| BRITISH COLUMBIA ARTISTS |
2021 BC ARTISTS - THE YEAR IN REVIEW
PREVIOUS UPDATES: 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2011-2015 2002-2011 AAEV updates
BC artists' birthday collage (click image for live web page)
20 YEARS ... 20,000 ARTISTS
BENCHMARK REACHED IN EPIC RESEARCH PROJECT
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Twenty years of adding research documents to BC ARTISTS has resulted in a huge amount
of compiled information. There are 3,880 web pages. 20,000 artists are listed, with 1,800 artist
biographies, over 1,200 images, and 975 artist monographs. Hundreds of exhibition catalogues are
completely transcribed listing over 17,000 individual artworks. I have listed hundreds of
exhibitions, hundreds of artist groups, and hundreds of newspaper clippings. My count is nominally 20,000 artists, that is. I wouldn't bet my life on the index having exactly that many names, some names have merged and others have split. Many of the artists turned out to be incredibly interesting people, with amazing lives lived around the world. Every artist who exhibited even one painting in one exhibition has a story. It is possible to begin looking at different ways to extract information from the project. The links below are some of the ways to view the information. Some files are still in-progress. |
| BCSFA Exhibitors Timeline (mostly done) |
| BCSFA Exhibitors Index (done from 1909 to 1923) |
| BC Artists At War (ongoing) |
| BC Artists Birthday Calendar (ongoing) |
| BC Artists Birthday Collage (ongoing) |
| BC Artists Country of Origin (done from A to F) |
| BC Historical Events Timeline |
Christmas Goose by Charles Hepburn Scott, 1923
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BC ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES RECENTLY EXPANDED I frequently do some directed research on a specific artist's biography, expanding the vital statistics, adding clippings and references, images, and so on, but there is no way for someone visiting this web site to know what biographies have been updated.
Recent research has updated the following biographies: Much of the additional information comes from vital statistics documents (birth, marriage, death), website memorials and obituaries, institutions who have an artist's work in their collection, and websites hosted by the artists or by someone associated with the artist. As of December 18, 1,005 such sources have been referenced into BC Artists. |
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For some time I haven't had web statistics available on my website, but I resolved
that on October 15. In the first 30 days of stats, there were 1,723 visitors
to Sim Publishing, who viewed a total of 5,095 web pages, and visited the site for
an average of 130 seconds per visit. Most of the visitors were from Canada, followed
by the United States and the United Kingdom. Others visitors so far
were from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, China, Finland,
France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica,
Japan, Lithuania, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand,
Norway, Panama, Romania, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey,
Ukraine, Uruguay, Vietnam, and Zambia. Welcome visitors! December 10 update: There have now been 2,928 visitors who viewed 8,145 web pages, an average of 2.78 per person, each visitor "staying" on the site for 123 seconds. Seven more countries are now represented (see countries in bold above). , |
(untitled) by Gary Sim, 1955
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In 2021, work on BC ARTISTS started with the ongoing addition of information,
images, and links for the exhibition catalogues of
the B.C. Artists' and
B.C. Society of Fine Arts exhibitions from
1951 up to their final shows in 1968 and 1967 respectively.
Rather than transcribing the information as per pre-1950 exhibitions, I am
scanning and linking the catalogues as images. This is about ten times faster
than transcribing and linking all of the information. NOVEMBER 13 UPDATE: Following another research session at the Vancouver Art Gallery Library this week to fill in some gaps, I have finally posted images of the remaining B.C. Artists' and B.C. Society of Fine Arts exhibition catalogues that I have had access to. Only a few early BCSFA catalogues remain to be found. DECEMBER 26 UPDATE: I reformatted the pre-1950 EXHIBITIONS list to be indexed on a year to year basis, instead of by decade (to make it easier to find a specific year or exhibition), and while doing so added listings for 30 annual exhibitions of the Island Arts and Crafts Society in Victoria from 1910 to 1941. I have the information at hand so why not? I've already listed quite a bit of information about the group, this will add to the collection.
With a large donation of early Vancouver art material and ephemera gifted by Renee Alexander, from the collection of her parents Irene Cattelle Porter and Robert Samuel Alexander, along with a number of publications from my own collection, I was able to add images and information to a large number of files: B.C. College of Arts 1933 Pre-Prospectus and Prospectus Royal Canadian Academy of Arts exhibition catalogues and BC artists Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition catalogues and ephemera Vancouver School of Art Prospectii and ephemera VANTECH 1933 school annual images Seattle Art Museum Northwest Artists exhibition catalogues and BC artists Federation of Canadian Artists updates National Gallery of Canada file created Western Art Circle file created Winnipeg School of Art file created
As part of a donation from Sim Publishing to the University of Victoria Archives & Special Collections, U.Vic. is going to "crawl" the entire BC ARTISTS web site (as well as Sim Publishing web site) and archive it on their servers. Physical donations to the University in the past year included: the entire Savary Pudding folio a collection of almost 500 items of ephemera and BC art periodicals a vertical collection of BC ARTIST CD-R's from 2002 to 2019 a collection of early Vancouver Island watercolours by Maud Rees Sherman
After much work I finally finished updates and markups in the index to Greater Vancouver Art Galleries. The printout (with reduced size font) is 33 pages. 51 artist names were added to BC Artists. 553 galleries are listed (over 200 more than the 2012 list), and 1,368 exhibitions are listed (zero previously).
I have reformatted all files, changing them from the AAEV header to the simpler BC ARTISTS header, as per below:
... became ...
