The collective Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) was formed and came together to communally shape a grassroots architectural movement founded on shared principles and intentions to put an end to housing alienation. Founding members of AAHA include Adrian Blackwell, David Fortin, Matthew Soules, Sara Stevens, Patrick Stewart and Tijana Vujosevic.
Born in Abbotsford, just outside of Vancouver where he lived and worked, Rodney Graham (1949-2022) is one of the most celebrated artists in the history of Canadian art. His work traverses a wide and diverse area of knowledge from psychoanalysis to music, from the poetics of Mallarme to contemporary cinema. His art is known for its rigorous conceptual architecture and dazzling interior logic. Among his recurring concerns are the camera and modern technologies of picture-making and notions of historical modes of self-representation. Graham is part of a generation of Vancouver artists—including Ken Lum, Stan Douglas, Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall, some of whom he played with in the punk band U-J3RK5—who established the city’s reputation for photo-conceptualism. Graham studied art history at the University of British Columbia from 1968 to 1971 and at Simon Fraser University from 1978 to 1979. He represented Canada at the 47th Venice Biennale, Italy (1997) and among awards he has received the Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2004), the Kurt Schwitters-Preis (2006) and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Visual Arts (2011). Graham’s work is held internationally, including in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Tate London, the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art. Rodney Graham was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2016 for his contributions to Canadian contemporary art.
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill was born in 1979 in K’ómoks territory on Vancouver Island and attended Simon Fraser University and the California College of the Arts. Hill is of Metis, Cree and English heritage and her work is often the result of in-depth research into social and political histories, such as concepts of land, property and economy. The artist makes paintings, sculptures and installations employing a broad range of materials, often including organic substances, and everyday and found objects.
Karin Jones is a multi-disciplinary artist with a background in jewellery. She received a Diploma in Jewellery Art & Design from Vancouver Community College in 1993, before embarking on a 20-plus year career as a goldsmith and independent artisan. Since 2007, her work has moved away from traditional jewellery and into sculpture and contemporary art. She received an MFA in Craft from NSCAD University (2018), where she began her most recent work dealing with the ways historical narratives shape our sense of identity. She is an instructor and former Department Head of Jewellery Art & Design at Vancouver Community College. She was longlisted for the 2022 Sobey Art Award and her work is held in the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Metal Museum (Memphis).
Tiziana La Melia (b. 1982) is a Vancouver-based artist and writer. She was born in Palermo, Italy, and raised on a rural farm in Winfield, BC. Her work is known for its ability to dissolve distinctions between painting, sculpture, performance, poetry and installation, and for creating evocative and complex narratives that move between language and form, the written and the visual. La Melia completed her BFA at Emily Carr University and her MFA at the University of Guelph. In 2014, she was a writer-in-residence at Gallery TPW, Toronto, and that same year won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. La Melia’s poetry and images have been published in C Magazine, The Organism for Poetic Research, West Coast Line, Capilano Review, Agony Klub, Charcuterie, Moire, Art 21 and The Interjection Calendar. She is the author of three books, lettuce lettuce please go bad (Talonbooks, 2024), The Eyelash and the Monochrome (Talonbooks, 2018) and a collection of her writing and poetry, Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect: Selected Writings (Publication Studio and Blank Cheque Press, 2015/18). La Melia has exhibited at Magasin III, Stockholm, Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels, François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, Galerie Division, Montreal, Mercer Union, Franzkaka and Cooper Cole, Toronto and the Vancouver Art Gallery, CSA Space, the Apartment, Western Front and Unit 17, Vancouver.
Carel Moiseiwitsch is an artist and social activist from Vancouver. She was born in London where she studied painting at St. Martins Central, moving to Vancouver in the 1980s to teach drawing and comics at Emily Carr College of Art and Design.
