Tag Archives: Collection

Margaret Peterson: A Search In Rhythm

April 11 – August 18, 2014

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

Discover more about Margaret Peterson by visiting the project website, click here.

Watch a short video about Margaret Peterson featuring Patricia Bovey | Robert Amos | Nick Tuele | Anne Mayhew | by Justine Drummond, click here.

This special curatorial project was developed in partnership with the University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries and UVic’s Special Collections and University Archives with funding support from the BC Arts Council. The project allowed for a co-op intern to select and develop a project to present new interpretations and scholarship utilizing primary research material and original works of art held at the university. Under the mentorship of the Legacy Art Gallery Director, Curator of Collections, and the University Archivist, the student created an exhibition and public program that highlights a major Canadian artist and furthers an important initiative of the University of Victoria, namely the building of the local artists’ archival holdings. This exhibition is one of the first of a series working with the artists’ archives at the University of Victoria.

The Collection at 50: Building the University of Victoria Art Collections

: William Percival Weston, Arbutus Shedding Bark

August 29 – November 24, 2012

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

Curated by Professor Martin Segger and Caroline Riedel

In conjunction with UVic’s 50th anniversary this exhibition, guest curated by former director Martin Segger, celebrates more than five decades of art at the University of Victoria.

The three founding components that underpin today’s University of Victoria Art Collection mark the stages in the institutional establishment of he University itself. The formal development of the Victoria College Art Collection was prompted by the amalgamation of the Victoria Normal School of Victoria College at the Lansdowne campus in 196. The commissioning of public art to enhance new buildings essentially began with construction on the Gordon Head Campus in 1961. The death of Katherine Emma Maltwood in 1961, just two years before issue of the University of Victoria’s letter patent, prompted her husband John to act on her wishes quickly and the Maltwood Art Gallery at Royal Oak passed into the hands of the University in 1964. Each initiative was to determine in its own way the future development of the University’s now 27,000 item art collection. – Martin Segger (Director and Curator 1973-2011)

Art at the McPherson Library

: Myfanwy Spencer Pavelic, Blue, Black, & Orange, 1980

June – September, 1998

McPherson Library Gallery

McPherson Library received an “artistic facelift” at the hands of curator Brian Grison. This upgrade included the cataloguing, cleaning and rearranging of 150 works already in the library, as well as the integration of 400 new pieces from the Maltwood Art Museum’s permanent collection.

Artists included Myfanwy Spencer Pavelic, Maxwell Bates, C. J. Collins, Jack Shadbolt, Don Jarvis, Brian Fisher and many, many more. Through the exhibition, UVic hoped to introduce its students, faculty, and staff, as well as the public, to the extensive range of art in the collection.

The museum decide to display as many of its framed paintings and prints as possible in the university’s McPherson Library. The result, on show to anyone who walks the stalks, is a stunning example of what can be done with an art collection. Ninty five per cent of what was in stoage is now on show… In the five floors of the building, almost 700 works of art are hung.

Robert Amos, “Library Full of Surprises”, Times Colonist, August 29, 1999

The Paul F. Crawford Collection: The First Three Years

May 10 – May 30, 1994

McPherson Library Gallery

A selection of works from Crawford’s collection of Canadian artists, including major works by Garry Lee-Nova and Reg Holmes R.C.A.

About the Collector:

Paul F. Crawford began collecting artwork on March 1, 1990, when he found a portrait by Yousuf Karsh in a Victoria Salvation Army. He went on to collect over two hundred pieces by Canadian and International artists.