2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games
Vancouver: Gallery to showcase photography of inner-city residents: “Random Perspectives: February 2010″ running June 25-30 at the Gathering Place community centre
In February and March, a dozen inner-city Vancouver residents took to the streets armed with digital cameras, basic photography skills and decidedly different perspectives in a town buzzing with Olympic excitement. The Gathering Place, a community centre primarily for low-income people, had provided them with six Canon Powershot 8480 digital cameras and a handful of [...]
ARTrageous Adventures offers arts and culture tour to British Columbia
ARTrageous Adventures is “Going for the Gold” this fall, announcing a five-day guided art and culture tour to Vancouver, B.C., Sept. 26-30. The tour, “ARTful Vancouver BC: A Cultural Journey of Olympic Proportion,” showcases Vancouver’s visual and performing arts, culture, and the Olympic legacy that has transformed the city. The reservation deadline is Aug. 1. [...]
Vancouver: Art Surfacing
A new public artwork explores False Creek’s marine life. Fiona Bowie’s new installation, Surface, will transmit the submarine activity of False Creek via a camera mounted under an aquabus. The live stream will function as an abstract mix of colours and impressions until crustaceans or fish swim by. After dusk, Surface takes on a more [...]
Olympic legacy not measured solely on economic benefits say Liberals
The B.C. Liberals say the Olympic games were about more than making money, while the opposition maintains that the government failed to take full advantage of the opportunity. The Olympic’s economic impact may not be fully felt for more than a decade according to a new report released by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, one of the largest auditing [...]
Cultural Olympiad: The lure and the legacy
What will be the legacy of the Cultural Olympiad? Some effects will be tangible and immediate, such as its impact on the International Olympic Committee and other Olympic Games organizing committees. Others will be more intangible and may take months or years to come to fruition. “I don’t want to put words in (the IOC’s) [...]
Stuff’s in store for wordsmith Shane Koyczan
Shane Koyczan is actually enjoying some relative quiet when the Straight reaches him at his Penticton home. This is his only interview for the entire day. In 24 hours, he’ll head to Toronto and back into the hot glare of the international media blitz sparked by his stirring, gold-medal performance of the spoken-word piece “We [...]
These shows are not about being disabled: People are just people and we just want to show what regular people are up to,’ creator of Spine says
Spine is about a guy going through a midlife crisis. Rick is about a teenager who likes to fish. Spatial Theory is about the diverse influences on an artist. They are not, their creators stress, about being disabled. The Paralympic Games begin tomorrow, and art exploring the disability experience is very much in evidence in Vancouver’s continuing [...]
Nelson Moody carving out a niche Coast Salish carver showcases craft to the world, and Sea to Sky, during Olympic and Paralympic Games
Canada’s First Nations people made it pretty clear at the Olympic opening ceremonies that they welcome other cultures onto their territory. And during the Paralympic Games, Squamish Nation carver Aaron Nelson Moody will continue to welcome people to his traditional territory, while teaching them about his people’s history and culture. The 43-year-old artist began training [...]
Vancouver Art Gallery Sets New Attendance Record: Nearly 100,000 Visitors
The 17 days of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games were the most highly attended in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s history. With line-ups that wrapped around Robson Square , the Gallery welcomed more than 95,000 visitors through its doors between February 12 and 28. “From Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man to Visions of British Columbia: [...]
Olympic visitors also lined up to view art
The Vancouver Art Gallery drew 95,000 visitors over the 17 days of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, the highest attendance in its history. Visitors were lured by free admission, courtesy of the B.C. government, and two blockbuster shows — Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man and Visions of British Columbia: A Landscape Manual. Lineups [...]
Vancouver 2010: View From the Top
Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson had no role in bringing the Olympics to his city. When the city held a plebiscite on the Olympics in 2003, Robertson, though he claims to have been a supporter, didn’t even vote. Robertson says at that time he was consumed with business and family matters. (He founded an organic juice [...]
Takin’ it to the (downtown) streets: For many people the Olympic experience is about crowds, street life and an abundance of arts and culture
The Olympics came with a lot of hype, and culturally, lived up to it. For the past two weeks, downtown Vancouver turned into a big street party, as up to 150,000 people a day flooded into the core to wander around, take in the sights and check out the many cultural events. “Downtown feels like [...]
Victoria dancers sparkle in the limelight: Emerging performers get their moment on a world stage
Victoria dancer Cameron Northover was stoked to perform in the Winter Olympic Games’ opening ceremonies. “It was a huge thrill, an experience that will be hard to beat the rest of my life — but it was an extreme time commitment for no money,” said the 28-year-old dancer. He volunteered along with about 180 others [...]
2012 planners impressed with Vancouver’s Cultural Olympiad
Vanoc’s integration of culture into the 2010 Olympic sports program has been singled out for praise by the man in charge of the Cultural Olympiad and ceremonies for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Bill Morris said Burke Taylor, executive producer of Vancouver’s 2010 Cultural Olympiad, and his team have integrated the cultural side of [...]
BC Street in the Richmond O Zone brings the province’s communities to the world
If you visit BC Street in the Richmond O Zone, you’re going to meet some entertaining characters. For instance, there’s Mike Puhallo, the cowboy poet from Kamloops who has written six books of poetry and writes a popular Meadow Muffins column for three regional papers. He said he’s “just a country poet not prone to [...]