Alex Morrison (b. 1971, Redruth, UK) is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Vancouver. Subcultures, activism, rebellion, the history of domestic architecture, civic spaces and avant-garde aesthetics are persistent themes in his work. His drawings, paintings, videos, sculptures and installations reveal a preoccupation with the vernacular and a critique of the universalizing aspects of modernism’s trajectory. He combines the aesthetics of craft with the language of protest, looking at subculture alongside legacies of colonialism and religious power. Morrison studied at the Victoria College of Art and Design, the Ontario College of Art and Design, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Klasse Lucy McKenzie, Kunst Akademie, Dusseldorf. Morrison’s work has been exhibited at White Columns (New York), Komplot (Brussels), Cologne Kunstverein (Cologne), Somerset House (London, UK), the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna) and others. His work is collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Museum Abteiberg (Germany), Zabludowicz Collection (London), and numerous other public and private collections.
Janet Wang (b. 1977, Vancouver ) is a visual artist and educator with a pluralistic practice, integrating sculptural installation, painting, drawing and new media. Her work explores the construction of identity through the appropriation and disruption of social patterns. Wang’s work borrows from the canons and traditions of history, both the artistic and the quotidian, in order to use the familiar as a meeting point with the viewer. A second-generation settler of Chinese heritage, Wang is based in Vancouver. She holds a BFA from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in studio practice from the University of Leeds. She has created public art projects for the City of Vancouver, Public Art Richmond, the City of New Westminster and CMHC Ottawa, and is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
Currently based between Takaronto/Toronto, ON, and Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc/Heffley Creek, BC, Holly Ward (b. 1973, St. John, NB) is an interdisciplinary artist of settler ancestry working with sculpture, multi-media installation, architecture, video and drawing as a means to examine the role of aesthetics in the formation of new social realities. Stemming from research of various visionary practices such as utopian philosophy, science fiction literature, Visionary Architecture, counter-cultural practices and urban planning, her work investigates the arbitrary nature of symbolic designation and the use-value of form in social and subjective contexts.
More recently, Ward’s practice seeks to develop artistic engagements with non-human entities and ecological systems in a future-oriented practice focused on sustainability, decolonial strategies, and holistic adaptation to rapidly changing natural and cultural contexts.
During the academic year 2009-2010 Ward was the Artist in Residence at Langara College, wherein she commenced The Pavilion project, a 22’ geodesic dome serving as a catalyst for artistic experimentation involving artists, writers, designers and Langara College students. The Pavilion has since been moved to rural Heffley Creek BC, where it is currently serves as a long-term, interdisciplinary life-as-art project, being performed in collaboration with artist Kevin Schmidt.
Ward has produced solo exhibitions at Artspeak, the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, the Kelowna Art Gallery, Or Gallery, YYZ Gallery, Republic Gallery, Volta 6 Basel, and others. She has participated in group exhibitions in Canada, Chile, England, Mexico, the US, Norway and South Korea. Publications include Planned Peasanthood (Kamloops Art Gallery, 2021), Volumes (Blackwoods Gallery, 2015), Every Force Evolves a Form (Artspeak, 2012), and “For Now, on Holly Ward’s Persistence of Vision,” a critical essay in Jeff Derksen’s After Euphoria (JRP Ringier Press, 2013). Her work has been collected by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Fogo Island Arts, and Scotiabank. Public Commissions include Cosmic Chandelier (UniverCity at SFU, Burnaby, 2016) Monument to the Vanquished peasant (Western front, Vancouver) (2016), and The Wall (CBC and the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, 2011).
Holly is an Associate Professor in York University’s Visual Arts program.
Tania Willard (Secwépemc Nation, b. 1977) is an artist and curator of mixed Secwépemc and settler ancestry. Willard’s research and creative processes are informed by land-based and community-engaged art practices, connections to culture and family, and intersections between Aboriginal and other cultures. Often focusing on Secwépemc aesthetics, language and land, Willard explores the shifts and tensions between ideas of the contemporary and the traditional. Willard centres art as an Indigenous resurgent act through her collaborative projects and her support of language revitalization efforts in Secwépemc communities. Willard’s personal curatorial projects include BUSH gallery, a conceptual space for land-based art and action led by Indigenous artists. Willard received an MFA from UBC Okanagan in 2018. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kamloops Art Gallery; Burnaby Art Gallery; and SFU Audain Gallery, Vancouver. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at FotoFocus Biennial; Cincinnati Arts Centre; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin Germany; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery; and Open Studio Contemporary Printmaking Centre, Toronto. Willard has curated numerous exhibitions, including the traveling exhibition Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture that began at the Vancouver Art Gallery (co-curated with Kathleen Ritter); Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe; Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun at the Museum of Anthropology (co-curated with Karen Duffek); and CUSTOM MADE at Kamloops Art Gallery. She was a curator in residence with grunt gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery. Willard was selected as one of five curators for a national scope exhibition in collaboration with Partners in Art and National Parks. She received the 2016 Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art, the 2020 Shadbolt Foundation VIVA Award, and was named a 2022 Forge Project Fellow. Her work with BUSH gallery was recognized through the Ruth Foundation for the Arts Future Studies award (2022). Willard is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies and Gallery Director at UBC Okanagan in Syilx territories (Kelowna, BC).
