The Hour is Blue

Inside the Audain Art Museum: In Conversation with Dr. Curtis Collins

In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Curtis Collins, Executive Director of the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, British Columbia.

CiTR 101.9 FM / The Blue Hour

Recorded live on July 21, 2026

You can listen to the episode on CiTR.

It is also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

The Blue Hour, hosted by Farha Guerrero, airs live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. on CiTR 101.9 FM at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada and at citr.ca.

Few museum directors have experienced Canada’s artistic and cultural life as broadly as Curtis Collins. Over more than three decades, he has led galleries, museums and arts institutions across six provinces and one territory—from Fredericton to Dawson City, from Regina to Whistler—while also teaching at universities across the country and helping shape major exhibitions, publications and public programs devoted to Canadian art.

Curtis has led the Audain Art Museum since 2018 and now serves as its Executive Director. During a remarkable period of growth, he has overseen and curated exhibitions including Wolves: The Art of Dempsey Bob, Curve! Women Carvers on the Northwest Coast, The Coast Mountains: Recent Works by Edward Burtynsky and Karin Bubaš: Garden of Shadows.

He is also the co-author, with 7IDANsuu James Hart, of the recent publication 7IDANsuu James Hart: A Monumental Practice, the first publication devoted to Hart’s extraordinary career.

In our conversation, we speak about these artists, exhibitions and his recent publication, as well as the Museum’s Tuesday Night Talks and his research for The Tlingit: Four Centuries of Art, a major exhibition planned for 2028. We also reflect on Curtis’s journey through museums across Canada and the many ways museums bring artists, ideas and audiences together.

Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity while preserving the natural rhythm of the live conversation.

Farha: Today I’d like to do something a little different. Rather than simply discussing exhibitions, I’d like to spend this hour getting to know the person behind them, the curator, educator, and museum leader whose career has quietly helped shape the way Canadians encounter art. Curtis, welcome to The Blue Hour.

Curtis: Thank you, Farha. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Farha: So your career has taken you through galleries, universities, and many institutions across much of Canada. What have those different regions taught you about this country’s art?

Curtis: Well, I think that each region, its geography, its people, its history, determines the quality of art that is produced from that place. And I’ve always been highly interested in Canadian art and how it has evolved and changed and continues to move forward. And so it’s been important for me to experience all these different locations as a way of anticipating a larger, I would say, multifaceted Canadian identity.

Farha: Now, in 2018, you landed yourself at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler. And it may be the longest place you’ve been to date.

Curtis: Short of my hometown, the answer is yes.

Farha: Now, you became Director and Chief Curator at that time. So how did you first become a candidate for the position, and what drew you to coming to Whistler?

Curtis: I was teaching at MacEwan University in Edmonton, which is a new university, in the cultural management section, and enjoying that position. However, having bounced back and forth between academia and public and private institutions, I was missing the celebratory aspect that comes along with the public responsibility of museums and galleries.

And I was on a flight from Minneapolis to Edmonton, surfing the net, and saw the Audain Art Museum posting. So I was already in the position of working towards becoming a tenure-track professor at MacEwan, and this opportunity popped up, literally. And I thought I just wanted to explore that possibility.

So the next day I called the management consultant firm that was doing the search and indicated that I felt as though I had excellent qualifications for the position and that I would send them a cover letter and a CV by the end of the week. To which they responded, “Make that tomorrow. The competition is closing.” So I did.

Farha: And here you are.

Curtis: And here I am, yes.

Farha: Now, the Audain at the time had opened only two years prior to you arriving. So when you arrived, what possibilities did you see in such a young museum?

Curtis: Well, it was a fascinating start in the fact that the posting that I responded to was for a director. And upon arrival, or shortly after the announcement of me taking over as director and a few months prior to my arrival, the Chief Curator at that time had resigned.

So they called me back and said, “Just so you know, you’ll be without a Chief Curator when you arrive.” And then my recommendation was that I could be Director and Chief Curator, and that upon arriving I oversee the hiring of a curator. And so that’s in fact how it played out.

