Splash 2021: Artist Spotlight
Arts Umbrella’s highly anticipated art auction and gala returns!
The renowned Arts Umbrella Splash Art Auction and Gala returns for 2021 with an innovative hybrid event experience, hosted in-person at The Fairmont Hotel Vancouver and streamed online to reach art enthusiasts across Canada and around the world.
Taking place this Saturday, October 23, Arts Umbrella’s flagship fundraising event presented by Nicola Wealth, invites art-lovers across Canada and the world to indulge in a night of festivities, with proceeds supporting youth arts education across Metro Vancouver.
With an incredible lineup of artwork donated by local and international artists, advance bidding is open to the public across Canada and beyond. Visit the bidding website here and don’t miss out on the action. Check out our round-up of inspiring artists below along with a few pieces we’ve got our eyes on.
@au_splash @artsumbrella @nicolawealth #SplashGala2021 #artsumbrella #NicolaWealth
Meet some of the artists!
Dana Claxton
Dana Claxton is a critically acclaimed international exhibiting artist. She works in film, video, photography, single and multi-channel video installations, and performance art. Her practice investigates indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political, and the spiritual. Her work has been shown internationally at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Sundance Film Festival and The Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, AU), along with exhibitions at Nasher Gallery of Art at Duke University (Durham, NC), Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (TN) and many more.
She is a Professor and Head of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory with the University of British Columbia, bringing her vast knowledge and experience to her students. She is also a member of Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in SW Saskatchewan and she resides locally in Vancouver, Canada.
Don Yeomans
Don Yeomans is one of the most established and respected Northwest Coast artists in Canada. Born to a Haida father from Masset and a Métis mother from Slave Lake, Alberta, Yeomans studied and worked in the Haida Style since his youth.
Yeomans first apprenticed under the expert guidance of his aunt Freda Diesing in the early 1970s. In 1976, shortly after attending art school at Vancouver Community College, Yeomans worked under Robert Davidson on the Charles Edenshaw Memorial Longhouse, a monumental project that unfortunately burnt down several years later.
With decades of work behind him, he has mastered formline design -the basic visual language of Haida art. He often works with non-traditional materials such as bronze and Forton (a gypsum resin).
As Yeomans states: "Those who understand [formline] and can design, have a limitless potential" (From Raven Travelling).
Russna Kaur
Russna Kaur (b. 1991, Toronto, ON) is an artist living and working in Vancouver, Canada. Selected solo exhibitions include at Wil Aballe Art Projects (2021); Birch Contemporary, A Room With A View Gallery in Toronto (2021); Veil of Tears at Trapp Projects in Vancouver (2019), to name a few.
Kaur is the recipient of the Takao Tanabe Painting Prize (2020) for emerging painters in British Columbia and the IDEA Art Award (2020). She was also awarded the Gathie Falk Visual Arts Scholarship (2019), the University Women's Club of Vancouver Graduate Scholarship (2017), an Audain Faculty of Art Graduate Teaching Fellowship (2018) and was shortlisted for the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada Graduate Scholarship (2018).
Her work is a part of several collections including the Audain Art Museum and the Vancouver Art Gallery. She holds an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2019), and a BA (Honours) with a studio specialization from the University of Waterloo (2013).
Kriss Munsya
Kriss Munsya is a Congolese-born visual artist currently living in Vancouver, BC.
He grew up in Brussels, Belgium in the ‘90s, and this era was very important for him. As a first-generation African immigrant, Munsya was consistently confronted with normalized and often violent racism from a young age. These experiences fed his vision of the world and himself within it.
Munsya is a self-taught artist, with experience in photography, graphic design, music and video production. Art has been present in his life from an early age, but he decided to focus on photography for five years because of his increasing involvement in social movements. He perceives photography to be an impactful medium that translates his experiences into open invitations to question the status quo.
Scott Sueme
Scott Sueme is a Canadian artist raised in Vancouver, BC, on the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Sueme attended Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2006, and has since worked in many fields including fine art, graphic design and large-scale wall paintings.
Sueme has exhibited throughout Canada, as well as internationally, including New York, San Francisco, Miami and Cape Town. Recent exhibitions include ‘Building Buildings’ at Mayberry Fine Art in Winnipeg (2020) and ‘Intercepting the Nature of Colour and Form’ (2020) at Gallery Jones in Vancouver.
Sueme’s paintings are rooted in an exploration of materiality – principally, the quality and perception of colour. In his work, colour manifests as an abstraction of various elements of life, interacting to recall memories, capture the passage of time or connect with the subconscious. Sueme’s hard-edge painting techniques create a subtlety of depth that reveals a new resonance to colour and an admission of the human hand. Through an intimacy of material interaction, Sueme’s works act as small records of larger lived experiences and a conversational catalogue of human imprints.
Stan Douglas
Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas has created films and photographs—and more recently theater productions and other multidisciplinary projects—that investigate the parameters of their medium. His ongoing inquiry into technology's role in image-making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible.
Douglas was born in 1960 in Vancouver, where he continues to live and work. He studied at Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver in the early 1980s. Douglas was one of the first artists to be represented by David Zwirner, where he had his first American solo exhibition in 1993.
In 2021, the artist’s permanent public commission, Penn Station’s Half Century was unveiled in the Moynihan Train Hall, Penn Station, New York. This body of work, commissioned by Empire State Development in partnership with Public Art Fund on the occasion of the dedication of New York City’s new Moynihan Train Hall, is composed of nine vignettes arranged into four thematic panels which explore the rich history of Penn Station.
About Arts Umbrella
Arts Umbrella is where young artists ages 2-22 cultivate their creativity in Art, Design, Dance, Theatre, Music, and Film. As a non-profit centre for arts education, they believe that art is powerful. Powerful enough to change childrens’ lives in incredible ways. When young people connect with the arts, they gain self-confidence, develop self-discipline, and discover creative expression—qualities they carry with them for life. Arts Umbrella has four locations in Vancouver and Surrey, as well as donor-funded programs at schools, community centres, neighbourhood houses, and healthcare facilities across Metro Vancouver. The organization reaches more than 24,000 young people every year, with more than 80% served through bursaries, scholarships, and donor-funded programs.
