In a week-long workshop called Ignite: Your Future as an Artist, MFA students explored essential professional skills, including legal and bookkeeping basics, art pricing strategies, and effective approaches to communicating their artistic brand.

The first of its kind at UM, Ignite is an exciting partnership between IDEA START and The Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (The Centre), and participating schools or faculties.

“Ignite demonstrates the power of collaboration. IDEA START initially connected the School of Art with The Centre. The School of Art provided important direction on program nuance and introductions to appropriate artists who could serve as guest speakers. And, The Centre designed and delivered the workshop,” said Janine Carmichael, Faculty Specialist for Entrepreneurship at The Centre who facilitated the workshop together with Jackie Hope, Educational Developer at The Centre.

Hope, who makes adventure films with her husband Ray, recently appeared on the IDEA START Podcast to share about their filmmaking company Midlife Mountaineer. “Ignite was an exciting project to be a part of. How lucky am I to spend a week with these talented students in a program that combines my love of art, entrepreneurship and education?”

Key features of Ignite: Your Future as an Artist included:

• Panel discussion with alumni and staff from the School of Art who have had commercial success in their career
• Career planning and networking with the Career, Community and Experiential Learning Centre
• Focus on legal and accounting best practices, including a student presentation from the Manitoba Legal Clinic for the Arts in the Faculty of Law
• Art pricing strategies
• Meaningful reflection activities

“A highlight of the week was the day spent off campus. Shaun Mayberry, co-owner of Mayberry Fine Art, gave students an insider’s look at gallery operations and practical tips for approaching and working with galleries. The day continued with lunch at Creative Manitoba, where staff shared the programs and supports they offer to help Manitoba artists thrive. The day wrapped up with a tour of three UM faculty’s studio spaces, giving students a close look at professional practices,” Carmichael added.

Associate Director of Graduate Programs, Dr. Oliver Botar added: “Every second year our MFA students participate in a week-long workshop on curation. We are so pleased to now offer this workshop on the alternate years. It’s important for students to wrestle with the thorny issues of artistic integrity and commercial viability while they are in our program.”

As for Carmichael and Hope, they can’t wait to do it again.

“Students in the MFA program are incredibly creative and curious and we can’t wait to refine our next offering for them in 2027. We also can’t wait to partner with other schools and faculties who want to do something similar,” Carmichael added.

Because Ignite bridges curricular and co-curricular learning, it can be fully customized with program length, learning goals, delivery format and more.    

Interested? Please reach out to Janine Carmichael, Faculty Specialist, Entrepreneurship in The Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL).

Young Winnipeg painters are having an exciting moment.

For the past six weeks or so, Dee Barsy’s signature aqua blues have washed over the 300,000 people who daily visit Toronto’s Union Station, which is decorated with a dozen of her bird-themed murals, buoying Toronto Blue Jays fans during the World Series.

Last month, artist, curator and writer Chukwudubem Ukaigwe was shortlisted to represent the Prairies region for the Sobey Art Award 2025 — Canada’s largest prize for visual artists, which will be handed out on Saturday.

Ukaigwe is perhaps best recognized for his paintings, often colourful to the point of psychedelic while refined in their details and lifelikeness, blending elements of realism, pop art and surrealism.

The artist is among a small group of artists around 30 or under, many of whom went to art school together at the University of Manitoba, and who may appear — at least at first glance — to be working in similar directions.

Two others are painters Bria Fernandes and Ekene Emeka Maduka, who sat down to discuss their work in a public conversation at the University of Winnipeg in mid-October.

Fernandes opened by discussing a piece on which she had collaborated with Maduka in art school in an obvious Renaissance style, before moving on to more recent works.

One of these appeared at the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Threads of Kin and Belonging: A Trinnipeg Live Mixtape Project show last year, while others were the basis for Gallery 1C03’s Things Left Unsaid exhibit, which ran in September and October.

To read the entire article, please follow the link to The Free Press.

That would explain why the photographer’s lens is typically trained at the roots instead of angled toward the treetops.

By nature and through nurture, Ciurysek’s practice is terrestrially bound.

“I have more of a familiarity or comfort with being outside, just lying down on the ground. I always had a desire to put my hands in the dirt or just lie down in the grass,” says Ciurysek, an associate professor in the School of Art at the University of Manitoba.

