A digital collage artist whose work is inspired by historic images of Black Americans was so elated to be selected as a featured exhibitor for the Gibsons Public Art Gallery that she shipped her collection — and transported herself — from Pennsylvania to Gibsons on her own dime.
Stories that Still Need to Be Told opened on Feb. 13 with a talk by artist T. Owens Union. Union mines archival photographic collections, collects vintage dolls, documents heritage quilts, and accumulates other ephemera that she synthesizes into arresting images depicting seminal events in Black history.
The show is co-presented by the Sunshine Coast Black History Month Collective. “Black History Month reminds me of my pride in my culture,” said collective organizer Dee Brown, “but it also reminds me that we don’t honour human beings as they come in the room, and take them for what they are: human beings, regardless of their colour.”
For Union, her ideas come “100 per cent from history.” Her earliest influence was traditional quilts fashioned by her grandmother in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Designs preserved in historic quilts sewn by Black slaves often encoded geographic information about escape routes that led to abolitionist Northern states.
Real-life photographs of the Little Rock Nine (nine African-American students whose high school enrolment ignited a debate about desegregation), and victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study shaped Owens’s blended images. “My presentation should maybe be called ‘stories that need to be told again,’” said Owens. “Because with a lot of them people know something about them, but it can be incorrect or incomplete.”
Owens exports her digital collage to a high-resolution format before they are printed onto aluminum surfaces. The result — wide-eyed figures accompanied by otherworldly colours (as in her series Do you see me now? which explores relationships of minority populations in a dominant culture) — are simultaneously familiar and haunting.
Stories that Still Need to Be Told continues in GPAG’s Eve Smart Gallery until March 9.
Another banner year for Sechelt
The annual street banner project coordinated by the Sunshine Coast Arts Council — which has now reached the quarter-century mark — is about to issue this year’s batch of 20 images for public delectation on local lamp standards.
Elementary school artists submit designs each year, and visitors to the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre choose their favourites from among hundreds of contenders. For the past eight years, Christel Evers has facilitated the transformation of miniature masterpieces into the double-sided, weatherproof banners. The 2024 theme was “Land between two waters,” which inspired a variety of ecological motifs (and one rendering of a weatherbeaten wharf).
Contributing artists and their families are invited to participate in the upscaling process. Evers mixes the paints (Paul’s Paintin’ Place is a longtime provider of the Benjamin Moore exterior pigments) and patiently guides participants in the process of reproducing their imagery on a mammoth scale.
“When we stand the banner up [vertically] and they see the size of it, they’re just so gobsmacked,” said Evers. “Then I hand them their original and I say something like: go forth and have a great life.”
Cedar Grove Grade 4 student Aberleigh McLellen and her mother Amanda spent the morning of Family Day rendering Aberleigh’s sun-drenched original image, which was inspired by boat trips from Bowen Island to Sechelt with her uncle Keith.
“When I heard my artwork was selected, I just thought: wow, that’s amazing,” said McLellen. Asked if she would escort visitors to view her artwork once it is mounted in place, she shrugged nonchalantly.
Wielding a paintbrush beside her daughter, Amanda nodded emphatically: “We definitely will be bringing everybody to see it.”
Dreamcoat drops next week
Six community-driven performances of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat are coming up at the Chatelech Secondary School auditorium. For the first time in director Sara Douglas’s musical career, she has united two casts in a single production: a corps of adults and the School District 46 music theatre student company.
The result is a song-and-dance spectacular that traverses ancient Middle Eastern trade routes with a healthy dose of contemporary humour (and a hip-swaying appearance by the King of Rock and Roll).
The show plays on Feb. 28, March 1, 7 and 8 at 7 p.m., and March 2 and 9 at 2 p.m. Fast-moving tickets ($20) are available for sale at Sew Easy in Sechelt and the One Flower One Leaf gallery in Gibsons.
To share events or initiatives that reflect creativity in action, contact the Coast Reporter’s arts and culture department by emailing [email protected].
