By Frank Moher

The sacking of four instructors in the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Keyano College in Fort McMurray is creating an uproar well beyond the city better known for its resource extraction talents. Artists, of course, are well aware that their masters — whether they be cabinet ministers or academic administrators — can swoop in at any moment and remove the struts that support not only individual work but entire cultural communities. What’s prompting the shock in Alberta’s artistic community (and give it a day and I expect it will be nationwide) is the way in which the swooping was reportedly done.

According to this blog post, the four were given 15 minutes to gather belongings from their offices, then escorted off campus by security. An anonymous comment confirms the account. It adds that a total of 19 staff were given notice — or whatever you call being told the job you thought you had when you woke up that morning is gone — with more targetted for tomorrow, Monday. So before artists start venting, we’d do well to remember that we’re not the only ones considered expendable in the halls of power these days. But since this is the Arts section of backofthebook.ca, I’ll focus on the VPA Department purge.

In an “open letter” published on Keyano’s website today, the school’s Vice President Academic, Ann Everatt, denies that the employees were marched off campus, at least by guards. “In only one instance was security asked to assist in escorting a faculty member off the premises and that was only because the human resource manager involved had another appointment to tend to.” She didn’t address the 15-minutes-to-get-out allegation. Russell Thomas, the College’s Director of Marketing and Communications (who happens also to be an actor, not to mention a blogger), couldn’t tell me if it was true, though he did acknowledge that the faculty had been advised of their firing that morning. I spoke with one of them this evening, who would not confirm the information, off-the-record or on, because “it might affect my severance package.”

In any event, Keyano’s open letter contains enough information and self-justfication to tell us what’s happening here. “If we left the VPA courses as they were,” says College President and CEO, Kevin Nagel, “declining low enrolments would eventually continue to all-time low levels, our theatre and arts related assets would continue to be under-utilized while concurrently, we would not be able to deliver the new engineering technology programs or the 4-year business degree program that we are planning to introduce this coming September.” Of course, a lot of this is projection, or, as the psychologists like to call it, “catastrophizing” — there are ways to arrest declining enrollments in particular areas, some of which Thomas tells me they’ve tried — but the Prez’s priorities are clear, and they aren’t the school’s arts “assets.” And is anyone surprised by this, coming from the President of a college plunk in the middle of the most avaricious example of asset exploitation on the planet — especially one who was, before this, Dean of the JR Shaw School of Business and who bills himself on his linkedin page as “a transformational leader, business consultant and post-secondary education administrator who brings extensive experience and a global business perspective into the board room and classroom”? (By the way, that grin-and-grip photo to the right shows him meeting oil sands apologist Ezra Levant, when the SUN News Network jihadist visited Fort McMurray in January to give a speech. Dr. Nagel seems very, very pleased to be shaking Levant’s hand.)

Keyano claims they will shuffle any remaining arts offerings into their “Conservatory” program, which is what they call Continuing Ed. courses in these areas. (Interestingly, the URL for the “Conservatory” is http://keyano.ca/business/academicscareers/workforce-development/visual-performing-arts. Yes, folks, it all comes down to workforce development.) The problem is that, when Keyano similarly decided a year ago to “suspend” its music program, it was supposedly in order to redesign and reintroduce it. Thomas tells me that never happened. So why they expect anyone to believe them about what will happen with their visual and performing arts programs beats me.

Fort McMurray got itself all into a tizzy when, in March, the British edition of GQ magazine published an article that depicted it as nothing but a drug- and prostitution-riddled magnet for hosers on the make. And quite rightly — as drive-by journalism goes, it was too easy. But Keyano’s actions don’t do much to help us see past that caricature. In fact, if this keeps up, pretty soon it won’t be one.

Review by Brian Brennan

Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman, and LeRoy Jensen were three dedicated and unfashionably tradition-based Vancouver artists of the 1960s who today are largely forgotten. Because they operated outside the confines of the exclusionary and restrictive Vancouver art establishment, their contributions are known only to a handful of collectors, fellow artists, and former students. However, thanks to the efforts of a gutsy little Salt Spring Island press, Mother Tongue Publishing, the three are now getting the broader public recognition they deserve. They are the featured subjects of the second book in a brave new series titled The Unheralded Artists of BC.

I say brave because the publishers, Salt Spring Island poet Mona Fertig and her printmaker husband, Peter Haase, gambled on launching their own trade publishing enterprise when they couldn’t find a British Columbia publisher willing to take on the series. Forgotten artists, it seems, don’t sell as well as roguish ex-politicians or sexually abused hockey players.

