The Live In Public: The Art of Engagement conference that took place in 2008 challenges popular notions of the role of art in our society. In this conference, grunt shed light on art practices that go beyond the gallery and address the ills present in our modern society. Visit The Art of Engagement archive to find out more about the artists and the conference.

“Exploring the roles, risks, breakthroughs and expectations of the work of artists in communities through four panels over four days with four artists per panel and over 150 participating artists engaged in conversation and critique, the conference sought to bring artist practitioners together to carve out divergent meanings from diverse work.”

For any comments or questions regarding the project or any of the websites being launched, please send us a question, follow us on twitter @gruntgallery or use the gruntArchive tag. You can also take a look  at grunt’s history via facebook timeline.

Mask by Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew. Video still. 1990’s.

“One of the basic requirements for entry into arts professions in Canada is to have an accredited and demonstrable understanding of European art history and the subsequent preservation and contemporary expression of it in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. This is also true of artists who support their practice by working in other professions such as teaching, etc. Thus, arts professionals must be fully equipped with a set of historical resources that sometimes formed the foundation for, arose out of or were developed parallel to the active and unapologetic eradication of living First Nations cultures and the exclusion and silencing of the voices of living First Nations cultural practitioners; actions which are still in living memory for some, and form a large part of the still-recent legacy of almost all First Nations. An ironic exception is the work of early (and not so early) anthropologists who practiced what they termed ‘salvage ethnology,’ collecting and documenting what they thought of as the last fragments of our living cultures before we would inevitably be extinguished. […]

“The well-rounded accreditation of non-First Nations arts professionals for the most part does not require even a rudimentary understanding of First Nations post-contact political history, let alone the basics of historical and contemporary First Nations cultural practices, and certainly not any of the most crucial understanding of how our unique languages and oratures shape and guide our diverse cultures. Thankfully, the professionalism and respect of many individuals in the non-First Nations arts community compels them to undertake personal research into these areas so that they have a deeper understanding of the rapidly growing community of First Nations artists with whom they are working and transforming the institutions in which they work. That understanding is, however, inconsistent, idiosyncratic and fragmentary when examined across the broad scope of the general community of contemporary arts professionals. The political will of everyone in the arts community is now required to transform the academic art and art history community to ensure a consistent and growing focus on First Nations art and culture as a fundamental requirement of an adequate arts education for arts professionals in Canada.” 


— From Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew’s 1996 essay, “Talk Indian To Me #3: wêmistikôsiwi—mîcim.” 

When the term First Nations Art, or Aboriginal Art is mentioned, it seems that we have become used to associating them with totem poles, mythical animals and imagery that is very rooted to an imagined past. The archive project goes beyond this limited view of aboriginal artistic practices and highlights First Nations artists that pioneered the way in which art can act as the locus for intersecting media, including theory, digital work and performance. This website focuses on Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew’s prolific practice

“This site features a comprehensive look at the work of Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew. Ahasiw was a theorist, curator, writer, new media practitioner and performance artist. He worked in artist run centres in Vancouver, Regina and Winnipeg curating and producing new practices in performance and new media. Ahasiw passed away in 2006. Ghostkeeper features writing, images, websites and performance documentation of Maskegon-Iskwew’s work as well as essays by other curators and producers on his work.” (From the Ghostkeeper Website)

For any comments or questions regarding the project or any of the websites being launched, please send us a question, follow us on twitter @gruntgallery or use the gruntArchive tag. You can also take a look  at grunt’s history via facebook timeline.

How can new forms of expression interact with the issues that still plague Aboriginal peoples in North America? How can this dialogue be opened up and discussed within an artistic context? In 2002 grunt gallery took up these types of questions with a groundbreaking conference. With the archives you can explore the topics raised by participating artists, topics that are still far from irrelevant and require us to be critical of our own histories. 