Compelled to touch grass — to silence urban and technological distraction to reconnect with the natural world — Ciurysek often heads to the forest, an environment that served as an inspiration for her solo exhibit Through, and through, on view at the Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts (100 Arthur St.) until Nov. 15.

At Platform on Friday at 6 p.m., Ciurysek will be joined in conversation by hannah_g, a local writer and the curator of the Galerie Buhler Gallery, to discuss the exhibition as part of Platform’s active research lecture series. The event is free to the public.

To read the entire article, please follow the link to The Free Press.

It was with great sadness that the School of Art at the University of Manitoba learned of the passing of Monica Mercedes Martinez on October 22, 2025. Monica was one of the first students to receive her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Manitoba. She and three others made up the first cohort of graduate students in fine arts when the new MFA program began in 2010. Monica Martinez graduated in 2012.

Monica’s thesis exhibition, installed in the School of Art Gallery in ARTlab in 2012, was powerful and poignant. Referencing her Chilean background Monica created hundreds of porcelain bones wrapped in red earthenware clay and stacked them up into a mountain-like shape on the gallery floor. Her thesis exhibition titled everyone is fallen except for us fallen… represented the skeletons of those tossed out of helicopters above the Atacama Desert during the reign of Augusto Pinochet, military dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990. Monica moved from Chile to Alberta when she was three years old. She talked about inherited generational trauma, and her thesis exhibition allowed her to dive deeply into reflecting on her cultural history and the impact it had on her family. “As a Chilean who grew up on the Canadian Prairies, she uses her practice to discuss the historical foundations that influence how we define who we are and where we belong” (returnatacama.com/whoweare).

After graduating Monica helped found a group of female Latino artists who called themselves Mujer Artista, a new initiative in 2014 designed to develop opportunities for local Latin women artists in Winnipeg. Monica Martinez participated in several group exhibitions and performances at Ace Art Inc. in Winnipeg’s Exchange District under the auspices of Mujer Artista.

In 2016 Monica travelled to Chile with a group of women artists known as CONSTELACIONES with the intention of burying her MFA thesis exhibition in the Atacama Desert, performing “a ritual of return, remembrance and witness” (returnatacama.com/performance/chile). Six large boxes filled with sculptural forms created by Monica to honour and remember the lives affected by the 1973 coup in Chile were returned to the desert in a performance piece titled Return Atacama. “Returning these symbols of grief, violence, and time to Chile completes a journey that began with Monica’s family’s exile . . . ” (returnatacama.com/performance/chile). One of the participants in the performance states of her experience: “Return Atacama dramatizes trauma memory as it is evoked by Martinez’s sculptural figures, abstract forms embodying the tension between disappearance and trace, resuscitating the bones of the desaparecidos. Their material hybridity—red terracotta and white porcelain—and textured surfaces are inscribed by her personal and collective memories that speak to her ‘mestizo identity’” (returnatacama.hemi.press/chapter/return-to-atacama-an-incomplete-alphabet-of-bearing-witness).

While studying in Winnipeg Monica formed many professional and personal relationships. Her warmth, kindness, and generosity was felt by the art community as she shared her inventive and unique art practice presenting work that was deeply provocative, challenging, and often interactive. Monica’s public interventions, such as Softening the Line (2014), where she encased a wrought iron fence in Winnipeg’s north Main Street area in red clay, brought attention to social and cultural lines that demarcate unspoken boundaries not to be crossed. An image of Monica pinching plugs of wet red clay onto the fence in the red-stained snow around her appeared on the cover of the Winter issue of Cahiers métiers d’art = Craft Journal, wherein Monica also contributed a review of an exhibition titled Saves Nine at the Manitoba Craft Council in 2013.

In 2021 Monica Martinez was included in a chapter written by Heidi McKenzie in Craft is Political (edited by D Wood, Bloomsbury Press). In her essay McKenzie wrote about the work of three Canadian mixed-race ceramic artists of colour, “Liminality: The Work of Monica Mercedes Martinez, PJ Anderson, and Habiba El-Sayed.” In the essay Monica is quoted saying, “The conversations I’ve had with the curious, the confused and the outright hostile people who observe my work are essential because, to me, art is a living thing that should make you question. When I develop new work, these conversations revolve in my mind” (email correspondence with the author, October 2019). In an exhibition at the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario she performed containher (2019). Standing inside a cage, pressing wet, red clay into the chicken-wire enclosure, Monica gradually disappeared from the viewer’s gaze as she continued to work from the bottom up. It was important to Monica to draw attention to the messiness of the making process by performing it publicly, standing in stark contrast to the orderly presence of the finished artworks pristinely displayed in the space around her. Monica’s legacy will live on in the thought-provoking artworks she leaves behind.

