Articles by Gudrun Will.

Arts Features

Sleuthing revives lost film of First Nations life by Edward Curtis

By Gudrun Will
Since 1915, nobody has seen the original cut of Edward Curtis’s feature film In the Land of the Head Hunters. Shot on the Pacific Northwest coast in the early 20th century by the famous “Indian” photographer, it starred Kwakwaka’wakw actors in a fictional take on precontact life.
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Arts Features

Treasures return from exile

By Gudrun Will
Forty-eight Tsimshian First Nation artifacts, collected in 1863 by the missionary Robert J. Dundas, are revisiting their place of origin, the Northwest Coast. During their long absence, these items sat in the curiosity cabinets of Dundas’s descendants in Scotland and England
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Arts Features

Behind the mask of AIDS

By Gudrun Will
A new exhibit shows how Malawi’s Chewa people are using an ancient art form to address a modern epidemic.
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Arts Features

The art of adornment

By Gudrun Will
Totems to Turquoise shows why jewellery art plays a shining role in First Nations’ resurgence from the Southwest to the B.C. coast.
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Arts

Vancouver's history gets a reality check

By Gudrun Will
The past is often said to be golden, but the facts don't bear this out.
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Arts Notes

MOA gets a modern makeover

By Gudrun Will
By the time the Museum of Anthropology completes its recently announced renewal plans in 2009, it may still be recognizable from the outside but perhaps not inside.
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Arts

Forum sheds light on city's museum boom

By Gudrun Will
The city's normally staid museum scene has recently gone into overdrive.
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Arts

Images of war's ambiguity

By Gudrun Will
After a bomb shattered the small Colombian town of Granada in 2000, it was overrun first by guerrillas, then by paramilitaries. It was just one more chapter in a 40-year armed conflict between multiple factions engulfing the country-one too complex even to be termed a civil war. Still, amid the barely cleared rubble, Granada's inhabitants found the strength to march through the streets bearing a huge, beautifully handmade sign declaring their devastated home a "territory of peace".
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Arts

Exhibit follows adventurous women into past

By Gudrun Will
With their crinolines and corsets, it's hard to imagine how women of the past moved comfortably through their own cities, let alone travelled the world. But they did-sometimes alone-and many left detailed written records.
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Arts

Chinese Script traces ancient writing system

By Gudrun Will
Whether or not we have the skill to read them, Chinese characters are all around us. Examples of one of the world's oldest writing systems pop up anywhere you look: on gaudy backlit restaurant signs, as an option on ATM screens, and covering the local Chinese-language dailies stacked in stores across the city. As I write this I can see a China Shipping container, emblazoned vertically in Chinese, being emptied down the block.
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Arts

VUEguide animates MOA

By Gudrun Will
The surviving remnants of Sea Lion House stand only a few feet apart in the Great Hall at the Museum of Anthropology. A big arch carved with stylized sea lions still faces an ancestral-figure house post and a ceremonial bench held up by grimacing slaves, but the confines of the glassed-in space have made it impossible for curators to keep the correct distance between them.
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Arts

Revolution show flashes back to city's paisley past

By Gudrun Will
In the summer of 1967, Vancouver was the hippie capital of Canada. Bell-bottomed long-hairs tuned in, turned on, and dropped out in Kitsilano's pre-gentrified heritage houses, leafed through newly minted alternative mouthpiece the Georgia Straight, and grooved at the West End's Retinal Circus and the Afterthought nightclub on Love Street (West 4th).
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Arts

MOA Gets a Brave New Boss

By Gudrun Will
On his left hand, Anthony Shelton wears a large, rectangular ring featuring a checkerboard of lapis lazuli and malachite. The new director of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC bought it as a good-luck token in a Mexican market two decades ago and says he's never taken it off. Perhaps this striking piece of jewellery helped lead the British- born professor, museologist, and curator to the helm of what will soon be the largest research-oriented anthropological museum in the Americas.
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Arts

Exhibit Revives Retro Ceramics

By Gudrun Will
With their carnival colours, squiggly décor, and amorphic shapes, the bowls, vases, and lamps produced by B.C. Ceramics Ltd. were clearly of their time. Manufactured in Yaletown during the 1950s and '60s by an immigrant couple from Germany, the wares combined a European modernist sensibility with locally inspired motifs.
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Arts

The Abstract And The Ancient

By Gudrun Will
A dramatic black-and-red painting stands propped against one cedar wall of Haida artist Robert Davidson's longhouse-style studio. The signature image of his first major solo show in a decade, it contains the recognizable features of a killer whale but is titled Southeast Wind, hinting at meanings below the seemingly familiar forms on the canvas.
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Arts

Homemade Toys Are Marvels of Imagination

By Gudrun Will
Exhibit features playthings crafted by Third World kids from discarded cigarette cartons, sardine cans, and flip-flops
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Arts Notes

Ghana's Artful Prints Are A Cultural Crash Course

By Gudrun Will
While working in Ghana as a Canada World Youth volunteer in 1995, Michelle Willard admired the brightly printed fabrics worn by locals. The mass-produced cloths mixed traditional patterns with portraits of politicians and their slogans and symbols. It was like getting a crash course on Ghanaian current events from people's outfits.
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Arts Notes

Fundraising Fun

By Janet Smith and Gudrun Will
Seems to be the season for artful arts-group fundraisers. The Vancouver Chamber Choir's Valentine's Day benefit sets the mood with Candles & Wine: held at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver's Pacific Ballroom, its theme is Latin amore, complete with guitars and Spanish serenades. Tickets are at 604-738-6822.
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Arts Notes

Strathcona Comes Alive

By Janet Smith and Gudrun Will
The Strathcona neighbourhood celebrates its cultural heritage with an array of shows and historical events from this Friday (February 13) to March 5. Vancouver Moving Theatre's sixth annual Strathcona Artist at Home Festival kicks off the first night at the Strathcona elementary school auditorium with multicultural acts such as Mozaico Flamenco and Abbla Banji.
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Arts Notes

Birds-Watching

By Janet Smith and Gudrun Will
Another public artist, Edgar Heap of Birds, is coming to Vancouver to give four talks about his provocative and political work, as well as to explore the possibility of finding a permanent home for an earlier exhibit with a B.C. theme.
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Arts Notes

Library Visitors Learn The Power Of The Pencil

By Janet Smith and Gudrun Will
Pencil in a trip to the Vancouver Public Library central branch to check out the facility's first-ever art installation among its books.
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