One of the reasons for my suggestion was I think it’s important that if you’re a good director, you have to have a sound curatorial base within the context of an art museum. And I’ll be quite candid, the curating is the fun stuff. And so I thought that this would be a nice complementary way to continue my curatorial efforts while leading what is a unique entity in Canada, in the fact that the Audain Art Museum is a privately founded and privately funded institution that collects. There’s no other equivalent in Canada.

It does mimic, to a certain extent, a more American model of institutions. I can think of the Barnes Foundation, for example.

And as I’m sure you know, as many of your listeners, The Audain is in Whistler. And I’m, I would say, a relatively outdoorsy kind of fella. And I do love to ski and cycle and swim, all those things. So it seemed like a real ideal fit for me.

Farha: And when you say swim, you swim in the lakes in Whistler, is that right?

Curtis: That is correct. I live on Alta Lake, and every morning before I go to work, I swim across the lake and back, and then cycle on the Valley Trail that goes around the lake and to the museum. So it’s, I would say, an idyllic start to the day.

Farha: Now, the Audain Museum just celebrated its 10th anniversary earlier this year. And since then, the museum has achieved Category A status.

How do you feel looking back at what is really most of the museum’s life? And how do you see your time there and what has evolved into something that is now, in many ways, part of Whistler’s cultural identity?

Curtis: Well, when I parachuted in, the museum had all the parts to be a space of national consequence and a leader in British Columbia. It was just a matter of assembling those parts, both with regards to building the collection and developing a program of special exhibitions.

And I think the essential part was to pursue both those objectives within a Whistler context. Initially we were having three major exhibitions a year in our primary exhibition space, the Tom and Teresa Goetzel Galleries. And that seemed not quite a good fit for Whistler.

And so we quickly evolved to having one major summer exhibition and one major winter exhibition. We also have a beautiful upstairs space, currently called the Upstairs Gallery, which will soon be redesignated as the Gordon Smith Mezzanine. That was also a really fascinating space, in the sense that it offered the best reflection of what is quite an astounding piece of architecture within the interior context.

So the formula that we maintain today is that we’ll open a show in the fall and the spring in the upstairs space, which are traditionally the shoulder seasons in Whistler, offset by major exhibitions downstairs in the winter and summer, as I mentioned.

It took us, I’d say, a year or two to arrive at that formula because I inherited exhibitions that had been planned in advance of my arrival.

And then the other part was, when negotiating with major institutions, the National Gallery of Canada, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, we negotiated in a way that we had longer-run exhibitions.

Most exhibitions of consequence usually go around three months, and we insisted that every show that we have would run four and a half months. And again, this was part of tuning our programming to the Whistler experience. So that was really important.

The other thing that was gradual was, I would say, the quality of our exhibition was good at the time when I arrived, but it wasn’t excellent.

And part of being able to hit that excellent level was securing our Category A status from Heritage Canada, which entails a very lengthy application.

You have to have two years’ worth of heat, humidity, security records before you can get this status. But once you have it, you can borrow works of art from anywhere in the world. And that was a real turning point for the museum.

And the exhibition that marked that turning point was the Jean-Paul Riopelle exhibition from the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. That was a threshold moment for the museum, and we never looked back.

Farha: And you’ve had, no doubt, extraordinary exhibitions in this last decade, and some very well-known people beyond Riopelle, but also people like Picasso and Edgar Degas and Edvard Munch, and many others. And of course, the incredible Canadian artists that have come through the galleries.

So do you feel that your landing at the Audain, given that you had been in so many different places in Canada, brought a unique set of skills to bring to Whistler?

Curtis: I have a very particular perspective on the Canadian art scene, having, as you mentioned, having lived in, I think, 14 different cities in Canada, but I’ll have to count at one point. And that’s also enabled me to develop a really extensive network of both artists and curators.