Of Monica’s premature passing, Dr. Oliver Botar, Associate Director of the Graduate Program at the School of Art states, “I remember well her quiet yet powerful presence and the stunning depth of her thesis exhibition. As part of the first cohort in the MFA Program, it is particularly poignant that she should have left us so soon. As Associate Director responsible for Graduate Studies, I wish to honour her memory.”

Monica’s graduate program advisor Prof. Grace Nickel fondly remembers Monica’s resolve and dedication, and her unconventional approach to working with clay. “I’ll never forget how Monica broke all the ‘clay rules’ in her approach to the medium and how, once constructed, she transported hundreds of forms produced for her thesis exhibition with great determination and perseverance across uneven terrain and treacherous ice in the winter to move them from her studio in the Art Barn to the kilns in the Ceramics and Sculpture Building.” A breezeway now connects the two buildings, but at the time the graduate program was blessed to have a student with the generosity and kindness to not complain and make it work. This attitude encapsulates Monica’s giving spirit and deep commitment to those whose lives she touched.

Monica Martinez often shared her artwork in clandestine ways, breaking down conventional notions of exhibiting in galleries. Prof. Nickel remembers, “one day when I arrived at the studio, I noticed a red line encircling the entire Ceramics Building, red earthenware clay pressed into the mortar in a single line all along the outer periphery of the nondescript single-storey structure, as if to say I was here and I’m leaving my mark. I’m reminded of Monica every time it rains because there is a beautiful cascade of red clay softly washing down the walls of the building as it runs down to return to the earth.” In another project she surreptitiously placed small stacks of figurative bricks throughout the university campus waiting for the lucky finder to take one home as a memento. These found works will now hold even more meaning and memory.

Monica’s quiet yet powerful presence will be deeply missed by many. Condolences to her family and friends.

Monica’s obituary can be found at trinityfuneralhome.ca/obituary/monica-mercedes-martinez

To read the full interview please visit Winnipeg Free Press.

The opening gathering brought together students, staff, faculty, and community members to mark the occasion. The event included opening remarks and a smudge led by Knowledge Keeper Barb Blind (Brandon University), followed by a community beading circle that invited conversation and connection. The afternoon also featured the unveiling of a new mural by artist Mike Valcourt, adding a powerful visual presence to the space and reflecting the values of creativity, storytelling, and cultural continuity.

Designed as a welcoming and supportive hub within the School of Art, the Indigenous Student Space offers a place for Indigenous students to gather, study, rest, and connect with Elders and Knowledge Keepers. The space is intended to support both everyday student needs and future programming that centres Indigenous ways of knowing, making, and being.

The ISS came together through the efforts of many contributors across the School of Art and the broader university community. Special thanks are extended to Katherine Boyer, Dr. Suzanne McLeod, and Lori Blondeau for their leadership, guidance, and sustained commitment throughout the development of the space.

Students are encouraged to stop by, say hello, and spend time in the space. More programming and events will be announced in the coming weeks.

For inquiries, please contact: soaindigenous@umanitoba.ca

Wally Dion: a thousand tiny prayers

November 6, 2025 – February 14, 2026
Curated by Blair Fornwald
School of Art Gallery, 255 ARTlab, University of Manitoba
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 6, 5:00–8:00 PM

Dion’s textile-based portraits and star blankets examine the generative and communal power of plaiting, stitching, and assembly—processes that bind individual elements into something stronger and more beautiful than their parts. Drawing on the interwoven nature of communities and ecosystems, Dion’s works also reflect on Indigenous identity, cultural resistance, and solidarity across global struggles for justice and self-determination.

Vibrant, luminous, and intricately detailed, Dion’s quilts and composite portraits merge synthetic fabrics, floral scarves, and translucent papers into layered reflections on care, strength, and connection. His recent works incorporate rose motifs—symbols shared across Indigenous, Ukrainian, and Palestinian communities—as gestures of empathy and unity.

Dion, a member of Yellow Quill First Nation (Saulteaux), has exhibited widely in Canada and the United States. His work is held in the public collections of the Remai Modern, the MacKenzie Art Gallery, the Portland Art Museum, and the Autry Museum of the American West, among others.

