Artists for Kids' Gallery Program brings contemporary Canadian Art to a class full of eager young people which introduces the students to the art and culture of our country. Our Gallery Program offers students a deep, engaged dive into responding to and making art. Classes spend half of the day in the gallery and half the day in the studio making work that responds to the exhibition they have studied in the gallery. All sessions are co-taught by the classroom teacher and an art expert teacher provided by Artists for Kids.
Spring Gallery Program 2024-2025
We are excited to welcome K-12 classes to the Gordon Smith Gallery for the spring exhibition.
Teachers can sign up for a half-day gallery visit. Artists for Kids art
educators will lead classes in an interactive tour of the exhibition
and a hands-on artmaking activity. Classes can visit from 9:30am-11:45am
or 12:30pm-2:30pm on select dates from April too June.
Registration for North Vancouver School District schools is now open. The program fee for North Vancouver School District classes is covered by NVSD.
Registration will open to out-of-district schools in April 1, 2025.
Spring Exhibition: Stitched: Merging Photography and Textile Practices
April 3 – June 21, 2025
Maya Beaudry, Lattice, 2024
Simranpreet
Kaur Anand, Barbara Astman, Maya Beaudry, Dana Claxton, Liz Ikiriko,
Jayce Salloum, Michaëlle Sergile, Michelle Sound, Lan “Florence” Yee
Co-curated
by Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Capture
Photography Festival, and Chelsea Yuill, Assistant Curator, Capture
Photography Festival
Photography
and textiles are ubiquitous; we continuously add to our personal diary
of photographs on our smart phones and are wrapped in and clothed by
fabric. This exhibition explores the intrinsic relationship between
textiles and photography. Photography, with its many uses for personal
snapshots, evidence, surveillance, advertising, storytelling, and art,
is a relatively new medium. Textiles have traditionally been dismissed
as craft in part because of the gendered norms embedded within these
historically domestic practices, which include sewing, beading,
embroidery, knitting, lacemaking, weaving, and dyeing. Although obvious
distinctions exist, there are many threads of connection between the
materials and processes used in the two mediums: the natural and
synthetic fibres that compose paper and thread and the chemical process
of creating a photograph or dyeing fabric.
The
artists in this exhibition proudly collapse the divisions and
hierarchies of these two mediums to reclaim and integrate methods of
image-making into their critical practices, forming new approaches to
lens-based and textile art forms. Including emerging and established
artists, the artworks in this exhibition explore ritual, memory,
aesthetic inheritance, technology, immigration, and colonial and
embodied archives. In a cultural landscape that continues to become more
and more digitized, their work asks what it means to create images that
evoke the desire to touch and feel? By disrupting traditions that limit
experimentation, the unexpected methods and hybridity of approaches
chart new territories of what is possible in today’s overwhelmingly
saturated image culture.
Stitched: Merging Photography and Textile Practices is co-presented by The Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art and Capture Photography Festival. It is sponsored by Parc Retirement Living and is generously supported by the Audain Foundation, the Timothy A. Young Family Foundation, the City of North Vancouver, the District of North Vancouver through the Arts & Culture Grants Program of the North Vancouver Recreation and Culture Commission, Artists For Kids, the Gordon and Marion Smith Foundation for Young Artists and the North Vancouver School District.
Fall Grade 5 Gallery Program 2024-2025
We are excited to welcome grade 5 classes to the Gordon Smith Gallery for the fall exhibition Playhouse. Teachers can sign up for a full-day gallery visit where Artists for Kids art educators will lead classes in an interactive tour of the exhibition and a hands-on artmaking activity. Classes can visit from 9:30am - 2:30pm on select dates from October 2024 to February 2025.
Setsuko Piroche, Circus, 1995. Collagraph
Playhouse is a teaching and learning exhibition with artwork by over 20 Canadian artists. It presents the Gordon Smith Gallery as a place for playing make-believe, telling powerful stories, and world building through character driven narratives. The exhibition sets the stage for us to consider ways in which the physical, social, cultural, and imagined qualities of a place are intertwined.
Playhouse is inspired by comics, broadly interpreted as characters acting in frames, asserting control over their own narratives. Comics are accessible forms of storytelling where readers build relationships with characters and settings over time. Throughout the exhibition you will see sculptures, animation, paintings, and textiles containing active forms and figures performing within their panels and waiting to be interpreted by readers of all ages.
Textiles and zines from elementary and secondary students intermingle with artwork from the Artists for Kids Permanent Collection and featured works by artists Whess Harman, Hannah Jickling and Reed H. Reed, Guná Jenson, and Cindy Mochizuki.
If you would like to explore Playhouse, you can do so using this 3D virtual matterport tour! You can travel through the art gallery and learn more about each artwork in the exhibition.
Registration for the 2024-2025 school year is FULL - please email cpinard@sd44.ca to put your name on the waitlist.
The program fee for North Vancouver School District classes is covered by NVSD.
Registration for out-of-district schools opens September 24, 2024 12:00 pm (noon)
The pricing for classes outside of NVSD is as follows:
TOUR + WORKSHOP (4 hours of instructional time plus 1 hour break time)
Up to 30 students + up to 4 chaperones + materials
Standard fee: $500
Access 1 fee: $400
Access 2 fee: $250
For more information on the new pricing structure for out-of-district schools click here.
Self-Guided Tours of Playhouse
Artists
for Kids invites K-12 teachers to use the Gordon Smith Gallery as their
classroom, by booking a time to bring a class for a half day
self-guided tour at our fall exhibition, Playhouse.
This
is a unique opportunity for your students to engage directly with
diverse works by Canadian artists and to learn through the lens of the
arts.
Teachers
can book self-guided tour slots (morning or afternoon) that
are available on dates in October - February. You can book your class by calling 604-903-3798.
We encourage teachers to attend an orientation of Playhouse prior to visiting with your class.
Self-Guided Instructions and Gallery Expectations