I remember very clearly about, I’m going to say, within a month of arriving, I called Dempsey Bob.

And I had known Dempsey since the late ’80s. And I said, “Hi, Dempsey, I got this great gig. Would you like an exhibition?”

He’s like, “Sure.”

And that was pretty much it—I said, “Okay.”

And then at that time, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, just north of Toronto in Kleinburg, had also been speaking with Dempsey. And so I called up their Chief Curator/Director, Sarah Milroy, and said, “Why don’t we join forces and mount this major retrospective of Dempsey’s work, along with a publication?”

It opened in Whistler. It was 120 pieces, and then a slightly smaller version then toured to the Glenbow in Calgary, the McMichael in Toronto, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, and then it wound up at the Kelowna Art Gallery.

And that was the most extensive exhibition that Dempsey had ever had in his entire career.

The works spanned from the early 1980s to the present. And so we were able to secure a really nice variety of pieces, both from private and public collections.

And there were two really important works that were very much a struggle to obtain, but through determination, we did. There was one piece called The Smart One, which was a mask that I saw in 1992 at the National Gallery of Canada. And Dempsey insisted that no retrospective of his work would be complete without it.

I tracked it down to a storage area in the San Juan Islands, to an old fellow that had been gifted it. And through numerous phone calls over the course of, I’m going to say, two years, we finally got it.

I hired a courier to go to the San Juan Islands, to pick it up, get it across the border, at which point it was in Vancouver. I drove to Vancouver, put it in the front seat of my truck, strapped it down, and as I was driving up the Sea to Sky highway, I phoned Dempsey, and he was elated.

It was five days before the exhibition opening. So it was a fairly pressure-cooked situation, but I can’t begin to tell you how satisfying it was to know that we had honoured Dempsey and his career, but particularly this pivotal work.

Farha: And I know some inside information. You were just in Alaska.

Curtis: Yes, I was.

Farha: With?

Curtis: Dempsey Bob.

Farha: There you go. Which we’ll talk about.

Curtis: Sure.

Farha: But let’s not go too fast forward, because that’s something to come. We still want to talk about what’s happened in the last 10 years, if we can even do that.

Your connections that brought you to the Audain were extraordinarily helpful, and your extensive knowledge of Canadian art. I would also add you as an educator, as someone that comes from a scholarly background. You’ve got a PhD from McGill, and so you’re bringing all of these things into the museum. And certainly we’re going to talk about how some of that knowledge has manifested itself over the years.

But there’s no doubt that there’s something interesting in seeing these connections with the Audain across the country. I was just at the National Gallery of Canada this past spring, and although I missed the exhibition Curve! in Whistler, sure enough, there it was at the National Gallery.

So I got to see it, and it was really nice to see the Audain in Ottawa, right? This certainly means that the Audain has moved beyond the boundaries of a mountain town, which is amazing.

Would you say that the Audain Art Museum is now a world-class museum?

Curtis: Absolutely. The quality of the special exhibitions that we mount are second to none. And as you mentioned, major European, major Asian, major North American artists, I would say, we have been able to feature through the last 10 years.

And it’s interesting now that anytime any major institutions, let’s say the National Gallery of Canada, the McMichael, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, are touring an exhibition, I get the first call when they want to come West. And so that, again, was a gradual process.

And it’s always very interesting when curators and/or directors come from institutions in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Halifax. I think they think they’re coming to a log cabin in the mountains.

And when they arrive, they’re pleasantly surprised, and then they’re even more impressed by the quality of what we’re able to do with a very small staff, but an incredible building designed by architects John and Patricia Patkau here in Vancouver.

And similarly, Michael Audain and Yoshiko Karasawa have been endlessly supportive.

And every Tuesday morning, this morning included, 9:30, I have a one-hour meeting with Michael and a one-page agenda that goes through everything from finance to marketing, but ultimately the most important part of the agenda is about the collection and our curatorial efforts.

