Richard Cavell is a professor in the Department of English and co-founder of the Bachelor of Media Studies program at the University of British Columbia. Cavell’s teaching, research and supervisions are in media theory. Working broadly in the wake of his University of Toronto mentor, Marshall McLuhan, he has published three books on McLuhan and maintains the website spectresofmcluhan.arts.ubc.ca. Experimenting with critical performativity, Cavell published Marinetti Dines with the High Command (2014) and SpeechSong: The Gould / Schoenberg Dialogues (2020). In 2023, SpeechSong was presented as a video installation at the West Den Hague Cultural Centre in The Netherlands, part of their exhibition devoted to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach. Forthcoming books include Mediatic Shakespeare (UTP) and The Explorations of Edmund Snow Carpenter: Anthropology Upside Down (MQUP).

Barbara Cole is the Curator of Outdoor Art at the Belkin. Cole oversees the University’s Outdoor Art collection, commissioning new projects in public space and stewarding the existing artworks sited across the Vancouver campus. For over three decades, she has been actively involved in the field of public art working as an artist, curator, educator and consultant. In 2005 she founded Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, a collective of artists, architects and curators presenting temporary projects in public space and continues today as part of the production team. Cole is also the principal of Cole Projects, a public art consulting firm that promotes experimental approaches to public art planning and commissioning. She has led workshops, lectured widely and published articles on the subject of art in public space. Cole taught at Emily Carr University from 1984 to 1999 and worked as a consultant to the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program from 1999 to 2004. In 2011, Cole received the Mayor’s Award for her contributions to the advancement of public art in Vancouver and in 2013, was a curatorial resident at ZK/U Center for Art + Urbanistics in Berlin, Germany.

Lionel (1915-2005) and Patricia (1918-2011) Thomas collaborated on many projects together. Patricia (née Simons) became well known across North America during the 1950s as a pioneer in the field of architectural colour consulting. Lionel worked predominantly as a painter until the mid-1950s, after which time his practice shifted and he became recognized for his murals and sculpture. The Thomases advocated an interrelationship between the arts and emphasized the importance of collaboration between the disciplines of architecture and fine art, evidenced by Lionel Thomas’s teaching appointments at UBC’s Departments of Fine Arts and Architecture, as well as at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University). They were committed to these ideals of the modern movement and were instrumental in bringing them to Vancouver. The pair’s mosaic mural, Symbols for Education (1958-60) is installed on a purpose-built wall adjacent to Brock Commons South and is part of the Belkin’s outdoor art collection and their painted mural The Pacific Rim (1969) hangs in the student union building, The Nest, and is part of the collection of the Alma Mater Society.