Online

Art Reads for Summer Moons

Books handpicked by our Editor

Moon phases are like reading habits, as we move through our days, nights, and lives guided by lunar cycles and folding the corners of pages, mapping meaning and making connections through art, poetry, criticism, and drawing.  This past Spring during MagNet 2019, Canada’s Magazine Conference, I had the opportunity to go to the moon, and...

Read More

How to Commemorate an Absence

In Nova Scotia and elsewhere people are grappling with the issue of what to do with monuments associated with a painful past, and are asking whether the action of tearing down statues like that of Edward Cornwallis in Halifax helps to redress a history of violence, or whether the removal simply hides or disguises what has happened. In thinking through the dilemma posed by this question, we are forced to consider when it is appropriate to remove a monument, what should happen to it when it is taken down, and what to do with the space left behind.

Read More

Appearance

Public and participatory practices here, elsewhere and anywhere.

Hosted at Parsons School of Art and Design in New York City as part of Project Anywhere, the “Elsewhere and Anywhere” conference presents art and research at “the outermost limit of site specificity”. The project hosts artists whose work engages micro to macro – bringing smaller, localized stories into the international art realm and beyond. It offered the opportunity to tap into the artistic psyche and methods used to reach public audiences through art.

Read More

Black Light, White Night

Nocturne 2018

This year was Nocturne’s tenth edition. A milestone for the organization, marked by a partnership with the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, who helped select Raven Davis as Nocturne’s first Indigenous Curator. Davis, in turn, selected this Nocturne’s theme: Nomadic Reciprocity, a multilayered reflection on what is given and what is taken as we move through space, and as we move here in Halifax over unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaq territory.

Read More

Welcoming our new Editor: Shannon Webb-Campbell

Shannon Webb-Campbell is a mixed Indigenous (Mi’kmaq) settler poet, writer, and critic. Her forthcoming book, I Am A Body of Land (Book*hug, 2018) attempts to explore a relationship to poetic responsibility and accountability, and frame poetry as a form of revisioning. Still No Word (Breakwater 2015) was the recipient of Egale Canada’s Out In Print Award. She holds a MFA in Creative Writing from University of British Columbia, a BA from Dalhousie University, and is currently completing a MA in English Literature at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. Shannon is a member of Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation, and currently lives in Montréal.

Read More

Indigenous artists vs. Paul Kane’s controversial legacy

Exploring depictions of indigenous people in art history archives

Visual Arts News' research intern explores the legacy of two NFB films from the '70s—One film portrayed Indigenous people in visual art, while the other depicted Indigenous people as visual art.

Read More

Steele + Tomczak collect strangers’ confessions

The Long Time collapses the distance between "us" and "others"

The works in The Long Time transmit the sense that you’re missing or meeting something, getting just a trace of what came before and what is coming next.

Read More

Unearthing buried histories of African Nova Scotian artists

Our research intern takes us on a dig through the archives to 90s Halifax

"Chris! I have been secretly waiting for this email for decades! Talk to me."

Read More

In This Place: The lasting impact of Nova Scotia’s first exhibition of Black artists’ work

Our research intern revisits a powerful 1990s exhibition and asks why we're not seeing more Black artists in galleries

Why In this Place was a groundbreaking exhibition for Black artists in Nova Scotia

Read More

Looking back: Our version of “women in the arts” in the 70’s

Visual Arts News' research intern reflects on a 1977 reading list

The 70's art world "was a desert for women! Let alone any person of colour!” But in 1977, in the second issue of Visual Arts News, we published a list of publications focusing on "women in the arts." Our research intern Chris Shapones reflects on the impact of that list, what endures and what could be added today.

Read More

Looking back, Looking forward

Get to know our new research intern

Meet Visual Arts News' new research intern, who's going to be trawling through our archives revisiting all the stories we've told about the visual arts scene in Atlantic Canada over the past 40 years.

Read More

Mocean Dance animates its past in lightening speed

The Masterworks winner has helped shape contemporary dance in Atlantic Canada

At fifteen years, the 2016 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award winner Mocean Dance is one of the longest surviving contemporary dance companies in Atlantic Canada and well-known for its highly physical, collaborative work.

Read More