The University of Western Ontario Visual Arts Department is talking a walk down memory lane to visit the sights and sounds of London’s artistic movement during the 1960s.
During the 1960s, well-known artists such as Jack Chambers, Greg Curnoe, Kim Ondaatje, Tony Urquhart and author-playwright (and University of Western Ontario English professor) James Reaney made London the inspirational backdrop for their work. The corner block at King and Talbot Streets served as the heart of the arts community.
Western also played a role in cultivating the arts movement in London, having established an artist-in-residence program at the university to give students exposure to working artists.
To commemorate this movement, students in the Museum Studies course created a website featuring images and information on local galleries, studios, gathering spaces and exhibition sites from the time period. Visitors to the website are able to ‘stroll’ along the various sites of interest and download a sound file which recounts the history of each location.
The opening reception will be held Saturday, April 18 from 2-4 p.m. in the artLab of the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre. It will feature a concert by local talent, the Nihilist Spasm Band, which came to prominence in the 1960s and still has an international following.
Turning the internet into a virtual gallery, Visual Arts assistant professor Kirsty Robertson says the online project forced students to find new ways to engage audiences without having the walls of a museum as a canvas to tell the story. The so-called ‘soundwalk,’ is based on similar-type exhibitions, such as the Murmur project in Toronto, which integrate audio recordings offering a brief history of different locations in the city into the exhibit.
“The exhibition is actually more interested in the space of London and the way that studios, meeting places and the small size of the city encouraged a vibrant art scene,” says Robertson, adding there is an emphasis on the artists who worked in London.
Having taught a Canadian art survey course in the past, Robertson was “very surprised to find that no one in the class knew about London’s rich artistic heritage.”
The art scene has changed dramatically over the last 50 years, she notes. Although there is still an important artistic community in London, it doesn’t have the same profile it once did.
Many buildings and former studios from the 1960s have been torn down or repurposed, but Robertson says there are still traces of the art scene during that time period found all over the city and on Western’s campus.
“It’s just a matter of knowing where to look and hopefully this exhibition will start to encourage an interest in doing that.”
Many of the artists that worked during the 1960s, namely Jack Chambers, Greg Curnoe and Paterson Ewen, are considered among the top collecting priorities of the Art Gallery of Ontario, she adds.
The project is intended to be interactive and viewers are invited to contribute their memories, stories and images to the online archive. A number of local artists who knew the famous talents of the past have donated work and memorabilia for the show.
Art.wav
The website for Art.wav: A walk through 1960s London, will be launched on April 18 and can be viewed at www.uwo.ca/visarts/artwav.
The department will also present a free public lecture on April 17 by Carleton University professor Katie Cholette, entitled, ‘Playing the Art Word: Greg Curnoe and the National Gallery of Canada.’ The talk will begin at 5 p.m.
The department is featuring an online exhibition April 18-24 titled ‘Art.wav: A walk through 1960s London,’ which explores the vibrant art scene which made the city what John Chandler called in 1969, “one of the most vital art scenes in North America.”