Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms and the Expanded Frame, 1960-2000

Exhibition Details

Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms and the Expanded Frame, 1960 – 2000 is an ambitious touring exhibition that opens September 9 at Nickle Galleries, University of Calgary. It examines the explosion of innovative textile-based art on the Canadian Prairies during the second half of the twentieth century. Although largely overlooked in histories of prairie art and craft, this was a period of intense energy and creativity. The exhibition features 60 works by 48 artists including settlers, immigrants, and Indigenous artists as well as influential visitors. Working across the Prairies, they challenged traditional approaches to weaving and embraced new techniques, materials, forms, and scale.

Featured artists include Mariette Rousseau Vermette, best known for her large-scale commissions and her teaching at the Banff Centre, the American artist Ann Hamilton who studied in Banff, Ann Newdigate known for her fine, painterly tapestries exploring identity and relationships, Pirkko Karvonen, who immigrated from Finland and is inspired by the colours and textures of the prairie landscape, and Margaret Harrison, a Saskatchewan-based Métis artist who transforms rug hooking into a vehicle for personal expression and advocacy.

Prairie Interlace is a collaboration between Nickle Galleries and the MacKenzie Art Gallery of Regina and is curated by Michele Hardy, PhD (Nickle Galleries, University of Calgary), Timothy Long (Head Curator, MacKenzie Art Gallery) and Julia Krueger, PhD (Independent Curator and Scholar).

Further details are available at prairieinterlace.ca including interviews with selected artists, recorded over the summer of 2022.

• Susan Surette talking with Katherine Dickerson

• Sherry Farrell Racette talking with Evelyn Goodtrack and Marge Yuzicappi

• Mireille Perron talking with Phyllis Green

• Alison Calder talking with Aganetha Dyck

• Mary Beth Laviolette talking with Inese Birstins

• Mackenzie Kelly-Frère talking with Jane Kidd

• Mireille Perron talking Ann Newdigate