Farha: And Michael Audain is the great patron and founder of the museum, so that’s special.

You mentioned Tuesday. So something happened during the pandemic which became actually really popular: Tuesday Night Talks. They were called TNT. And so these were conversations. This is where you were the interviewer, and you were interviewing extraordinary artists.

And it was a really great way to keep up with the activities of the museum, to keep the public engaged in the museum. Do you want to bring us back to those talks?

Curtis: Sure. It was a fascinating time. So we did three seasons of TNT and one special episode. And again, not long after I arrived, COVID hit. And many museums and galleries—in fact, all—were scrambling because nobody knew what to do.

Our doors closed, and it was a very trying time personally and professionally. However, those moments also present opportunities. And the Tuesday Night Talk series came out of a cancelled studio visit with Ian Wallace.

And so I called Ian and said, “Sorry, COVID’s on, can’t do studio visits.”

And then I said, “Ian, how about we talk over Zoom, and then people can key in and watch our talk? You’ll be in your studio. I’ll be in the museum, sitting in front of one of your works that’s in the collection.” And he thought that was a fantastic idea.

And then the other layer to this was, since the museum was closed, we wanted to keep a marketing presence, particularly on Instagram. And because we split shifts in the museum during COVID, I had the night shift.

And during COVID, there was a smash and grab of a Van Gogh painting in Amsterdam. The next day, I had my Tuesday morning meeting with Michael Audain, and he was very concerned about the museum’s security, and rightfully so. And so, just in our conversation, I said, “Tell you what, Michael. Every night before I leave, I’ll walk through the museum with a flashlight and make sure everything’s okay.”

And he was a bit taken aback by that offer. He said, “You’d do that?”

I said, “Absolutely.”

So I did. And then, as I was going through the museum, literally with a flashlight, I started taking photographs on my phone. And so you’d see an Emily Carr painting with the ring of the light around it. Or you’d see a Jeff Wall photograph with the ring of the light around it, or a Vicky Alexander.

And then I started sending these to our marketing person at the time, Justine Nickel. And she said, “These are fantastic.” And so we started an Instagram series before TNT was launched, which were called the Director’s Security Tours, which were really popular.

And so we combined the two. And again, when I’m sitting in the museum during the TNT talks, we lit it using a flashlight, with me connecting to artists in their studio, not only in British Columbia, but also in Montreal, in Toronto, depending where the artists were living at the time.

And there were some real memorable moments, part of which were part of the technical glitches of getting a new thing off the ground. At one point during the Paul Wong interview, somebody texted him, and it cut out our sound because we were running the sound through his phone at that moment. So that’s as much as we could figure out at the time.

And so there was a pause in the program. And Paul was great. Paul is a wonderful fellow. And he’s like, “Oh, I had to go to the bathroom. We’re back.” So that was quite special.

One time—and again, there was a different time factor because we started at 8 p.m., and that was very deliberate, and it was live—and it reminded me of when I was a kid with kind of old-school television viewing habits.

And I recall very clearly my parents would sit down at certain days of the week, at very specific times, to watch their program.

And I thought, I need to mimic that somehow so people know, “Oh, it’s Tuesday, a little bit after dinner, 8 o’clock.” You have maybe a port or a whiskey or lemonade, what have you.

And so you can sit back, relax, and just enjoy whatever the featured artist was that week, and get to know some really concentrated information about that artist’s practice and the specific piece in our collection.

And I say that because the museum, in a larger context, offers a very concentrated experience. I often refer to it as a boutique museum. So TNT had that boutique feel to it.

There was another interview where I was interviewing, Attila Richard Lukacs. And he’s a fairly shy guy, and he’s quiet, a really nice fellow. But then at one moment he goes, “Do you mind if I have a smoke?”

I said, “Go for it.”

He lit up a cigarette, and then suddenly, he was so relaxed. And he was sitting in this really nice upholstered chair, and the interview was fantastic.