But how good were Molnar, Hardman and Jensen? That hardly matters. The point, as Lions Bay man-about-the-arts Max Wyman notes in his introduction, is that “we now have a clearer idea of what was going on in our small corner of the world of art than we had before.” When the trendy American-influenced abstractionists like Jack Shadbolt, Gordon Smith, and Peter Aspell were getting all the public attention and the big commissions, the European-influenced representationalists and expressionists like Molnar, Hardman, and Jensen were quietly writing their own chapters into the history of art in British Columbia.

Molnar, born in Hungary and trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, never gained acceptance in Vancouver because he dared to paint nudes with pubic hair showing. He refused to create works for commercial gallery owners who wanted landscapes, trees, and lakes, and he refused to produce canvases to match the sofas and drapes of would-be art buyers. Shut out of the major galleries, suspicious of art dealers, and unable to make a living from his art, Molnar taught art for 30 years at North Vancouver’s Capilano College (now University). Today, at age 73, he shows his work by appointment only at his home in Point Grey.

Hardman was a largely self-trained sculptor and printmaker from New Westminster who taught art in London for a couple of years during the 1950s, then returned to Canada to establish himself in Burnaby, first as a high school art teacher and later as director of the Burnaby Art Gallery. When his terra cotta sculptures were first featured in group shows in Vancouver and Toronto, Hardman told reporters that teaching was his hobby and sculpting his profession. However, because his occasionally figurative work ran counter to the prevailing abstract styles, he was marginalized. Feeling neglected and unappreciated, he destroyed two of his large sculptures in 1969. Forty years later, he was finally recognized, posthumously, with a retrospective of his prints at the Burnaby Art Gallery.

Jensen, born in Vancouver and trained as a painter in Copenhagen and Paris, found it impossible to break into the cliquish art scene when he returned to Vancouver in 1955. Like his fellow outsiders Molnar and Hardman, Jensen too found his niche as an art teacher, most notably at the revolutionary Vancouver Free University. Through his association with other radicals at this now-defunct institution, Jensen eventually became one of the first members of Greenpeace, sailing to Alaska in 1971 in a converted mine sweeper in a futile attempt to stop the United States from conducting underground nuclear tests at Amchitka Island. Jensen spent the last two decades of his life on Salt Spring Island, where he painted while exhibiting his work at galleries in Victoria and Nanaimo.

The best feature of this book is the artwork. Photographers Janet Dwyer, Ingeborg Hardman, Dan Fairchild, and Ernest Vegt have done an excellent job of capturing the artists’ work on camera, and the reproduction quality is second to none. So too is the design work by Jan Westendorp and Mark Hand. This really should be a hardcover coffee table book to do full justice to the photography and design, but I suspect that would incur an unrecoverable expense for the publishers.

Less satisfying is the accompanying text. While authors Eve Lazarus, Claudia Cornwall, and Wendy Newbold Patterson have done a good job of researching the stories of their individual subjects, the storytelling lacks energy, coherence, style, and flow. It feels as if some paragraphs were deleted from a longer original text for space reasons, and that other paragraphs were moved around to fit with the book’s design concept. The end result reads more like a product of expedient editing and restructuring than a work of creative literary endeavour.

That quibble aside, I recommend this book as required reading for curators, collectors, critics, art history enthusiasts, and others interested in knowing what was happening in the rest of the West Coast art scene when all the attention was being given to the teachers and students at the Vancouver School of Art, and to the local artists whose works were being exhibited at and acquired by the Vancouver Art Gallery. Molnar, Hardman, and Jensen were quickly consigned to the scrapheap of art history before a serious evaluation of their work could take place. Now, as Wyman says, it’s time for attention to be paid.

Author Brian Brennan has published numerous biographical profiles of West Coast artists, including Gathie Falk, Joe Plaskett and Takao Tanabe.

The City of Vancouver ordered the removal of this mural from the public artspace outside the Downtown Eastside’s The Crying Room gallery on the grounds it is “graffiti.”

Artist Jesse Corcoran works at a homeless shelter: “The oppressive nature of the Games is what I wanted to capture and how the majority is suffering for the minority.”

Gallery owner Colleen Heslin says it is the first time in 10 years the city has ordered her to remove a work of art.

Vancouver spokesperson Theresa Beer says: “It has nothing to do with content.”

Sure.

Robert Holmes, President of the BC Civil Liberties Association, has written to the city :

“Given the long and uninterrupted display of public art at this gallery, the tolerance of the City to date, the content of the mural, and the stipulations of the IOC and VANOC in limiting anti-Olympic expression, it certainly appears to be more than simple coincidence that the City has chosen this mural, at this time, to take exception to the Gallery’s actions.”

Yup.