The Treaty Space Gallery, a part of NSCAD’s Anna Leonowens Gallery system, has a new and bigger location at 1887 Granville Street that will be open in September.
“I'm most excited to transform the new space into, not only a gallery where people can exhibit work, but also an Indigenous Student Centre,” says exhibitions coordinator of the Treaty Space Gallery, Natalie Laurin. “We have such a big space now that the back room is going to provide a really nice space to have workshops in a more intimate setting.”
Since its creation in 2017, the Treaty Space Gallery has offered a space at the Port campus where NSCAD students and the public can learn and participate in Indigenous and BPOC art and showcases. On Tuesday Aug. 13, the space held a drop-in drum painting session as a follow-up to their rawhide drum-making workshop in June with Trevor Gould. The painting session was run by Laurin and project coordinator Sydney Wreaks.
On July 16, TSG hosted a medicine garden planting event to conclude their “Seeding & Beading” project at the Peace and Friendship Park on Hollis Street. That morning, everyone who came was able to transform a garden bed at the park into a community garden bed with a focus on Indigenous medicines and useful plants for harvesting—from plants grown with seeds sourced from Cultural Seeds and collected from the Dalhousie Pollinator Garden—which was created in 2021 by guest curator at the gallery, Frances Dorsey, in collaboration with Mi’kmaw artist and scholar Michelle Sylliboy.
These projects and others were part of the space’s Creating with Community summer gallery initiative funded by the group Indigenous Youth Roots. The summer program hosted five workshops in collaboration with community partners that were designed to “increase the wellness, resiliency, and engagement of urban-Indigenous youth through providing access to arts, art-based workshops, cultural knowledge, and traditions” through these Indigenous artist-led workshops.
The Treaty Gallery’s new and bigger space close to the school’s downtown Granville campus—and right next to the Anna Leonowen’s Gallery—will allow for more workshops, performances and exhibitions to be shown and shared with the broader NSCAD community.
Laurin will be joined by Buffy Googoo who will be the treaty education curatorial assistant, beginning at the end of August. Both Laurin and Googoo will work closely with their neighbours at The Anna, too—director Erinn Beth Langille and exhibitions coordinator Kate Walchuk.
As per the treaty space gallery’s website, the TSG is “one facet of NSCAD’s ongoing commitment towards Indigenous knowledge mobilization and continued support of Indigenous contemporary art.”
With a new space this big, Laurin says the TSG will be able to have “a more intimate setting for workshops, and teach-ins for Indigenous specific participants that we can now have in a closed and private space—we're really excited to have the opportunity to be a safe space for Indigenous students, Indigenous staff and faculty, and also a place of learning and education for non-Indigenous community members to come in to, where we can continue to share our stories.” The beauty of the new space, says Laurin, is that it’s a public setting which can become private when it needs to be.
The gallery has an ongoing call for exhibition proposals, which is open to the public with priority given to current NSCAD Indigenous students. Details are available on the gallery’s website here, which reads “we call upon Indigenous and non-Indigenous professional artists, NSCAD students and community members to submit exhibition proposals that respond to the UN’s declaration [of 2022-2023 as the International Decade on Indigenous languages, as well as themes of] cultural revitalization and notions of treaty.”
This gallery call-out, says their site, will use multiple educational approaches at the space “to foster a well-rounded understanding of Indigenous cultures, treaties of Mi’kma’ki and Turtle Island and each of our roles as treaty people…towards decolonizing together.” Like the Anna Leonowens Gallery system more broadly, the Treaty Gallery shows both leading and professional artists alongside NSCAD student works. Says the gallery’s site, “we aim to foster the merging of current Indigenous community-based knowledge with productive academic and artistic research.”
For members of the NSCAD community wishing to submit proposals, Exhibition Application Forms can be found in the NSCAD form portal. For exhibition proposals from non-NSCAD students, faculty, and alumni, send an email to [email protected]
The gallery is accepting proposals on an ongoing basis, however their guidelines say that it’s best to submit proposals at least two months in advance of an artist’s availability to show their work “to ensure [their] application is received by programming deadlines.”
Exhibitions at the new space will run simultaneously with shows at The Anna starting Sep.16.
Opening receptions will run in tandem with The Anna, on Mondays, however shows at the TSG will likely run longer than the week-long length at the gallery next door,” because there are more stipulations to what kind of shows can go in the [TSG],” says Laurin.
Laurin says being next to The Anna is going to make life much easier, in terms of sharing resources and equipment between the two galleries. As well, “we can collaborate on our opening receptions, by having dual receptions at the same time,” says Laurin, “which means people can pop in at each one and they’ll gain a bigger crowd.”
Stay alert for upcoming exhibition details.
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