Vancouver

Vancouver Art Gallery scraps plan for new, $444m Herzog and de Meuron-designed building

The institution ended its partnership with the Swiss firm, begun nearly a decade ago, as it reassesses its plans

Vancouver’s floating artist residency finds safe harbour in new location

The Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency, based in the refurbished former home and studio of Carole Itter and Al Neil, is now moored near Vancouver’s Maritime Museum

Awardsnews

Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore wins the Audain Prize, one of Canada’s top art awards

The annual prize, which honours an artist based in British Columbia, comes with C$100,000 cash

Artist who created Queen Elizabeth II portrait on Canadian coins sues dealer over stolen and damaged works

Susanna Blunt alleges the dealer Benjamin Lumb promised to compensate her for a stolen piece and knocked over several works in a “domino effect”

Vancouver artists donate works to fundraiser for social housing in hardscrabble neighbourhood

Stan Douglas, Ken Lum, Douglas Coupland and others are helping efforts to raise C$8m for housing for Vancouver’s homeless

Vancouver Art Gallery launches construction of new $295m building with ceremony, donation and new acquisitions

The celebratory event marked a major milestone in a process begun in 2004; the new building is expected to be complete in 2028

Chinese Canadian Museum opens with timely reflection on national identity

Marking the centennial of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the museum’s inaugural exhibition is “the story of the Chinese community’s darkest period in Canada”

The forthcoming Chinese Canadian Museum names its first chief executive

The institution is scheduled to open in summer 2023 inside the oldest building in Vancouver’s Chinatown

Rodney Graham, influential Canadian conceptual artist with a wry sense of humour, has died, aged 73

After coming up among the Vancouver School’s photo-conceptualists, Graham struck out on his own singular, irreverent pursuits

Vancouver Art Gallery gets $29m in federal funding toward future Herzog & de Meuron home

The fresh funding means the gallery has raised C$270m toward the project’s overall cost of C$400m

In new performance, artist Janice Kerbel choreographs a fight for one

Kerbel’s new solo exhibition at Catriona Jeffries gallery in Vancouver, the artist is debuting two new performance works

Nearly 20 years after the invasion of Iraq, an artist revisits the looting of the national museum in Baghdad

The Iranian-born artist Abbas Akhavan’s installation at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver re-stages a scene captured at the Iraq Museum in 2003

Rare Shakespeare First Folio acquired by Canadian university to go on view at Vancouver Art Gallery

The University of British Columbia has acquired a copy of the ‘First Folio’ that helped preserve some of the bard’s most famous plays, including ‘Macbeth’ and ‘The Tempest’

Vancouver Art Gallery will put largest-ever cash donation to a Canadian art museum toward new building

New gallery by Herzog & de Meuron to be built in Vancouver’s Larwill Park after consultation with artists from Indigenous groups

Vancouver Biennale seeks donor to purchase $2m headless sculptures for the city

Only five of Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Headless Walking Figures remain outside City Hall, as demand for the artist’s work has grown

Art and architecture merge on Vancouver’s towers—but is the cultural outreach more than illusion?

Two public projects launching this week highlight the Canadian city’s booming developments, in which only a select few can afford to live

Canadanews

Klee Wyck, a historic home used by Emily Carr in West Vancouver, to be demolished

The property, bequeathed to the district by a physician friend of the artist for use as an arts centre, has been neglected for decades

Joe Average unveils new mural honouring the fight against Aids in Vancouver

Marking the 40th anniversary of the first reported cases of the disease in the US, the Canadian artist and activist expands his One World, One Hope design to a city-sized work

Vancouver Biennale opens a bridge into the digital world

Voxel Bridge, by the Colombian artist Jessica Angel, turns a venerable piece of city infrastructure into a hybrid immersive art work

Sea junk sculptures draw crowds in Canada for World Oceans Day

After popping up in Vancouver, an installation of figures made from trash travels to Toronto and Quebec City

Arts Umbrella, Canada’s largest culture educator, opens new $27m home in Vancouver

The new education centre on Granville Island with arts, music, film and dance studios, will serve 24,000 student annually

They see ‘dead people’: billboard works removed from Vancouver photography festival after locals complain

The images of sleeping people were too creepy for many residents, in a city where property values are a major concern

Designreview

A tribute to Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, the landscape architect who shaped Vancouver’s greenspaces

A joint retrospective organised by the West Vancouver Art Museum and Art Gallery of Alberta beautifully expresses the designer’s passion for nature and understanding of community needs

Vancouver’s street artists respond to columnist’s graffiti gripes with painted ‘letter to the editor’

A writer’s complaints about downtown tagging were met with accusations of classism—and a new mural

Douglas Coupland brings his prophetic slogans to Vancouver's billboards

Slogans for the 21st Century are on view in the city's new Arbutus Greenway

Vancouver painter’s $100 Facebook portraits raise more than $150,000 for residency project

Proto-Riot Grrrl Jean Smith plans to launch space to support international artists

Canadanews

Mural memorialises Vancouver’s lost historic Black neighbourhood

Hogan’s Alley was once a thriving hub of Black Canadian culture, before it was demolished like so many communities in the name of urban renewal

Chinese Canadian Museum opens in Vancouver with pop-up show centred on food

The institution is looking for a permanent home in the city’s historic Chinatown

Canadanews

Vancouver street artists provide coronavirus advice to Canada’s most vulnerable communities

City council is collaborating with mural makers to paint storefronts that have closed due to Covid-19 in a neighbourhood already suffering from the opioid crisis

Rodney Graham’s Spinning Chandelier creates a ‘class-warfare’ debate in Vancouver

Installation in gentrified area is criticised as artists are priced out of the city's housing market