“This site is an Indian Act in and of itself-a chance to continue the heart journey that was the original Indian Acts: Aboriginal Performance Art conference (grunt gallery 2002), and carry that heart to others who could not attend the conference, but whose own hearts may be ignited by this archive and who can witness this conference through the material within this site.”

For any comments or questions regarding the project or any of the websites being launched, please send us a question, follow us on twitter @gruntgallery or use the gruntArchive tag. You can also take a look  at grunt’s history via facebook timeline.

Extract, the most recently released component of grunt’s online archiving project features a curatorial focus on work that deals with “the act of writing and the position of the written word”, with some surprising results. From Tattoos to Graffiti, from the Library to Beadwork, the range and dimension of work addressed within this site presents a faceted perspective on writing and the word in grunt’s history of programming.

For any comments or questions regarding the project or any of the websites being launched, please send us a question, follow us on twitter @gruntgallery or use the gruntArchive tag.

The Sculpture website is now up! You can either follow this link or click on the above image. “This Sculpture site that Program Director Glenn Alteen and I have put together shows a vast variety of sculpture: looking through this website, one will notice many approaches and styles, from minimalism to feminism to social commentary on the spaces we live in. Each exhibit archived in this website was created with a unique purpose, but they all have something in common: each is a means of dealing with social and emotional realities that remain unique to the time in which each exhibit was created.” (Polina Bachlakova, Curatorial Intern)

Artwork by James Carl.

For any comments or questions regarding the project or any of the websites being launched, please send us a question, follow us on twitter @gruntgallery or use the gruntArchive tag.

As promised, click on the above picture to access grunt gallery’s Performance archive. The website “features a curatorial focus on a variety of performance based works that have been developed at grunt since its inception in 1984.” As well as acting as the digital record of the gallery’s own history with the performance art world, the website  concentrates on historically marginalized groups and artists, situating these performances within a larger social, political and artistic discourse. We greatly appreciate your support!

For any comments or questions regarding the project or any of the websites being launched, feel free to send us a question, follow us on twitter @gruntgallery or use the gruntArchive tag.

As Grunt Gallery’s Activating the Archive project concludes, we will be unveiling the websites that will allow you to take a look at the gallery’s fascinating history. Stay tuned!

Phil Dwyer, Scott White, and Kevin Brow performing jazz standard “Afternoon in Paris” at A-Trane in Berlin, Germany, in the spring of 2009. Both Dwyer and White participated in grunt gallery’s “Jazz at the Gallery” series. 

Bruce Freedman, Clyde Reed, and Stan Taylor. Along with Bill Clark, Freedman, Reed, and Taylor all performed together for grunt gallery’s “Jazz at the Gallery” series in February of 1988. 

Clip of a performance by saxophonist Michael Blake. Blake performed at grunt gallery with Ken Lister, Blaine Wickjord, and Ross Taggart as part of the “Jazz at the Gallery” series in the spring of 1988. 

The NOW Orchestra performing at 1067 on Granville last August. The NOW was founded in 1987 by Coat Cooke, who performed—along with Rob Frayne, Gregg Simpson, Brad Muirhead, Bill Clark, Scott White, Graham Ord, Claude Ranger, Roger Baird, and Ron Sanworth—at the very first session of “Jazz at the Gallery,” which took place on December 2nd, 1987, the evening after the opening of Jackie Crossland’s Toyland exhibition at grunt gallery.

From December of 1987 to the spring of 1988, grunt gallery—then located at East 6th Ave—hosted a series of jazz concerts that took place every Wednesday night. Entitled “Jazz at the Gallery,” the series was organized in collaboration with members of the Vancouver jazz community with the aim of providing a forum for local musicians to develop and perform “non-commercial music.”* Unfortunately, documentation of the series could not be found in grunt’s archives. Over the next few days, we will be posting works performed in other venues by select artists involved in “Jazz at the Gallery” instead, by way of providing a sense of the talent that congregated under grunt’s roof for the program. 

*From a 1987 grunt galley press release for “Jazz at the Gallery”