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun (Cowichan/Syilx, b. 1957) is a Vancouver-based visual artist and activist of Cowichan (Hul’q’umi’num Coast Salish) and Okanagan (Syilx) descent. Born in Kamloops, BC, he attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School as a child, but spent most of his adolescence in the Vancouver area. He documents and promotes change in contemporary Indigenous history through his paintings using Coast Salish cosmology, Northwest Coast formal design elements and the western landscape tradition. His work explores political, environmental and cultural issues and his own personal and socio-political experiences enhance this practice of documentation. Yuxweluptun has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group shows, including the Museum of Anthropology’s Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories (2016), the National Gallery of Canada’s Sakahán: International Indigenous Art (2013), and the Services Culturels de l’Ambassade du Canada’s Inherent Rights, Vision Rights: Virtual Reality Paintings and Drawings (1993). Yuxweluptun has received numerous awards, including the Vancouver Institute of the Visual Arts (VIVA) Award in 1998 and the Eitelijorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art Fellowship in 2013. His paintings are held in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Gatineau, GC), the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs and the National Gallery of Canada.
Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital troubles the enduring narrative binary of town and country. Borders between these two terrains have always morphed and slipped around each other theoretically, politically, economically and socially, yet the narrative of the urban/rural divide persists. Indigenous land dispossession and reclamation, capital accumulation in the form of real-estate assets, labour and technological development are all obscured by this persistent fiction. Town and country narratives similarly obscure questions of class, freedom of movement and resource extraction.
Art has played a defining role in the narrative. This group exhibition, which focuses on histories and practices in so-called British Columbia, approaches the political, economic and representational systems at play in our long-mythologized conceptions of this binary of place, through the work of contemporary artists. The narrative’s total erasure of Indigenous sovereignty and other communal approaches to land – systems and protocols that governed (and continue to govern) unceded lands and preceded notions of western property – has had a profound impact. Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s declarative text painting You Are on Indian Land (2024) counters this by emphatically situating the exhibition in territory beyond the limited perspective of town and country.
Bourgeois migration from the industrial city to the country idyll – seen in the British Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the twentieth century, the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and the most recent pandemic exodus – cycles repeatedly. This conception of “retreat to the country” wherein the country is seen as an unoccupied space of health and freedom continually under threat from its hungry, industrial urban counterpoint, in both instances, hinges on conditions of colonialism, land ownership and physical labour. As the city increasingly becomes a place of parked capital (in the form of real estate investment) resulting in an urban housing crisis, the country becomes an attractive alternative for many. But the country is not simply a place where artists can enjoy larger studios for a lower cost; it is a place of diverse cultural production and economic imperatives of its own. Obscuring this repeats violent economic cycles of private property and its displacement in a doppelgänger effect. Works by Rodney Graham and Tiziana La Melia invoke these doppelgängers through the tale of the town mouse and the country mouse, the aesthete and the rube, to directly problematize these characterizations. Alex Morrison’s drawings and sculpture examine the ongoing relevance of William Morris’s socialist activism around labour and housing, itself expressed through a romanticized rural aesthetic.
