This collection represents some of the men and women who have been part of the history of the University of British Columbia between 1913 and 1966. Since the early 1980s, whether for fear of defacement or other concerns, these portraits left the departments from which they originated to be stored at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. This exhibition is an opportunity to recognize UBC’s history and to find homes for these pictures on campus.
Many of the artists who created these images are major figures in the history of Canadian art. Robert Harris, who painted Professor George E. Robinson in 1913, is known for his 1884 work, Fathers of Confederation. Lilias Torrance Newton, who painted Dean F.H. Soward in 1959, was a member of the Beaver Hall Group in Montreal. John Koerner (Dean Gordon Shrum, 1964), Peter Aspell (Dean Clement, 1949), and Charles Stegeman (Portrait of Dean Daniel Buchanan, 1952) are important painters in the history of Vancouver post-war modernism.
This exhibition is presented as part of Faces, a project of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. Faces is presented in three locations in Vancouver: the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Walter C. Koerner Library and the Satellite Gallery. The exhibition explores the diverse ways faces are represented, looking specifically at how notions of gender, race and class affect our understanding of them—aiming to reveal, in the process, that this uniquely human trait is anything but neutral.
Faces includes drawings, paintings, photographs, sculpture and video from the collections and archives of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Gatineau), and the American Museum of Natural History Library (New York).
This library exhibition is a collaboration of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Walter C. Koerner Library at the University of British Columbia and is made possible by the generous support of the Audain Foundation. Art in the Library offers new perspectives on contemporary art by presenting art that challenges and questions our current perceptions.
Jerry Allen, To Sir, with Love (1967), 2007.
Oil on canvas, 35.6 x 27.6 cm.
Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia.
Gift of the artist, 2008.
bill bissett, this is yr head lovingly, late 1960s.
oil on canvas, 57.8 x 47.7 cm.
Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia.
Gift of Beverly Simons, 1996
Stephen Shearer. Wave, 2006-7.
Oil, traces of pastel on canvas, 101.6 x 86.4 cm.
Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia. Purchased with funds from the Morris and Helen Belkin Foundation and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Acquisitions Fund, 2007.
The Audain Foundation
Every undergraduate student at UBC is invited to participate in an essay contest considering the relationship between representations of the face and notions of subjectivity. The exhibition Faces poses the questions, you provide the answers. Essays should address some of the following questions: How do representations of faces invite modes of viewing that rely on particular notions of subjectivity? Confronted by the paintings, photographs, sculptures, and installations in Faces (at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery from January 14th to April 10th, 2011), how do we read raced, gendered, and classed identities into these representations? How might such processes of what Deleuze and Guattari call facialization be conceptualized? What would it mean to approach artworks not only as things we look at but also as things that look back? What types of ethical and/or political obligations might we assume if we regard acts of viewing as face-to-face encounters? The Guidelines: Essays must be no longer than 1,000 words in length and submitted (4 hard-copies) to the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery no later than 5:00 pm on Friday, February 25th, 2011. Contestants must be full-time students registered in an undergraduate program at the University of British Columbia.
[more]Didier Civil is a celebrated Haitian painter and papier-mache artist, and the founding director of an art school in Jacmel, the site of the most celebrated Haitian Carnival and one of the towns devastated by the recent earthquake and cholera outbreak. Civil will talk about themes of performativity and masking, as they relate to the ritual of Carnival.
[more]Works of art in "Faces" are presented at 2 additional locations:
[more]The Named and the Unnamed (2002) incorporates a video of Vigil that Belmore performed at the corner of Gore and Cordova Streets on June 23, 2002. The Named and the Unnamed is in polemical commemoration of the women who have gone missing in the downtown east side of Vancouver. It is a reflection on the larger implications of this local event.
[more]Exhibition catalogue from the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (4 October–1 December 2002). Texts by Scott Watson, Charlotte Townsend-Gault and James Luna.
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