As part of the revision, the page title and footer was changed from AAEV to BC ARTISTS, and a fair bit of text and htm coding was deleted. This was also an opportunity to review every biography page, and hundreds of additional vital statistics (now over 900 referenced) were researched and added to further identify artists and their history. Quite a few more links to other files were also added, often to various group files that were created subsequent to the artist biographies. Over 3,500 files were updated during this revision and upgrade, including every artist biography file. The entire process took four months to complete.
One part of this project that has been lagging behind is the index page for listing CLIPPINGS. A lot of reviews were only listed in artist biographies, and a lot were not listed at all. So, I spent a few days listing as many as I could find, and have been able to add over 250 references to that file so far, for a total of more than 420.
NOVEMBER 18 UPDATE: Another 105 have been added, for a total of more than 530. |
| NEW ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES (not all are listed) | |
| Barr, Florence | |
| Chekaluk, Anne | |
| Dalton, Annie | |
| Deane, Peggy (Miss) | |
| Harvey, M. (Miss) | |
| Helders, John | |
| Laidlaw, H.C. | |
| Le Messurier, Ernest | |
| Main, Thomas | |
| Millar, Joyce | |
| Nilan, Jack Galway | |
| Sinclair, Irving | |
| Tinning, Campbell |
| NEW PRE-1950 GROUP EXHIBITIONS | |
| 1937 | VANCOUVER FOLK SONG & DANCE FESTIVAL |
| 1936 | EXHIBITION OF DRYPOINTS BY GORANSON, FISHER & HUGHES |
| 1939 | 1st ANNUAL VANCOUVER PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY EXHIBITION |
| 1940 | 1st INTERNATIONAL VANCOUVER SALON OF PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY |
| NEW PRE-1950 SOLO EXHIBITIONS | |
| 1932 | Exhibition by Frederick H. Varley (90 artworks) |
| 1934 | Exhibition by Gytha Owen (27 artworks) |
| 1938 | Exhibition by Marion Morham (73 artworks) |
| 1938 | Exhibition by Mary Riter Hamilton (30 artworks) |
| 1938 | Exhibition by Myrtle Jackson (28 artworks) |
| 1938 | Exhibition by Melita Aitken (51 artworks) |
| 1939 | Exhibition by Plato von Ustinov (27 artworks) |
| 1939 | Portraits of Persons & Places by Kathleen Shackleton (34 artworks) |
| 1939 | Exhibition by Esmee Townley (25 artworks) |
| 1939 | Exhibition by John Ensor (42 artworks) |
| 1939 | Exhibition by E.R. McTaggart (26 artworks) |
| 1939 | Exhibition by Myrtle Jackson (30 artworks) |
| 1940 | Exhibition by Bessie A. Fry (23 artworks) |
| 1940 | Loan Collection by Charles John Collings (33 artworks) |
| 1946 | Paintings by Irving Sinclair (20 artworks) |
| 1947 | Paintings by Jack Shadbolt (79 artworks) |
| 1947 | Exhibition by Maxwell Bates (34 artworks) |
| NEW POST-1950 EXHIBITIONS | |
| AGGV81 | CERAMIC SCULPTURE Valerie Pugh, Bill Rennie (1981) |
| AGGV99 | TO THE TOTEM FORESTS - EMILY CARR AND CONTEMPORARIES ... (1999) |
| FCA77 | Federation of Canadian Artists WINTER EXHIBITION (1977) |
| GLEN84 | IMAGES OF THE LAND - CANADIAN BLOCK PRINTS 1919 - 1945 (1984) |
| ICCM13 | SILENT SPACES: PAINTINGS BY JOHN CAPITANO & MENA MARTINI (2013) |
| ICCM14 | MASTERWORKS: VANCOUVER ARTISTS STUDY CLASSICAL PAINTING (2014) |
| ICCM15 | MENDED: CONTEMPORARY TEXTILE ART (2015) |
| ICCM17 | IN RUINS: ELIZABETH HARRIS, CATHERINE NICHOLLS, ALLY NICHOLS (2017) |
| ICCM18 | WOMEN'S WORK (2018) |
| ICCM19.2 | MALLEABLE: CHANGING NOTIONS OF WOMEN (2019) |
| ICCM20 | PERSONAL+MATERIAL GEOGRAPHIES: CRAFT AT THE CENTRE (2020) |
| ICCM21 | BEAUX ARTS (2021) |
| IG87 | Inuit Gallery HANDS OF CREATION (1987) |
| NGC60 | ARTE CANADIENSE (1960) |
| NWA | Seattle Art Museum Northwest Artists - BC artists by exhibition |
| NWAA | Seattle Art Museum Northwest Artists - BC artists alphabetically |
| VMM00 | BEYOND THE CANVAS - Artists, Stories and the Sea (2000) |
| NEW POST-1950 REFERENCES - BOOKS & PAMPHLETS | |
| BCCA58 | BRITISH COLUMBIA - A CENTENNIAL ANTHOLOGY (1958) |
| CAN00 | CANADIAN ART - FROM ITS BEGINNINGS TO 2000 (2000) |
| CAP79 | CANADIAN ART PRINTS (1979) |
| CC71 | CREATIVE CANADA (1971-72) |
| MTP20 | A POCKET GUIDE TO THE UNHERALDED ARTISTS OF BC SERIES (2020) |
| UBC72 | PUBLIC ART IN VANCOUVER (1972) |
| NEW IMAGES |
