settling in Rome, where he remained until 1935. During these 12 years, Escher toured the Italian countryside drawing and sketching images for the prints that he would produce later in his studio at home. Mostly cross grain wood-cuts, these early works are more naturalistic representations of the Italian landscape (that are both lesser known and reproduced), with a few dream-like images such as Castle in the Air (1928) and The Drowned Cathedral (1929), that evoke the artist’s later works interest in uncanny juxtapositions and architectures of the imagination.
In 1935-1936, the interest that Escher had shown in the world around him expands from a more traditional study of the physical landscape to an intense engagement with the physics of the world - of reflective surfaces, plays with perspective and illusions of depth - and with an interest in the order, symmetry and geometric logic of mathematics. The exhibition features iconic images such as Day and Night (1938) and Sky and Water (1938), as well as examples of Escher’s studies of the multiple variations possible in the regular division of the plane through images representing his study of glide reflection, the metamorphosis of forms and size reduction. This can be seen in works such as Circle Limit III (1959) and Circle Limit IV (Heaven and Hell) (1960).
The exhibition also includes examples of Escher’s experiments with different print-making techniques, from the introduction of lithography to his work in 1929 seen in works such as The Bridge (1930) and Tropea Calabria (1931), to one of the artist’s few etchings, the mezzotint Mummified Frog of 1946. Finally, the exhibition includes examples of Escher’s plays with impossible architectures Relativity (1953); Belvedere (1958) and Waterfall (1961).
The National Gallery of Canada at the Art Gallery of Alberta
Presented with the support of Capital Powered Art, sponsored by Capital Power Corporation
Organized by the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Alberta.
In the summer of 2010, The National Gallery of Canada at the Art Gallery of Alberta features Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s haunting and dramatic images from the print series, Carceri d’invenzione (The Imaginary Prisons).
Freely invoking the grottoes and subterranean ruins of Rome’s ancient past, fourteen copper plate etchings of Piranesi’s first series were published in that city in 1749–1750 by Giovanni Bouchard as Invenzioni Capric di Carceri. In 1761, the artist himself published a second edition with an adjusted title and two additional plates. His mastery of the etching needle, with its fluid line and tonal effects, resulted in prints possessing a compelling atmospheric quality. The psychological atmosphere of these architectural fantasies has caught the imagination of many artists over succeeding centuries. Their menacing, exotic atmosphere inspired the 19th century Romantics, while the Surrealists of the 20th century admired their irrational portrayal of objects in space.
For this special exhibition, the AGA will be featuring the superb example of the second edition from the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, complemented by a selection of 5 impressions from the first edition, demonstrating how Piranesi dramatically re-worked many of the plates between subsequent printings.
The National Gallery of Canada
at the Art Gallery of Alberta
Presented with the support of Capital Powered Art, sponsored by Capital
Power Corporation
Warner Bros. cartoon studio has earned both critical and popular acclaim as the producers of the finest, funniest, and most inventive animated shorts ever made. The Hollywood studio, which opened in 1930 and shut its theatrical division in 1969, developed and perfected the kind of antic, irreverent, street-smart humor that has characterized much of short-subject animation ever since. Along the way, the Warner shop won 6 Academy Awards, and created more cartoon stars than any other studio – in chronological order, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Pepe Le Pew, Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, The Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Speedy Gonzales, and many others.
Since the introduction of Porky Pig in 1935, Warner Bros. Cartoons have been enormously popular. In the heyday of theatrical animation, they were voted America’s most popular shorts for 16 consecutive years – from 1945 to 1960. This major exhibition features 165 drawings, paintings, animation cels and related art objects used in the making of Warner’s classic cartoons. The exhibition explores seven different themes from a chronological history of the cartoon studio to the evolution of Warner’s first cartoon stars, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck; and features a step-by-step breakdown of how classic cel animation was made and an in depth look at Warner’s most famous creation, Bugs Bunny. The Warner writers devised stories and gags of brilliant invention, while the studio’s directors executed them with masterly verve and timing. They, in turn, were supported by a cadre of gifted animators, painters, and designers. The result is a body of work that, with each new screening, seems richer and deeper, and more clearly a significant part of North American culture.
