Call for Pitches: Fall/Winter Issue

We’re getting started on the next issue of the magazine and are opening a call for pitches. We want to hear from writers, artists, and critics who are paying attention to what’s happening across Atlantic Canada. That might mean spending time with an artist’s work, spending time with a show, or following an idea that...

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Angela Henderson, stick 7, from the ciphers series (2026). Graphite, Kitikata paper. Photo: Robert Bean

Welcome to Angela Henderson’s Quiet Archive 

In mouth them like words, Angela Henderson welcomes viewers into a space that feels quiet, careful, and a little mysterious. On view at StFX Art Gallery from February 25 to April 4, the exhibition brings together graphite drawings nestled within free-standing wooden structures that subtly shape how you move through the gallery. Her line work shifts between intention and instinct, between the clarity of design and forms that seem to rise up from somewhere harder to name. The installation feels like a living archive, one that asks you to slow your pace, come closer, and spend time with images that do not resolve all at once. In this conversation, she reflects on ambiguity, restraint, and the conditions she creates to allow something unexpected to surface.

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Of Pansies, Birdfish, and Becoming: A Conversation with Shay Donovan and Autumn Star

Two Pansies, a collaborative exhibition installed at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery during the fall of 2025, featured colourful, whimsical, and deeply serious eco-feminist dialogues in paint, sculpture, video, and performance by two emerging queer artists, Autumn Star and Shay Donovan. An expansive show filled with paired paintings of uncanny figures in luscious colours, performances in animal and flower costumes, and moving, human-sized snail, fish, bird, and spider sculptural forms, Two Pansies makes an argument that queer and trans bodily change is about more than “sex,” “gender,” or “human” morphologies and relationships. It is also about the beauty of emergence and the ways our relationships with one another and the non-human world inspire, move, reveal, and tether us in “laughter, whimsy, shame, and love,” as the Two Pansies video puts it.

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Dance Like No One’s Watching

CELEBRATION AS LIBERATION As you venture deeper into the exhibition, a spread of black-and-white photographs lines the walls on either side of the room. On the right side is Allen D. Crooks’s Lose yourself to dance,most of which was photographed during a fiftieth-anniversary family celebration and vow renewal at the East Preston Recreation Centre. The photos pull you into a room full of joy, laughter, and celebration. Glistening suits and well-worn floors set the scene, as family members—old and young, anonymous and identified—strut their stuff, skirts swaying with the music, arms raised in jubilation.

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Sarah Maloney’s Pleasure Ground

Sarah Maloney’s Pleasure Ground

Sculptor Sarah Maloney’s idea of a pleasure ground is a little more literal. It's the title of her most recent solo exhibition, on display at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, until October 12, 2025. Pleasure Ground investigates both the body and sexuality (pleasure) as well as plants and other elements of the natural world (ground).

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detail of a a mural, titled Respect the Architechts

Cultural and Community Resilience in Still Tho: Aesthetic Survival in Hip Hop’s Visual Art

As a newcomer committed to uplifting Black artistic production, I long to connect with people whose experiences help situate my presence on this land. Instead, I often feel isolated in my desire to see more diverse audiences—until the opening of Still Tho: Aesthetic Survival in Hip Hop’s Visual Art at Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery on September 21, 2024, in Halifax. At the opening, the gallery’s warmth struck me immediately: the sound of laughter and the beat of DJ DTS’s set created a palpable sense of belonging. For the first time since moving to Halifax from Toronto over a year and a half ago, I found myself surrounded by my community, which transformed the event into a celebration of presence and belonging in a space so rarely welcoming of Black people. 

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Justin Augustine, The Faith Catchers, 2000, oil on canvas. Dalhousie Art Gallery permanent collection, purchased with funds donated by Dr. John A. Scrymgeour, 2001. Photo: Steve Farmer

Mapping Black Resilience: Three Perspectives

Mapping Black Resilience: Three Perspectives at Dalhousie Art Gallery, which ran from February 4 until May 4, 2025, is an exhibition in three acts, which independently, yet in tandem, reconsider archival material and its role in the documenting and redocumenting of Black identity. The exhibition explores personal and collective experiences as archival documentation of Black...

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Image of a stack of a variety of copies of Visual Arts News

Call for Submissions 

Spring/Summer 2026 Volume 48 #1 Visual Arts News turns 50 this year. We want to mark the milestone by widening the circle. We’re inviting writers, artists, and critics to pitch smart, generous stories that deepen conversations around Atlantic art and culture. Surprise us. Challenge us. Bring forward practices, places, and people that haven’t had enough...

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Jacoby Battiste, photo by Mackenzie Pardy

Aaron Prosper and Mackenzie Pardy’s Amalkewinu’k

Walking into the Treaty Space Gallery at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University on a bitter cold February morning I smell the lingering sage from the exhibition opening of Amalkewinu’k from the previous night. For the public portion of the opening, Michelle Peters sang a Mi’kmaq song, and curators Aaron Prosper and Mackenzie...

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an image of a gallery wall with four artworks. Titles in the photo caption.

Behind Moving Eyelids at 13 Cedars  

While the wild green of a sunny May afternoon blazed outside, the bright white interior of a barn on a rural New Brunswick property radiated with its own kind of energy. These synergies are from a joint exhibition, Behind Moving Eyelids (May 10–11, 2025) in Rowley, New Brunswick, by Jeneca Klausen and Caitlin Lapeña, whose deceptively simple works hummed with ideas about feminine power, both surface and projected, and those of a deeper, darker, more private nature. 

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Exhibition Image 4 This Seems Personal at the Confederation Centre of the Arts

This Seems Personal: Autobiography in Search of Community

The exhibition This Seems Personal at the Confederation Centre of the Arts centers around themes of autobiography, personal agency, and reciprocity. Featuring emerging and mid-career artists Andrew Quon, Miya Turnbull, Curtis Botham, Laura Kenney, Shauna MacLeod, Lux Gow-Habrich, and Monique Silver, it explicitly examines the connection between autobiographical art and socio-political issues. Guest-curated by Brandt Eisner, the curatorial premise asserts that the personal is inseparable from the political and that the human body and its memory hold a record of the body's interaction with the world at large. It is through this holistic recognition of our existence as social beings that we, as a collective, have the means to enact transformative change for the common good.

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Light and Material Book Cover

Danielle Hogan’s Light and Material: Weaving and the Work of Nel Oudemans 

“I think the weight is worth bearing, because I think it's so important that we learn about the people who've walked these places ahead of us and all the successes and the challenges and the failures that they faced,” she says. “It's such a huge responsibility that I didn't understand until I really wrote and deleted and wrote and deleted and tried to get it ‘right.’”

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