This year we’re celebrating forty years of grunt! The incredible array of artists, cultural workers and community members who have shared their time and gifts with us since we opened our doors in September 1984 has made grunt what it is today: often ineffable yet steadfast in our support of diverse and unruly approaches and practices. Anchored in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood on the lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations throughout our history, we reach far beyond our gallery walls through the work of extraordinary artists and you, our delightful, generous and ever-growing community—these are the ingredients of the ‘grunt sauce’ simmering on our proverbial stove for four decades. At times sweet, at times spicy, ours is a concoction reduced and extended over the years, with a pinch or dash from too many cooks to thank, a secret recipe we’d love to share with you.
To kick off our celebrations, grunt gallery is proud to launch archives.grunt.ca, the new home for our archives online. The grunt archive, containing documentation of forty years of artist-run programming and projects, has become a cornerstone of gallery operations, a wellspring for research, programming, and other activations, and an extension of our care for artists and their work during and beyond their time in our space. While our initiatives have placed our archival content in several spaces online since 2012, we are pleased to at last offer audiences and researchers a comprehensive, centralized, technically robust, and practical platform to explore and enjoy our collections.
archives.grunt.ca is a work in progress and we welcome feedback on the content, use, accuracy and accessibility of the site. Research inquiries are also welcome and we are happy to support and guide your searches. If you are an artist who has shown or worked with grunt over the years, we would love to be in touch about how we can best represent records of you and your work. More details on feedback and policies can be found here.
While we celebrate in the present we also look back to acknowledge the foresight and labour of folks like Glenn Alteen, Brice Canyon, Merle Addison, Archer Pechawis, Venge Dixon, and the dozens of art workers and volunteers whose work foregrounded this project. For the full story of our collection please see its record here.
This project, now some three years in the making, is the product of many folks’ hard work and a community of care for the story of contemporary art in Vancouver. We would like in particular to thank Susan Gibb and Anna Tidlund at Western Front, Kendra Place and Syr Reifsteck at VIVO Media Arts, and Shaunna Moore, Seth Kaufman, and Maria Passaroti at Whirl-i-Gig, as well as Casey Wei, Russell Gordon, Emily Guerrero, and Vanessa Kwan. Thanks to the team at grunt: Katrina Orlowski, Meagan Kus, Kay Slater, Whess Harman, Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa, Dan Pon, Jessica Fletcher, Sebnem Ozpeta, Dustyn Krasowski-Olmstead, Kira Saragih, Linda Gorrie, and Mary Ann Anderson. Finally we give thanks to the thousands of artists, curators, photographers and videographers, and others whose work is represented in our archive.
archives.grunt.ca is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategies Fund.
Please stay tuned for archives features, highlights, instructional resources and much more, we are forty, sporty, and excited for what lies ahead.
Image creditsImage Credits (starting at top left, clockwise): Photos taken by Merle Addison, Rachel Topham, Merle Addison, and Henry Robideau.