The ongoing colonial land grab and conceptions of property ownership as economic security follow an unsustainable commodity logic. Past and current land use policy continually entrenches the conversion of housing and territory into “assets.” Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s sculptural works from her Four Effigies for the End of Property (2017) series consider how stolen land becomes (and remains) colonial property through legal frameworks such as pre-emption and highest and best use. Architects Against Housing Alienation, with their Not For Sale (2023) project presented at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, point to achievable policy alternatives and ways of reframing that could ameliorate the current critical housing crisis across Canada.
The perceived separation of urban from rural, country from city has, in addition to fueling land dispossession and privatization, hidden the mass exploitation of human capital. Holly Ward’s Monument to the Vanquished Peasants (2016) points us back in time to the feudal shift from land as a public commons to private enclosures and its impact on peasant labourers and economies. In her installation Points of Entry (2021), Janet Wang considers histories of Chinese workers in British Columbia, as the railway, necessary to open up the province for further extraction and exploitation, was built through their indentured labour. Karin Jones’s sculptural installation aestheticizes the farming implements of rural labour as tools of both complicity and resistance.
The rapidly unfolding climate catastrophe may render moot any distinction between city and country, as floods and fires destabilize established systems of property and value. Tania Willard’s Carrying Memories of the Land approaches the change affecting the land and communities in Secwepemcúĺecw. Her banners show the resurgent practices of hide tanning and basketry on one side and the skies from intense and devastating wildfires, along with a text reflection on the memories carried by the land and the medicine it has to offer. Carel Moiseiwitsch relocated from the city to the country, only to be forced back to the city as a result of a devastating wildfire in Lytton, BC that destroyed her home and her life’s work. Her fire paintings capture the violent endgame of ongoing capital accumulation.
The works in this exhibition subvert rural and urban binaries to offer gestures of refusal and resistance. Through the inextricable entanglement of town and country’s histories, nostalgias and futures, the exhibition reflects on a critical reframing of conceptions of “land use” across disciplines. Our moment requires a radical rethinking of property, territory, occupation and ownership, and these artists and activists can help do this.
Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital is co-organized by the Kamloops Art Gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, curated by Caitlin Jones, Charo Neville and Melanie O’Brian and made possible with the generous support of the Audain Foundation, Jane Irwin and Ross Hill, the Hamber Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council, the City of Kamloops and the Belkin Curator’s Forum members. Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital is part of the 2025 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.
The collective Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) was formed and came together to communally shape a grassroots architectural movement founded on shared principles and intentions to put an end to housing alienation. Founding members of AAHA include Adrian Blackwell, David Fortin, Matthew Soules, Sara Stevens, Patrick Stewart and Tijana Vujosevic.
Born in Abbotsford, just outside of Vancouver where he lived and worked, Rodney Graham (1949-2022) is one of the most celebrated artists in the history of Canadian art. His work traverses a wide and diverse area of knowledge from psychoanalysis to music, from the poetics of Mallarme to contemporary cinema. His art is known for its rigorous conceptual architecture and dazzling interior logic. Among his recurring concerns are the camera and modern technologies of picture-making and notions of historical modes of self-representation. Graham is part of a generation of Vancouver artists—including Ken Lum, Stan Douglas, Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall, some of whom he played with in the punk band U-J3RK5—who established the city’s reputation for photo-conceptualism. Graham studied art history at the University of British Columbia from 1968 to 1971 and at Simon Fraser University from 1978 to 1979. He represented Canada at the 47th Venice Biennale, Italy (1997) and among awards he has received the Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2004), the Kurt Schwitters-Preis (2006) and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Visual Arts (2011). Graham’s work is held internationally, including in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Tate London, the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art. Rodney Graham was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2016 for his contributions to Canadian contemporary art.
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill was born in 1979 in K’ómoks territory on Vancouver Island and attended Simon Fraser University and the California College of the Arts. Hill is of Metis, Cree and English heritage and her work is often the result of in-depth research into social and political histories, such as concepts of land, property and economy. The artist makes paintings, sculptures and installations employing a broad range of materials, often including organic substances, and everyday and found objects.
