Sitting quietly in its leafy nook along East 2nd, surrounded by some of Vancouver’s largest commercial art galleries and groundwork for the new Emily Carr University of Art and Design, grunt gallery bears little resemblance to the scrappy artist-run centre of its origins. Thirty years, and owning their own building, have allowed the experimental art gallery and performance space institution-like stability and enviable perspective within Vancouver’s shifting art scene.
And after a year‘s worth of celebratory programming embodying the gallery’s current focus of community engagement, they are now taking these last few months to allow that community to look back, launching Vancouver Independent Archives Week come this November.
“The relationship of artist-run centres to archives is hugely important,” says Vanessa Kwan, grunt’s curator of community engagement. “We’ve been putting a lot of work into talking about archive activation, how to tell these histories and what these histories mean to artist-run culture. We’re also talking a lot about, specifically in Vancouver, how we start creating space in a very difficult place to do that. How do we leverage our stability and cultural capital to create opportunities for artists to create work?”
At its original off-Main location, where The Whip is now, grunt gallery began in 1984 as a place for outsider art and evolved into a home for unaffiliated artists and work that wasn’t being shown anywhere else. Eleven years later, the founding artists rallied enough support to purchase space in a new development at 350 East 2nd.
It was a controversial move, directly tied in with the promotion of the live/work condo which was perceived to, even in the ‘90s, be making the area too expensive for artists to live in. But grunt persevered, building a legacy with deep roots in support of aboriginal artists, as well as an activist presence within political landscape of the city.
From Pat Beaton’s awareness-building community garden project in 1994; to Hans Winkler’s 2005 LIVE Biennial of Performance Art piece in which the Vancouver Public Library housed a collection of books curated entirely by drug addicts; to Beat Nation, a work of indigenous expression that would end up in the Vancouver Art Gallery and touring across Canada from 2008-2012; to the recent Mainstreeters retrospective, grunt’s relevancy persists, and its archives become a means for inciting informed conversation about where the city could go next.
Enter Archives Week, a multi-institution celebration of archival practice and the value of “organized and accessible community memory.” Archives Week will also include the rich histories of Western Front and VIVO Media Arts Centre – two artist-run spaces with decades-long legacies of their own.
“Because the nature of our collections is so different, we’re all doing it very differently. It’s an interesting conversation going on between these three spaces,” explains grunt co-founder and program director Glenn Alteen. “Their emphasis is on saving, because so much of their stuff is from the ‘70s and has become very brittle, whereas our stuff is more from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, so we’re not on that same salvage paradigm.”
Funded by a Field of Interest grant from The Vancouver Foundation, all three centres will present programming throughout the week of Nov. 22-28 with the goal of engaging the public and raising awareness around the operation and challenges that come with these types of non-traditional art archives.
“The archives become more and more important as time goes on,” says Alteen. “It’s really kind of the crux of what we do, because it allows us to make connections over decades.”
Among other content, grunt will be highlighting the experience of researchers in their archive, the moving and preservation of Al Neil’s cabin from the redeveloped Cates Park location on the North Shore, and their upcoming web project Settler Sites, which will examine the site-specific practice of artists in rural and remote locations in BC. They will also be doing off-site events, such as the screening of archival footage at the Vancity Theatre.
“Our favourite thing to do is bring young curators in and throw them at our archives and say, ‘Well what interests you?’” says Alteen. “It’s like seeing what we’ve done before through a whole set of different eyes. What they see in terms of the shows, what they think is important, and why they think it’s important is often very different then why we showed it in the first place, and I find that fascinating.”
• Vancouver Independent Archives Week runs Nov. 22-28 at grunt, Western Front, and VIVO.
• grunt will also be participating in the ROVE art walk this Friday, Sept. 25 from 6-11pm.
