There's a new arts program in town but few seem to know about it yet.
The Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts is collaborating with St. Albert's Visual Arts Studio Association, or VASA, to provide art workshops for local residents with developmental disabilities. The pilot project called Artists With Disabilities starts today.
VASA's board president Pat Wagensveld has long wanted this day to come. The building's recently completed renovations have allowed for the accessibility requirements plus a room with enough space to host such programs.
"I think that there are a lot of undiscovered artists with disabilities," she states.
The partnership – along with a private sector boost from Delta Art and Drafting Supply – will offer a program much like the Nina's Art Express classes that happen at the Art Gallery of Alberta.
According to the AGA's website at www.youraga.ca, it is a hands-on studio style approach to art education with class projects focused on students expressing their personal creativity.
Paul Freeman, the Edmonton arts centre's artistic director, called it a hybrid of a traditional pedagogical structure with teachers and students along with the open-ended way of things at the Nina.
"We're going to do a materials and exploration based approach to art making. It's not going to be like everybody's going to walk out with the same painting of a lighthouse on a beach, y'know? My vision is that people will be shepherded toward a certain set of materials that we'll be working with that day, and offered some strategies for how to work with them. What each person makes is still going to be very much up to them."
There are two two-hour sessions, starting at either 3:30 p.m. or 6:30 p.m. on Wednesdays, each with 10 spaces for artists 16 and older. Each spot in the 12-week program costs $144.
Wagensveld added that the evening session is half booked but the afternoon one has lots of space.
The VASA Studio is located at 25 Sir Winston Churchill Avenue in the Hemingway Centre for the Arts.
For more information, call 780-460-5990 or email [email protected].
Cover glory for Nuttall
Well-known local painter Alan Nuttall thought that having one of his unmistakeable paintings made for sale at the Alberta Legislature's gift shop was cool enough but that led to the work getting a wider distribution across the whole country.
His rendition of the now century-old stately government building in autumn recently made the cover of the Canadian Parliamentary Review, a quarterly periodical made to inform Canadian legislators about activities of different levels of government.
He's quite pleased to have the exposure, at least to the very specific audience.
"Every 'Leg' office gets one. Unfortunately there's no money involved…" he quipped.
Nuttall has made his mark with local audiences painting quaint and nostalgic scenes of St. Albert. His Legislature piece isn't his first one outside of the city boundaries. He's also done works of the Art Gallery of Alberta and other notable Edmonton spots, and has sales right across the street at Tix on the Square as well. Another one of his works was recently presented to Premier Alison Redford.
