Covering Niagara: Studies in Local Popular Culture

Back to Our Roots: How Niagara Artists Centre Became Popular Again

BACK TO OUR ROOTS | How Niagara Artists Centre Became Popular Again ROSLYN COSTANZO INTRODUCTION Saturday, September 13, 2003, was a defining day for the Niagara Artists Centre (NAC).1 That evening, Lilli-Putting, a site-specific miniature golf installation , opened at the converted warehouse in downtown St. Catharines to a crowd of over 250 local residents, artists, and members. The show combined work by twenty new, long-standing, and founding members and reconciled NAC’s present with its past. NAC’s member artists were invigorated and the public excited by the return to this type of witty and collectively driven contemporary art programming, which had defined the artist-run group (the Niagara Artists’ Co-op), since its inception in the ’70s.2 The space was filled with artists, art lovers, and mini-golf enthusiasts. From a vantage point outside the building, revellers spilled onto the fire escape and street, sharing their experiences of the unconventional par 711 course. In a review in Pulse Magazine , G. Pardie enthused, “I was amazed by the turnout, not only the sheer [number] of people putting, but the diversity of people, everyone from old fogies and little kids, to artists and lawyers….” (2003). Lilli-Putting made contemporary visual art fun and unpretentious, dissolving social barriers between art and the general local public in the process. Since the ’70s, few NAC exhibitions could boast such popularity. The local relevance of many of the “art objects” in the exhibition solicited the community’s attention. Founding NAC president John Boyle constructed a hole resembling a ship passing through the Welland Canal, a prominent feature of the St. Catharines landscape and a symbol of industry, local history, 263 264 Local Connections and the working class. Don Dormady, NAC board member at the time of this writing, fashioned his hole after a map of the downtown core, allowing locals to putt through their own streets. Lilli-Putting, which was originally proposed by NAC members Sandy Fairbairn and Dennis Tourbin in the mid-’70s, evoked those early projects by the co-op members who went to great lengths to involve the local community, earning them “an enviable reputation for craziness and positive innovation” (Barber 1974). As such, Lilli-Putting signified the start of a new era at NAC, one built on this artist-run group’s long effort to put community at the centre of its contemporary visual art projects. In 2001, concurrent with the appointment of Stephen Remus as director, NAC underwent a community-focused renaissance. A keystone of NAC’s current programming is the rediscovery of art happenings carried out by the founding members of the civic-minded collective in the early ’70s. This populist and entertaining approach is unique among the more than 100 artistrun centres across Canada and renews the spirit of a mission statement issued by the Niagara Artists’ Co-op in 1974: “NAC’s new and intensified interaction with a much more representative public than before seems to be having a positive influence on the art being produced. If this is the case, and if it continues to be a natural and honest process, then it is a welcome development that will surely contribute to a strong and distinctive Canadian culture ” (press release). NAC’s recent resurgence has resulted in an increase in membership of more than 300 percent as well as some of the highest exhibition attendance records since the ’70s. Exploration of NAC’s history brings FIGURE 12.1 Lilli-Putting group installation, 2003. Niagara Artists Centre Archive into relief the organization’s uncommon and as yet unpublished contributions to the development of artist-run culture in Canada. Artist-run history exists on the margins of Canadian cultural research and, as a regional movement, has generated only a small body of writing. This case study takes a revisionist retrospective approach to the activities of NAC as a regional centre bound to the specifics of its environment and indicative of Canada’s national identity as a culmination of disparate geographic and cultural perspectives. Regionalism as practised by NAC’s first wave of artists leveraged local identities as a means of realizing a shared national experience. Today, as Canadian art institutions embark on the task of rethinking Canadian art in an era of globally linked media technologies and the predictable internationalist preoccupations that ensue, it is critical that regional artist-run centres continue to assert themselves by revisiting their cultural history from the...