And I’ve seen other interviews with artists where you can’t expect that artists are necessarily outgoing or want to talk about their work. So that was always the challenge, to get them to loosen up and feel comfortable, and for the show to be this very anecdotal, offhand, relaxed discussion of art, which would be accessible to a very broad audience.

And I knew that something was happening, I’m going to say, somewhere into the fourth or fifth episode. I started getting stopped in the grocery store, people saying, “I saw TNT last night. Way to go.” I was really very flattered.

Farha: You might have to bring that back.

Curtis: As long as COVID doesn’t come with it.

Farha: But you have resolved something about you patrolling at night with a flashlight. If I’m not mistaken, you have someone that does that full-time.

Curtis: Absolutely, yes.

Farha: Now, I think it’s time to move to some of these other artists.

Curtis: Sure.

Farha: And there’s one that I will confess is very close to my heart. The love continues to grow immensely. And if you’re out there, Jim Hart—some people call you Jimmy, I heard that in Haida Gwaii.

James Hart, the master carver. He is very dear to me for many reasons. And outside the museum stands his monumental bronze, The Three Watchmen, which I was lucky to see another cast of in front of the National Gallery in Ottawa.

But you’ve got a long relationship with this man, and recently as well, because as I mentioned at the start, this was a book that is really important to the museum, but I think also may stand itself as a kind of extension of your scholarly life.

It is something that I think art historians can look at as well. I think it’s more than just what we might call a museum catalogue. It has the full breadth of James Hart in the title: 7idansuu: James Hart, A Monumental Practice.

So, as you know, you can’t put a man like James Hart in one museum. It’s not so simple like Dempsey Bob. Hart has monumental projects all over the world, some even in Sweden, France, and of course in Canada.

And so the book is maybe the best way to show the full breadth of his life and career.

Curtis: When I first started talking about the book to Jim, we imagined it as an exhibition that could never happen. And the fact that, as you mentioned, he’s got these major monumental works, one of which is here, on the UBC Campus, the Reconciliation Pole.

And so the book is meant to operate at a number of levels. At a purely visual level, it’s an exhibition of his monuments. And then it’s a document of his commitment not only to his practice, but to the Haida in general.

And that project had a rather auspicious start as well. Haida Gwaii opened back up, I’m going to say, around 2022. They closed the islands during COVID. And so as soon as it opened, I went there to talk to Jim, and it wasn’t about this book. It was about something else that never happened.

And so I made arrangements. I land there, I find his house, I knock on the door. Rosemary, his partner, who I’ve become quite close with—a wonderful woman—answers the door, and I said, “Hi, I’m Curtis. I’m here to see Jim.”

And she said, “Oh, he’s not here. He’s in New York.”

He couldn’t get out of New York because of COVID. And so I had already booked flights, hotels, and so then I just kind of hung around their house, chatted with Rosemary, went down to Skidegate and sort of got to see the islands. The Haida Gwaii Museum was closed as well, but they have poles and things outside—and I just got an initial feel, at least, for Old Masset, Masset, and Skidegate, and Daajing Giids, to get a sense of what the book could be.

And then, I think I was going there three times a year over the course of five years, which I consider a perk. Just sitting down, interviewing Jim, with hours and hours and hours of tape.

Farha: I’ll confess, I feel a little envious.

Curtis: And then we began to gather photographs. I fired through their family photo albums and extracted so much material. And then began reaching out to the Olympic Museum in Switzerland, because he’s got a pole there. The King’s summer residence in Sweden also has a pole there. And gathering and gathering information.

And then it was a process about trying to think about how Haida art and Indigenous practices on the Northwest Coast in general have, for most of the last century, been pigeonholed into this anthropological context with very hermetic treatments.

I wanted really to pull Jim’s work out of that, what I thought was a delimiting discourse. And I hope that that was achieved, alongside with this brilliant visual presence.

I need to acknowledge the role that Figure One here in Vancouver, the publisher, played. They were absolutely fantastic. There was quite a bit of content to wade through.