12:30 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Exhibition Tour: The Art of Warner Bros
Free with Admission
Tuesday evenings, 6 pm
$25 / $20 AGA Members (GST will be applied to course fees)
Limited enrolment; refreshments included in tuition
June 22 | The Visual Culture of Incarceration
In conjunction with the exhibition Piranesi’s Prisons: Architecture of Mystery and Imagination, with AGA Interpretive Staff, Dr. Merle Patchett.
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: Piranesi’s Prisons
Free with Admission
Drop-in classes for families and kids aged 3-5
Wednesdays 10 am-11:30 am
Free with Gallery admission
Landscape Explorers
Up, down, near, far, over, under! Explore landscape art from the past
and the present with looking activities, stories and making.
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: TIMELAND: Culture & Colour Time
Free with Admission
Free admission to the AGA on the last Thursday of every month from 6-9 pm
Open Studio Drop-in Workshop
Every Thursday, 7-9 pm
Summer Season: June 3-August 26
$12 / $10 AGA Members
Servus Community Access Night
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: The Art of Warner Bros.
6:30 pm AGA Architecture
7:30 pm Spotlight: TIMELAND: Body Time
8:30 pm Spotlight M.C. Escher: Mathemagician
Free with Admission
Catherine Crowston on M.C. Escher: The Mathemagician
Friday, June 25, 6:30 pm
Ledcor
Theatre
Free
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: TIMELAND: Land Time
Free with Admission
12:30 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Exhibition Tour: M.C. Escher: Mathemagician
Free with Admission
In Canada, the myths that surround landscape are powerful. Reframing a Nation explores the role that landscape plays in the construction of Canadian identity. It looks at what these myths are and how they have shaped popular perceptions of our country.
This exhibitions features works from a major donation to the Gallery by the Ernest E. Poole Foundation in 1975, which today forms much of the core of the AGA’s collection of historical Canadian works.
Reframing a Nation considers how works by Canadian artists such as Frederick Verner, Cornelius Krieghoff, Tom Thomson, The Group of Seven, Emily Carr and David Milne have been viewed in the past, and searches for new ways to talk about them in the present.
This exhibition includes a photographic mural by contemporary artist Maria Hupfield. Hupfield is of Anishnaabe (Ojibway) heritage, and a member of Wasauksing First Nation in Ontario. Her work focuses on land, memory, community and the power dynamics of gender.
Reframing a Nation features a project by DodoLab titled Ideas of Canada. In this project visitors are asked to choose 3 icons they think are the most Canadian, and 3 icons they think are the least Canadian.
The results are being tallied and posted here on our website.
As part of the 2010 Works Art and Design Festival, the Art Gallery of Alberta presents the travelling exhibition Out on a Limb in the AGA lower level foyer. This exhibition, developed by the Art Gallery of Alberta for the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (AFA) Travelling Exhibition Program, celebrates the International Year of the Forest in 2011.
Out on a Limb focuses on the theme of trees and features artworks created by Albertan artists John Maywood, Holly Newman, Erin Schwab, Gerald St. Maur and Peter von Tiesenhausen, as well as works from the AFA’s collection. Produced with a variety of artistic media and in a diversity of styles, the works in the exhibition challenge viewers’ perceptions of this natural resource and the ways that trees have impacted our lives in the past and into the present.
Following its debut at the AGA, Out on a Limb will tour Alberta from September 2010 to August 2012.
12:30 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Exhibition Tour: The Art of Warner Bros.
Free with Admission
Tuesday, June 29, 7 pm
Ledcor Theatre and City of Edmonton Terrace
$15 / $10 AGA Members
Panelists: Candice Hopkins, Andrew Hunter, Robert Enright (moderator), Richard Rhodes, Nancy Tousley
Aiming to capture the past, the present and the future of Alberta art, TIMELAND: 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art reflects a unique understanding of time and place as seen in contemporary art in Alberta.
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: M.C. ESCHER: The Mathemagician
Drop-in classes for families and kids aged 3-5
Wednesdays 10 am-11:30 am
Free with Gallery admission
Crazy Cartoons
What’s up doc? Explore The Art of the Warner Bros. with this
fun-filled gallery exploration. Look for characters, create story
sketches and make silly sounds to animate what you see.
1 pm AGA Architecture
2 pm Spotlight: Piranesi’s Prisons
Free with Admission
