Photo: John Cameron
Jane Kidd was born in Victoria British Columbia Canada. She taught at the Alberta College of Art + Design in Calgary, Alberta from 1979 until 2010. She currently lives on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia and maintains an active studio practice. Through her practice and her teaching Kidd has shown that tapestry is capable not only of beautifying and enriching the environment of the user, but, as a material artifact, it is intrinsically linked to the communication of vital cultural information. She has been in the forefront of advocacy for this important form of disciplinary practice.
Her beautiful, technically demanding and conceptually rich tapestries provoke profound questions about handcraft, disciplinary knowledge and the importance of bringing historical practices into the contemporary art arena for critical discussion and debate. She has exhibited in numerous solo and over fifty group shows across Canada, the United States, Japan, Poland, Hungary and Australia. Her work is to be found in private and public collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Alberta Art Foundation, and The Canadian Museum of History. She has produced several large commissions for public buildings in Canada. She was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Art in 2001 and was awarded the Alberta Craft Council Award of Excellence in 2008. In 2016 she was awarded the Saidye Bronfman Award, a Governor General's Award for Visual and Media Arts, Canada's foremost distinction for excellence in the visual arts.