The other fascinating part about the book is I hired a fellow by the name of David Strongman to do drone photography of many of the poles. And that gave a real fascinating perspective.

And so the book really arcs across his first major screen, a killer whale screen that’s at the Royal BC Museum, and then it finishes on the memorial pole that he raised for his son Carl in the spring of 2023. And there was a potlatch for that.

And so there’s a sort of an art historical curatorial thread that runs through it. But there are very personal stories about Jim and his family, the Staastas Eagle Clan where Jim is the hereditary chief, and of Old Masset, and Haida Gwaii in general.

And so that was a real educational experience for myself. Getting to know Jim, Rosemary, Gwaliga, Mary, Leah, Jim’s mom, who’s since passed, and then other people. He has a memorial pole outside his house for his sister who passed away in the ’90s.

I was fortunate to be able to go across to a village across from Masset, a former village called Yan, to see some of the very thin remnants of some of the monumental work that was there.

And even here, there’s a bronze, a smaller version of Three Watchmen, just off Quilchena Park in Vancouver. There’s a similar bronze out front of the National Gallery of Canada. So I must say, I have a very deep appreciation for Jim’s work and his life.

Farha: And that has to make your job really lovely, because you get to have not only the sort of behind-the-scenes connection with the art itself and everything that goes with it, but also a deep connection with the artists, one-on-one. And you couldn’t have painted a more beautiful picture of that relationship.

And there’s also, I should mention, in that book, a chapter written by James Hart himself. So you can hear his own words as well.

But there’s other exhibitions that we should quickly go through. Why don’t we just talk a little bit about Curve? Because this was really important: Women Carvers on the Northwest Coast.

These are Indigenous women carvers that may have been lost to history—we don’t know, honestly, right?—in the past, many of the pieces that still remain today carved by Indigenous carvers, some of them could have been made by women. We’re not 100% sure, right?

But we do know that there is an extraordinary body of work by women carvers. And you had the privilege of working with Dana Claxton on this exhibition.

Curtis: That came together in a fascinating way, in the sense that, in many respects, it was an extension of the Dempsey Bob show.

Freda Diesing, of Haida ancestry, who lived in Prince Rupert for a large portion of her life, was a key figure in teaching Dempsey Bob how to carve. And he reinforced that over and over while we were putting together his retrospective.

And I thought to myself, there’s something here. This artist has been under-recognized and has played a major role in many lives.

And so there was her work. Another artist that many people will be familiar with in Vancouver, is Ellen Neel, who’s got poles all around Vancouver and masks in collections throughout this city.

And so while I was thinking about these artists from the ’60s, ’70s, and ‘80s, and particularly Indigenous women that had been under-recognized, I had struck up a friendship with Dana Claxton, who many of you’ll know is a really important artist, filmmaker, curator, educator. And she is also quite a collector.

And so she had begun collecting a number of Indigenous women artists from the Northwest Coast, carvings in wood and argillite.

And so in the midst of a conversation one day, we both realized that there was a really fascinating exhibition that could come out of this conversation and that would arc from the 1960s to the present.

And as you mentioned, let’s say in the 19th, 18th, 17th century, while practices such as carving and weaving were definitively mostly men carving, mostly women weaving, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t crossover and cross-pollination.

However, again, in the anthropological treatment of practices like weaving and carving, anthropologists tend to categorize and not break categories or suggest that there’s latitude. And so that was another important part of rethinking the practice of Indigenous women artists on the Northwest Coast.

And it turned out to be immensely satisfying. Doreen Jensen, again, another artist that was active during the ‘80s, I got to know her daughter. And during a phone call, she said, “Oh, I still have my mom’s tools.”

And for anyone that’s familiar with carving, most carvers make their own tools eventually. And they’re very important because they’re styled for their hand, their style of carving, et cetera.

And she said, “Oh, would you like them for the show?”

And I said, “Absolutely.”

