Scott Watson (Canadian, b. 1950) is Director Emeritus and Research Fellow at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia. A curator whose career has spanned more than thirty-five years, Watson is internationally recognized for his research and work in curatorial and exhibition studies, contemporary art and issues, and art theory and criticism. His distinctions include the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2010); the Alvin Balkind Award for Creative Curatorship in BC Arts (2008) and the UBC Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance Development in the Visual and Performing Arts (2005). Watson has published extensively in the areas of contemporary Canadian and international art. His 1990 monograph on Jack Shadbolt earned the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1991. Recent publications include Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry (2015); Thrown: British Columbia’s Apprentices of Bernard Leach and their Contemporaries (2011), a finalist for the 2012 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize; “Race, Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape” and “Disfigured Nature” (in Beyond Wilderness, McGill University Press, 2007); and “Transmission Difficulties: Vancouver Painting in the 1960s” (in Paint, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006).

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 Belkin’s inaugural 1995 exhibition Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Born to Live and Die on Your Colonialist Reservations, 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. The name Yuxweluptun was given to the artist during his initiation into the Sxwaixwe Society at age 14 and is Salish for “man of many masks”; the name Lets’lo:tseltun was given to the artist by Sto:lo artist Laura Wee Lay Laq in 2018 and means “man of many colours.”