Related Events

Quilting Workshops with Wally Dion
November 1–6 | Studio 460 (460 ARTlab)
Drop in throughout the week to design and create patchwork quilt faces using the bright, iridescent fabrics featured in Dion’s work. Artist-led sessions: November 1, 3, and 5. All supplies provided. No experience necessary — just curiosity and creativity.
Register to attend

Artist Talk with Wally Dion
Thursday, November 6 | 12:00–1:30 PM | 468 ARTlab
Join the artist in conversation about his practice, cultural influences, and the ideas behind a thousand tiny prayers.
Also live-streamed on the School of Art Gallery YouTube channel.
ASL interpretation and YouTube closed captioning available.

Wally Dion: a thousand tiny prayers invites viewers to imagine a world strengthened by connection, compassion, and collective care.

School of Art Gallery

255 ARTlab, University of Manitoba
Free admission | All are welcome

Monday-Friday, 9:00 am-5:00 pm or by appointment

Reception & Keynote with Robert Harrison: Thursday, October 30 | 5:00–8:00 PM
(Keynote Presentation & Slideshow: 6:00 PM | Room 366 ARTlab)

The University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery is pleased to present Robert Archambeau: One Leads to the Next, a retrospective exhibition honouring the life and work of one of Canada’s most influential ceramic artists. Featuring a selection of key works in clay and on paper, the exhibition traces Archambeau’s six-decade career as an artist, educator, and mentor whose impact continues to resonate in studios across Canada and beyond.

Working in clay for more than sixty years, Archambeau developed a body of work recognized for its refinement, restraint, and technical mastery. Deeply influenced by the ceramic traditions of Japan, Korea, and China, his vessels reveal a devotion to form and process that merges discipline with intuitive experimentation. One Leads to the Next brings together groupings and variations that illuminate his ongoing investigation of the vessel—its endless potential for reinvention—and the quiet dialogue between surface, shape, and fire.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, Archambeau served in the U.S. Marine Corps before completing his BFA at Bowling Green State University and an MFA at Alfred University. He taught at the Rhode Island School of Design before joining the University of Manitoba’s School of Art in 1968, where he shaped generations of ceramic artists until his retirement in 1991. His contributions to the field earned numerous accolades, including the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2003), the Manitoba Arts Council Award of Distinction (2014), and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (2008). Archambeau was named Professor Emeritus in 2004 and passed away in Winnipeg in 2022.

About the Keynote Speaker

Robert Harrison is a practicing artist based in Helena, Montana, whose 40-year career spans large-scale architectural sculpture and studio ceramics. A graduate of the University of Manitoba (BFA) and the University of Denver (MFA), Harrison is a Fellow of NCECA and a member of the International Academy of Ceramics, the World Association of Brick Artists, and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. His projects, exhibitions, and publications—including Sustainable Ceramics: A Practical Guide (Bloomsbury/ACS, 2013)—reflect a sustained commitment to material innovation and environmental consciousness.

About the Curator

Candice Ring is a studio potter from Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the Ceramics Studio Technician at the University of Manitoba. A former studio assistant and longtime friend of Archambeau, Ring brings a personal perspective to this exhibition. She holds a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Manitoba and an MFA in Studio Art from Arizona State University, and has exhibited her work throughout North America, Australia, and China.

Exhibition Details

Robert Archambeau: One Leads to the Next
October 16 – November 14, 2025
Curated by Candice Ring
School of Art Gallery – Collections Gallery, 255 ARTlab
Reception & Keynote with Robert Harrison: Thursday, October 30 | 5:00–8:00 PM
Keynote Presentation and Slideshow: 6:00 PM | Room 366 ARTlab

umanitoba.ca/art/robert-archambeau-one-leads-next

Free admission · Everyone welcome.

Thursday, October 16, 2025  |  7:00–9:00 PM (doors 6:30 PM)
Desautels Concert Hall, University of Manitoba

Light refreshments • Cash bar • Free admission • Registration required

The School of Art Gallery (SOAG) invites the UM community and the public to Exchange as a Symmetrical Gesture, an evening that celebrates the culmination of SOAG’s multi-year Visiting Curator Program with a reading, a curatorial panel, and the launch of three new publications.