So she bundled them up, literally, and sent them to the museum.

And then similarly, I had asked Dale Marie Campbell, who’s a Tahltan Tlingit carver out of Prince Rupert, if we could borrow a few of her tools, because she was working on a mask that wasn’t going to be finished in time for the show.

And so I said, “Couldn’t you show that piece in progress?” And she was nervous about that. And I said, “Well, we’ll put it in a context where people understand that.” And I said, “If you could also send some tools, that’ll help with that concept.”

She said, “Okay, I’m going put four knives in a leather glove.” And she said, “Be really careful when they arrive, because they’re really sharp.”

And sure enough, the first thing I did was cut my finger when I was taking them out.

But it was a really important show in the sense that, as I said, it arced from the ’60s to the present. Many, I would say, were emergent carvers, such as Stephanie Anderson, Arlene Ness, Cherish Alexander, some mid-career artists, and more senior artists were featured. Susan Point, for example, was in the show. Marianne Nicolson was in the show.

So these are really important artists, but bringing them together within the larger context of Indigenous women and their key role in keeping traditions alive and vibrant—both in their communities and in a broader provincial and national context—was, I hope, important.

And Dana just did an incredible job in terms of encouraging the artists, bringing them together, and making it so that this show was an important opportunity for each one of them.

Farha: And you mentioned Susan Point, who is a Musqueam. We are here on Musqueam territory.

For the Audain Museum also—it’s very important to have local artists like Rick Harry, Xwalacktun, as well. And there are some up-and-coming artists from the Squamish Lil’wat Nations.

So it is another testament to the commitment of the museum to showcase its BC talent. When we think of The Three Watchmen. The base of The Three Watchmen at the Audain—it’s actually two art pieces in one, right? So you’ve got James Hart from Haida Gwaii, and then you have Rick Harry, right, at the base.

Curtis: As well as Levi Nelson.

Farha: That’s the name that was on the tip of my tongue.

Curtis: So we wanted to make sure that it was properly presented and it acknowledged the territory, the shared territories of the Squamish and Lil’wat Nations.

And Levi did something really interesting. So there’s a cutout ring at the base. Part of the imagery is, as you mentioned, by Xwalacktun. The other part of the imagery by Levi is based on some pictographs that are found on Lil’wat territory.

Farha: Now we are getting close to the end of our talk. But Curtis, I want to get a little bit behind the scenes with you. Something that I think is kind of fun—and I thought, let’s just, get into your head a little bit.

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing your office, which feels almost like a museum within a museum. Now, for listeners who cannot see it, what would you show us first?

Curtis: There was a piece, a three-panelled piece, which was created by Rebecca Belmore for her exhibition at the museum called Reservoir. And Rebecca is predominantly a performance artist.

And so what she often does is create a performance on the street, at a gallery, or in various other locations. Then she’ll go back and restage it to be photographed. But when she restages it for the photograph, her sister is the stand-in for Rebecca.

And so, in this piece in my office that leans against the wall, it’s her sister in a safety outfit, standing knee-deep in water, because the show was all about water—how precious it is and what it means.

And she just left it behind. It’s just vinyl pressed onto plywood. Her work isn’t about objects as much as it is about experience. She doesn’t have this preciousness associated with what she does. And I can only imagine that’s why she left it behind.

I’m happy to have it in my office just because the light levels are such that I can’t have pieces from the collection, but I can have what I refer to as remnants from all the different shows in different ways.

There’s a large white bulbous thing that sits on my table, which is Joseph Tisiga’s brain that you can actually wear on your head, which I take great joy in having people wear.

So there’s all these bits and pieces of things that happened —or have happened, rather—over the life of most of the museum, particularly my tenure at the museum. So I just take it for granted because it’s got quite layered over time. We won Best Wedding Venue in British Columbia in 2021, so I have that prize, along with a variety of other things.

Farha: So since we have very little time, can you give us a little snippet very quickly about—this is a project that you’re developing called The Tlingit: Four Centuries of Art. It’s something projected for 2028.