Karin Jones is a multi-disciplinary artist with a background in jewellery. She received a Diploma in Jewellery Art & Design from Vancouver Community College in 1993, before embarking on a 20-plus year career as a goldsmith and independent artisan. Since 2007, her work has moved away from traditional jewellery and into sculpture and contemporary art. She received an MFA in Craft from NSCAD University (2018), where she began her most recent work dealing with the ways historical narratives shape our sense of identity. She is an instructor and former Department Head of Jewellery Art & Design at Vancouver Community College. She was longlisted for the 2022 Sobey Art Award and her work is held in the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Metal Museum (Memphis).
Tiziana La Melia (b. 1982) is a Vancouver-based artist and writer. She was born in Palermo, Italy, and raised on a rural farm in Winfield, BC. Her work is known for its ability to dissolve distinctions between painting, sculpture, performance, poetry and installation, and for creating evocative and complex narratives that move between language and form, the written and the visual. La Melia completed her BFA at Emily Carr University and her MFA at the University of Guelph. In 2014, she was a writer-in-residence at Gallery TPW, Toronto, and that same year won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. La Melia’s poetry and images have been published in C Magazine, The Organism for Poetic Research, West Coast Line, Capilano Review, Agony Klub, Charcuterie, Moire, Art 21 and The Interjection Calendar. She is the author of three books, lettuce lettuce please go bad (Talonbooks, 2024), The Eyelash and the Monochrome (Talonbooks, 2018) and a collection of her writing and poetry, Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect: Selected Writings (Publication Studio and Blank Cheque Press, 2015/18). La Melia has exhibited at Magasin III, Stockholm, Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels, François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, Galerie Division, Montreal, Mercer Union, Franzkaka and Cooper Cole, Toronto and the Vancouver Art Gallery, CSA Space, the Apartment, Western Front and Unit 17, Vancouver.
Carel Moiseiwitsch is an artist and social activist from Vancouver. She was born in London where she studied painting at St. Martins Central, moving to Vancouver in the 1980s to teach drawing and comics at Emily Carr College of Art and Design.
Alex Morrison (b. 1971, Redruth, UK) is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Vancouver. Subcultures, activism, rebellion, the history of domestic architecture, civic spaces and avant-garde aesthetics are persistent themes in his work. His drawings, paintings, videos, sculptures and installations reveal a preoccupation with the vernacular and a critique of the universalizing aspects of modernism’s trajectory. He combines the aesthetics of craft with the language of protest, looking at subculture alongside legacies of colonialism and religious power. Morrison studied at the Victoria College of Art and Design, the Ontario College of Art and Design, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Klasse Lucy McKenzie, Kunst Akademie, Dusseldorf. Morrison’s work has been exhibited at White Columns (New York), Komplot (Brussels), Cologne Kunstverein (Cologne), Somerset House (London, UK), the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna) and others. His work is collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Museum Abteiberg (Germany), Zabludowicz Collection (London), and numerous other public and private collections.
Janet Wang (b. 1977, Vancouver ) is a visual artist and educator with a pluralistic practice, integrating sculptural installation, painting, drawing and new media. Her work explores the construction of identity through the appropriation and disruption of social patterns. Wang’s work borrows from the canons and traditions of history, both the artistic and the quotidian, in order to use the familiar as a meeting point with the viewer. A second-generation settler of Chinese heritage, Wang is based in Vancouver. She holds a BFA from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in studio practice from the University of Leeds. She has created public art projects for the City of Vancouver, Public Art Richmond, the City of New Westminster and CMHC Ottawa, and is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
Currently based between Takaronto/Toronto, ON, and Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc/Heffley Creek, BC, Holly Ward (b. 1973, St. John, NB) is an interdisciplinary artist of settler ancestry working with sculpture, multi-media installation, architecture, video and drawing as a means to examine the role of aesthetics in the formation of new social realities. Stemming from research of various visionary practices such as utopian philosophy, science fiction literature, Visionary Architecture, counter-cultural practices and urban planning, her work investigates the arbitrary nature of symbolic designation and the use-value of form in social and subjective contexts.
More recently, Ward’s practice seeks to develop artistic engagements with non-human entities and ecological systems in a future-oriented practice focused on sustainability, decolonial strategies, and holistic adaptation to rapidly changing natural and cultural contexts.
