The Prince Albert Arts Board has unveiled a permanent kiosk at the E.A. Rawlinson Centre to honour Arts Hall of Fame inductees.
Also available online, the display walks guests through the Arts Hall of Fame history back to its launch in 2014.
That first year is the only one that doesn’t contain a video for each person, organization or event that’s contributed to the city’s arts community. Big Drum Media put together the videos.
Cara Stelmaschuk, who’s on the Prince Albert Arts Board, said members knew they wanted to remind people in the city that arts and culture “is an important part of our identity.”
In 2019, longtime volunteer Bruce Rusheleau, the city’s oldest theatre company, the Prince Albert Community Players, and the longest running choral group in Saskatchewan, the Watsonairs, were added to the Arts Hall of the Fame.
The board hosts a gala every year to honour new inductees.
“Having something permanent was the next step—that permanent place where we always know that this is where the Arts Hall of Fame inductees are going to be kept in one nice place,” said Stelmaschuk.
Unlike the Sports Hall of Fame located in the Art Hauser Centre, she said they decided to go digital for a number of reasons. But one of the major ones is so people could access the videos.
“It won’t keep going and going down a wall somewhere, it’s compact and it’s all there,” she said, adding the inductees and their families have the videos as keepsakes.
Don Erhardt attended the unveiling on Tuesday morning. His wife Linda was inducted in 2015, which is also the year she passed away.
“She was a painter, a potter, a weaver, all of those kinds of things…and she was the studio monitor at the Arts Centre for a fair number of years, so she pretty much lived in that pottery studio,” he said.
“Anybody who…doesn’t know who the nominees are, this would be a great opportunity for them to go through and view the history of the inductees over the years. I think it’s a really good idea, and the fact that it’s available online and stuff, hopefully it’ll reach a lot more people and there’ll be more younger people who know the history of our community.”
Also inducted in 2015 was philanthropist Malcolm Jenkins as a ‘Builder of the Arts.’
He’s supported theatre companies such as Broadway North, Odyssey Productions and the Prince Albert Community Players. He also helped establish the E.A. Rawlinson Centre and the Borealis Music Festival.
“I certainly wouldn’t get it for acting,” he joked.
While the Arts Hall of Fame gala is a great way to honour inductees, explained Jenkins, the kiosk “is a way of sort of chipping that into granite so that it can be preserved.”
The touch screen digital kiosk is located on the first floor of the Rawlinson to the left of the stairs that lead up to the Mezzanine.
Stelmaschuk said it will always be there for people to go through while waiting before a show and, with its wheels, it can be easily moved if the space is needed for another event.
You can go through the inductees by category or by year.
The Prince Albert Arts Board is currently accepting nominations for 2020 inductees. Categories include literature, media arts, visual arts, performing arts, creative arts (culinary arts, fibre arts, cosmetology) and builders (impacting the arts community through volunteerism, sponsorship or philanthropy).
You can download the nomination form at www.princealbertarts.ca. The submission deadline is Apr. 30.