And you just recently returned from Alaska with that wonderful man, Dempsey Bob. I know you were with him. I don’t know if you were for the entire—

Curtis: Yes, yes, for the entire time.

Farha: So yeah, your job is fun, Curtis. Can you just give us a little snapshot about why this is an important project?

Curtis: Sure. Again, this happened on a trip that I took to Terrace, actually during the time of the Women Carvers show, when I was meeting some of the artists, and had lunch with Dempsey. And he said, “You have to do a Tlingit show next.”

And I said, “Okay,” and I just kind of filed that away.

And then once the Jim Hart book was off the ground and it was nearing completion, and the same with the Women Carvers, I called Dempsey. I said, “Do you really want to do that Tlingit show?”

And he’s like, “Absolutely.”

And I said, “Well, you’ll have to co-curate it with me.” Dempsey is Tahltan-Tlingit.

And he said, “Sure.”

And I said, “Okay. What do we need to do to get this off the ground?”

He said, “Well, we have to go to Alaska.”

And so this past May, actually, we started in Seattle, then we went to Anchorage, Juneau, Sitka, and Ketchikan.

Tlingit territory is predominantly the Alaskan Panhandle, but there are also Tlingit communities, or mixed Tlingit, Tahltan, Tsimshian communities, in the interior of B.C., as well as the southern Yukon.

And one thing that has happened consistently—and I think the best example is the Grand Hall at the Canadian Museum of History—is the reconstruction of major cedar-plank houses representing the Kwakwaka’wakw, the Haida, and others, with the exception of the Tlingit.

Farha: Yes, and I was also there recently.

Curtis: Oh, so good. You understand. The Tlingit are sequestered in a corner without any house in this Grand Hall, under dark lighting. And that’s purely because there’s this little dotted line and the fact that Alaska was sold to the United States by the Russians, I would say illegally, in 1867.

However, the Tlingit are just an essential part to the whole history of artistic production up and down the coast. And also bringing in that Canadian aspect to it, I thought, made it even more important because the relations, the family, and overlap is constant.

And so we started visiting artists and collections throughout Alaska, in Seattle. We’ll be going to New York, to the American Museum of Natural History, in the fall, as well as the the Louis Shotridge Collection at the Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania, and then continuing to meet with carvers, weavers, jewelry makers.

And it was absolutely fantastic because Dempsey taught carving in Sitka and Ketchikan in the ’80s, as Freda Diesing had instructed him to do.

So there were so many instances of encounters. For example, we’re in a café in Ketchikan, and this elderly lady came in, and she broke down because she hadn’t seen Dempsey in 25 years. So there were all these really special moments.

Also, though, in Seattle, we met with Alison Bremner, a brilliant Tlingit artist living outside her home community, and Nicholas Galanin, who is represented by a major commercial gallery in New York but lives in Sitka.

And I’ll be going up to Terrace this summer and doing a little road trip with Dempsey to all points between Terrace and Rupert, and meeting with some Tlingit artists or artists of Tlingit ancestry.

Dempsey has really taught me how to see and what to look for. And so, again, I feel privileged to have what is now a 30-plus-year relationship with Dempsey that keeps giving.

Farha: And a 30-plus-year relationship with Canadian art and the communities it comes from. And it’s a reminder to anyone who has just tuned in to go up to Whistler and see the Audain Art Museum.

I can just think of this beautiful Chilkat blanket from the Tlingit people at the Audain that, I would say, rivals some of the others I’ve seen—and I won’t mention where.

But I will say it’s as pristine as anything could be. It looks as though it came from the weaver’s hands yesterday, and it’s from the 1800s. It’s extraordinary.

Curtis, it’s been lovely to have you, and I thank you for taking the time to come from Whistler to UBC to speak with me today.

Curtis: I managed to get in a swim at Third Beach on the way, so all good.

Further Reading and Viewing