During the academic year 2009-2010 Ward was the Artist in Residence at Langara College, wherein she commenced The Pavilion project, a 22’ geodesic dome serving as a catalyst for artistic experimentation involving artists, writers, designers and Langara College students. The Pavilion has since been moved to rural Heffley Creek BC, where it is currently serves as a long-term, interdisciplinary life-as-art project, being performed in collaboration with artist Kevin Schmidt.
Ward has produced solo exhibitions at Artspeak, the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, the Kelowna Art Gallery, Or Gallery, YYZ Gallery, Republic Gallery, Volta 6 Basel, and others. She has participated in group exhibitions in Canada, Chile, England, Mexico, the US, Norway and South Korea. Publications include Planned Peasanthood (Kamloops Art Gallery, 2021), Volumes (Blackwoods Gallery, 2015), Every Force Evolves a Form (Artspeak, 2012), and “For Now, on Holly Ward’s Persistence of Vision,” a critical essay in Jeff Derksen’s After Euphoria (JRP Ringier Press, 2013). Her work has been collected by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Fogo Island Arts, and Scotiabank. Public Commissions include Cosmic Chandelier (UniverCity at SFU, Burnaby, 2016) Monument to the Vanquished peasant (Western front, Vancouver) (2016), and The Wall (CBC and the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, 2011).
Holly is an Associate Professor in York University’s Visual Arts program.
Tania Willard (Secwépemc Nation, b. 1977) is an artist and curator of mixed Secwépemc and settler ancestry. Willard’s research and creative processes are informed by land-based and community-engaged art practices, connections to culture and family, and intersections between Aboriginal and other cultures. Often focusing on Secwépemc aesthetics, language and land, Willard explores the shifts and tensions between ideas of the contemporary and the traditional. Willard centres art as an Indigenous resurgent act through her collaborative projects and her support of language revitalization efforts in Secwépemc communities. Willard’s personal curatorial projects include BUSH gallery, a conceptual space for land-based art and action led by Indigenous artists. Willard received an MFA from UBC Okanagan in 2018. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kamloops Art Gallery; Burnaby Art Gallery; and SFU Audain Gallery, Vancouver. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at FotoFocus Biennial; Cincinnati Arts Centre; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin Germany; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery; and Open Studio Contemporary Printmaking Centre, Toronto. Willard has curated numerous exhibitions, including the traveling exhibition Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture that began at the Vancouver Art Gallery (co-curated with Kathleen Ritter); Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe; Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun at the Museum of Anthropology (co-curated with Karen Duffek); and CUSTOM MADE at Kamloops Art Gallery. She was a curator in residence with grunt gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery. Willard was selected as one of five curators for a national scope exhibition in collaboration with Partners in Art and National Parks. She received the 2016 Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art, the 2020 Shadbolt Foundation VIVA Award, and was named a 2022 Forge Project Fellow. Her work with BUSH gallery was recognized through the Ruth Foundation for the Arts Future Studies award (2022). Willard is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies and Gallery Director at UBC Okanagan in Syilx territories (Kelowna, BC).
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun (Cowichan/Syilx, b. 1957) is a Vancouver-based visual artist and activist of Cowichan (Hul’q’umi’num Coast Salish) and Okanagan (Syilx) descent. Born in Kamloops, BC, he attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School as a child, but spent most of his adolescence in the Vancouver area. He documents and promotes change in contemporary Indigenous history through his paintings using Coast Salish cosmology, Northwest Coast formal design elements and the western landscape tradition. His work explores political, environmental and cultural issues and his own personal and socio-political experiences enhance this practice of documentation. Yuxweluptun has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group shows, including the Museum of Anthropology’s Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories (2016), the National Gallery of Canada’s Sakahán: International Indigenous Art (2013), and the Services Culturels de l’Ambassade du Canada’s Inherent Rights, Vision Rights: Virtual Reality Paintings and Drawings (1993). Yuxweluptun has received numerous awards, including the Vancouver Institute of the Visual Arts (VIVA) Award in 1998 and the Eitelijorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art Fellowship in 2013. His paintings are held in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Gatineau, GC), the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs and the National Gallery of Canada.