Blog

Open Studios – May 27 – 28, from 11 am – 5 pm

Website – www.artistsinourmidst.com

My studio – 4557 W. 4^th Ave. studio #2 on the map

Everybody is invited to enjoy our art, ask any questions and socialize.

All works will be offered at 50% discount. Last year was a great success. Everyone was happy; the buyers, for getting great bargains, and myself for seeing my work going to art lovers and for helping a good cause.

Artists in our Midst – the story

Pnina Granirer – www.pninagranirer.com

In European cities such as Paris, art has been blooming for centuries and has become an essential component of life and culture. Unfortunately, in the historically young city of Vancouver, art was barely noticed in the early nineties.

While living in Paris in 1992, I discovered an amazing number of galleries and museums and spent every free moment gorging myself on a wealth of art. One of the most exciting art happenings occurred in the spring, when an unusual event burst onto the city: Le Génie de la Bastille. All around the arrondissement (neighbourhood) of the Bastille, hundreds of artists opened their studios to the public for an entire week. A large exhibition at the City Hall was launched and maps were handed out to the public, showing the location of each studio. Every day, map in hand, I would go up and down the ubiquitous five floor buildings in the area, soaking in the opportunity of seeing the great variety of works and talking to the artists.

Then, too soon, I was back in Vancouver, still thinking with much pleasure about that wonderful week in Paris.

Getting together with my artist friend, Anne Adams, I described to her the excitingl days spent visiting the artists’ studios in the City of Lights, when a sudden thought occurred to me.

Anne, I said, what if we tried doing this here? Are any artists living in our neighbourhood, who might be interested? One never knows, unless one tries. Anne was as excited at the idea as I was, and we searched for a way to reach out to discover the artists in our community. We approached the now defunct local Courier newspaper, that was most supportive and published an article with a call to artists.

We did not wait long for the telephone to start ringing. To our delight, we discovered a good number of artists living in Point Grey, Kitsilano, and Dunbar/Kerrisdale, who were most willing to share their art with their neighbours.

The plan was simple. We aimed at letting our community know that the person living next door, or down the street, might be an artist who wanted to share their art with them.

A small group of artists got together to plan the event. We needed a venue to have an opening exhibition, followed by a weekend when the artists would open their studios and their homes to the public. This had never been done before in Vancouver!

The West Point Grey Community Centre at Aberthau offered its space and the first, very well attended exhibition, opened in 1993. Word spread like wildfire. We were inundated with calls from many artists from the West side communities who wanted to join. This will be too much for one weekend, I thought. Let’s keep it small, and limit the number of studios to no more than 20, so that everyone’s work could be seen.

I suggested that we hold the Art Walk over 3 weeks, one week for each neighbourhood. Preparing for this event was a lot of work, all of it voluntary. This was a time without the Internet, so we used a ‘telephone tree’ and the maiI. Anne was an excellent organiser and helped get the event going. I was quite idealistic at that time and suggested that we do not ask for any grants or taxpayers’ money, although donations from businesses and private donors were welcome. We would prove that artists had initiative and could do this event all by themselves. The local merchants were happy to help us by showing our art in their windows, turning the street into an art gallery.

And it worked! We proved that artists were capable of contributing and enriching their communities by sharing their art and creativity. Now we needed a name that would represent us. After sifting through many names, we decided to call ourselves Artists in our Midst – we were all artists living in the midst of our community. Two years later our idea had caught on and spread all over the city and the Lower Mainland and we are all culturally richer for it.

Over the 30 years since we began, much has changed. We are now back to only one weekend. Many new artists have joined us and we have expanded our area to include studios West of Main. During the last weekend in May, we celebrate our 30^th Anniversary. Everyone is invited to visit us, enjoy the art and perhaps take some home to live with.

As for myself, I shall repeat my last year’s idea of a fundraising sale to benefit STAND UP FOR MENTAL HEALTH, founded by my son, David, the recipient of the Governor General medal for Meritorious Service. He teaches stand-up comedy to people with mental illness, as a way of building confidence and fighting public stigma and has been invited to work all across Canada, the US and Australia.