The program begins with an opening reading by artist Erika DeFreitas, followed by a curatorial conversation featuring Grace Deveney, Shalaka Jadhav, and Lillian O’Brien Davis, moderated by Nic Wilson. A reception will follow, where guests can connect with the curators and artists and pick up the newly released publications documenting the exhibitions produced through the program.

Launched in Summer 2021, the Visiting Curator Program has helped shape conversations around contemporary art in the Prairies while creating meaningful opportunities for students, faculty, and community members to engage directly with curators working across Canada and the United States. The initiative was realized through three exhibitions at the School of Art Gallery: Open Structure (curated by Grace Deveney, Nov 3, 2022–Jan 28, 2023), The Performance of Shadows (curated by Lillian O’Brien Davis, Feb 16–Apr 29, 2023), and To Broadcast is to Scatter (curated by Shalaka Jadhav, Nov 30, 2023–Feb 10, 2024).

This capstone event recognizes the wide-ranging research, collaboration, and mentorship fostered by the program and highlights its lasting impact on artistic and curatorial practice at UM and across the region.

Register here to attend: showpass.com/exchange-as-a-symmetrical-gesture-visiting-curator-program-closing-celebration

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Featured Guests

Grace Deveney is the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago and an art historian with a PhD from Northwestern University. She previously served as Associate Curator for the Prospect.5 triennial in New Orleans and Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Shalaka Jadhav is a writer, researcher, and curator whose work bridges critical geographies, public memory, and queer ecologies. Trained in urban planning, they have curated exhibitions across Halifax, Winnipeg, Guelph, and Toronto, and co-direct Textile, a hyper-local arts collective in Waterloo Region.

Lillian O’Brien Davis is Associate Curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. She has curated projects at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Susan Hobbs Gallery, and the School of Art Gallery, with writing published in BlackFlash, Peripheral Review, C Magazine, and RACAR.

Erika DeFreitas works across performance, photography, video, textiles, installation, drawing, and writing. Their practice examines loss, legacy, post-memory, gesture, and materiality, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.

Nic Wilson is an artist and writer whose videos, performances, texts, and artist books explore time, queer lineage, and decay. They have exhibited nationally and internationally and were long-listed for the 2021 Sobey Art Award.

Accessibility and contact

The Desautels Concert Hall is accessible. For questions about access, ASL interpretation, or other accommodations, please contact the School of Art Gallery.

School of Art Gallery
255 ARTlab, 180 Dafoe Road, University of Manitoba (Fort Garry)
Hours: Monday–Friday, 9:00 AM–5:00 PM (or by appointment; closed statutory holidays)
Email: gallery@umanitoba.ca | Phone: 204-474-9322

Valmestad’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in an intimate engagement with nature, shaped by personal history and philosophical reflection. From the sweeping expanses of the Prairies to the elemental terrains of Norway, Iceland, and Newfoundland, Valmestad seeks out open vistas as emotional and contemplative spaces. Her paintings probe the interplay of light, spatial tension, and atmosphere (Stemning), drawing on the aesthetics of the Sublime to evoke awe, unease, and introspection. 

For Valmestad, Nature is not merely a subject but a force. Its rawness and immensity serve as a catalyst for emotional resonance and a profound sense of place. Artist residencies in Iceland (Iceland Up Close, UM Today) and Newfoundland have furthered this inquiry, offering her access to coastal landscapes that mirror the rugged spirit of northern geographies. These experiences continue to shape her visual language and deepen her exploration of space and water. 

In this latest series, Liv Valmestad explores the raw beauty of Newfoundland’s Atlantic coast, continuing her inquiry into Nature’s emotional and spatial presence. Influenced by the aesthetics of the Sublime, her paintings evoke both awe and unease, capturing the elemental force of coastal landscapes. 

Inspired by her residency at Bareneed Studios on the traditional territories of the Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, Innu, and Inuit, Valmestad reflects on our deep ecological connection to place. Fishing nets appear as abstracted forms, symbolizing human impact and the enduring rhythms of coastal life. Guided by Deep Ecology, her work calls for reverence toward Nature and a renewed awareness of our place within it. 

Beyond her studio practice, Liv Valmestad currently serves as the second Canadian President of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA), a leading international organization representing over 1,000 art information professionals across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Founded in 1972, ARLIS/NA includes Canadian founding member Peter Anthony, then Head Librarian of the Architecture/Fine Arts Library at the University of Manitoba. 

Visitors of St John’s College are encouraged to stop by the Quiet Room to experience this powerful body of work.