Doina Popescu: Envisioning the Ryerson Gallery and Research Centre / Doina Popescu présente sa vision de la galerie et du centre de recherche Ryerson (original) (raw)
1971
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Prepared during the fall of 2001 as a framework for future campus planning and design "There's a light on at Dacie's, I wonder who's therethe people who live there, the Knights, the Knightengales, someone baking cookies, or people just hanging out. I never know who will be there when I walk in the doorthat's part of what makes Dacie's special."-Anonymous, from "A Year At Dacie Moses House Cookbook" "Perhaps there is no spot on the campus more popular, perhaps there is no place that serves more varied purposes."-A 1922 article describing Lyman Lakes, a campus landscape developed in 1915-16 "From this day forward, you are a part of Carleton and Carleton is part of you."-Carleton President Laurence M. Gould's annual greeting to incoming freshmen Carleton is Valued in Many Ways Americans value landscapes and lasting public institutions that express community, commitment, and involvement in public life. Set in a historic Minnesota town, Carleton is one of the nation's leading liberal arts colleges. The campus is compact and immersed in an arboretum of wetlands, lakes and restored prairies and woodlands. Like any historic city or village, the College is valued for many reasons: for its professors, social life, architecture, and interweaving with a town that has changed relatively little since Jesse James robbed its leading bank. This survey was prepared as a kind of "pre-design vision" for a future campus master plan at Carleton. Involving 44 participants from staff, students, neighbors and faculty, this project includes participant photography and comments about valued places, people, and events in and around the campus. The most photographed subjects such as the Bald Spot, and small quiet spaces, were described with a range of reasons for attachment. The most rich and memorable places at Carleton are valued for many reasons including their memories, their testimony to academics, and their symbolism of Carleton's unique traditions. A campus is more than bricks and mortar. If there is any college in the Midwest where this statement rings true, it is Carleton. The discussion to follow lays out the diverse ways that people see and value the campus. Their comments provide remarkable insights about how to steward it for future generations. Participating Members of the Carleton Community Students 17 participants Freshmen Upperclassmen Staff 18 participants Grounds crews Facilities Administration Admissions Development Institutional Advancement Faculty 5 participants Department members Alumni(future inclusion
On 13 July 1979, The Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Continuing Education opened an ambitious exhibition on contemporary Canadian art photography. Curated by Lorne Falk and Hubert Hohn, the exhibition included a stellar group of photographers, with the goal of establishing The Banff Centre as a place for serious photographic study. This was a time of transition and growth for the institution. Hired to teach photography at the Banff Centre in 1977, Hohn quickly became involved with the development of the Centre's new educational master plan, published in 1979 as "A Turning Point," which transformed the school into a creative arts colony. Newly employed by the Walter Phillips Gallery, Falk set out to establish a collecting practice for the growing institution, where works by visiting artists and prominent Canadians could be used for both teaching and curating. The Banff Purchase was part of this larger goal. By the 1970s, the medium of photography was becoming prominent in art galleries and museums around the world, dominated by the U.S.A. Yet concern over the status of art photography in Canada reverberated throughout this period as writers, curators, and critics struggled to differentiate "Canadian photography" from photography "made in Canada." Falk, in a 1979 article entitled "The Dilemma of Photography in Canada," published in the nascent magazine Photo Communiqué, worried about the lack of professional and artistic standards as young artists began to experiment with in the medium. Through their curatorial and pedagogical project, Falk and Hahn wished to challenge the place of the medium in the Canadian imagination by using the exhibition, the collection, and its accompanying publication "as a catalyst" for growth and professional development within the photographic and photo curating communities. As part of their curatorial strategy, Hohn and Falk focused on a small group of photographers who could be universally acknowledged by both peers and art professionals as unfailingly talented, professional, and devoted to the medium of photography. The Banff Purchase, which travelled across Canada in the following years, promoted a particular style of photography, one based on a late photographic modernism. What is noticeable in the work chosen is an absence of experimental and performance-based photography. While some critics saw the exhibition as exclusionary and conservative, others embraced the aesthetic and technical professionalism that the photographs represented. Alongside their ambitious curatorial and educational programming, Falk and Hohn produced a hard-cover photobook. The Banff Purchase is an exemplary object which stands out in quality, materiality, and production value. At a time when photographic exhibition catalogues were often done as cheaply as possible in Canada, if produced at all, the book was a serious statement—if not critique—that aimed to raise the standards in Canadian art photography publishing. While today The Banff Purchase photobook only hints at the many concerns of this cultural moment, through careful re-reading it offers insight into the past and ongoing dilemma of contemporary photography in Canada. The Banff Purchase, both the exhibition and the publication, express a vision for contemporary Canadian art photography grounded in critical vigour, formal exceptionalism, and artistic professionalism.
Reimagining the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts
2021
How has the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020/21 altered the outlook for the performing arts in Toronto and for under-represented populations in the city and surroundings of the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts? This environmental scan will be used as a starting point to frame the conversation for a more in-depth consultation with interested neighbourhood and sector stakeholders. The research identifies a series of challenges and emerging conditions that suggest a shifting landscape in need of strategic response to prepare STLC for a resilient future
University of Toronto Press eBooks, 2013
To write a single-volume history of a university is a daunting, difficult, and largely thankless task. The author has only so many pages to cover so much history. What gets put in; what gets left out? The interests and concerns of multiple and competing groups have to be juggled and massaged. Does the author write for historians, the public at large, or alumnae? The author needs to construct a narrative that is both readable and enjoyable but also analytical and critical. How far can one criticize the institution that likely sponsored the work? When writing The University of Toronto: A History, Martin Friedland faced many difficult choices. Some worked; many did not. Friedland chooses a chronological format for his text. The result is a story of the University of Toronto's progressive and triumphant expansion from a small liberal arts college into the billion dollar multiversity of today. For much of the narrative, the author recounts facts focusing on the growth of buildings, programs, and faculty. Three chapters are remarkable exceptions. Chapter 9 on the admission of women to the university, Chapter 15 on the student strike, and Chapter 36 on student activism are excellent works of history. These three chapters are contextualized, provide multiple perspectives, and explore in detail the how and why of events and decision-making. They are welcome diversions to the chronology and provide an alternative example of how Friedland could have structured his text. Other areas that have been arranged chronologically could have been better organized in a thematic manner. For example, the reception and controversy surrounding Darwinian thought is present in the text but is fragmentary, disjointed, and easily missed. Scattered through three different chapters, the force of Charles Darwin's impact on the university dissipates into obscurity. Friedland chooses to focus his text on the elite: administrators, faculty, politicians, and businessmen. The result is a top-down and administrative-political history where students are largely reduced to numbers and most of the professoriate and support staff remain faceless. This decision is out of step with the latest trends in the history of higher education. Over the last few decades, historians of higher education have tended to focus on student and professorial cultures and issues of class and gender. One example that represents the more recent scholarly work is James Pitsula's As One Who Serves: The Making of the University of Regina. Because Freidland focuses so much of his narrative on administrators, the reader is left wondering about questions fundamental to the university experience. What would it be like to be a student at the University of Toronto at the beginning of the 20 th century or before the Second World War?