A 1912 Emily Carr painting that expresses a Kwakwaka’wakw community scene frozen in time has been acquired by Whistler's Audain Art Museum, care of the Audain Foundation.

Titled Street, Alert Bay, the vibrantly hued oil-on-canvas work was produced after the artist's studies in France, carrying through the vibrant Fauvism colours that had inspired her across the Atlantic. But it is also highly significant for its subject matter, depicting Indigenous people amid two long houses on a street with two totem poles. 

Carr based the work on a 1909 watercolour by Carr entitled Alert Bay, Street Scene with Mother in Foreground.

The Emily Carr painting sold in November for $2,401,250 at the most recent Heffel auction in Toronto. 

You can view it over the next few weeks as part of the Audain Art Museum’s exhibition Emily Carr: Fresh Seeing - French Modernism and the West Coast, on view until January 19, 2020.

When that show ends, Street, Alert Bay will be featured in the museum's permanent Emily Carr display in its Whistler Blackcomb Foundation Gallery.