Recently the Mann Art Gallery made changes to their department structure.
The new person in charge of the artistic direction is Rebecca La Marre who works under the title of Artistic Director. La Marre said she’s had a great response to her tenure since beginning in April.
“I really appreciate being welcomed into the Community in this way and I’m really excited about the relationships that are going to develop and the projects that are going to come out of that,” she said.
With La Marre in as the Artistic Director, Carolyn Carleton steps in to act as the Administrative Director. The duo share responsibilities, but have different areas of focus.
“I’m responsible for programming and education programming and overseeing it and communications with the public, and the kind of direction of the gallery in terms of the programming overall,” La Marre explained.
La Marre previously worked at the Remai Modern Art Gallery in Saskatoon as the Editor and Publications Coordinator in the curatorial department. She said her new position is a bit of a step up, but has more responsibility.
“I was doing public programming there and I’ve done a lot of freelance work with different institutions across Canada and in the UK and in the States and all sorts of places,” La Marre explained.
She started the job in the middle of April and currently commutes from Saskatoon for the job because the position is part time. She has been impressed by the artistic community in Prince Albert.
“I’ve been really impressed. It’s been great getting to meet everyone and getting to know everyone,” she said. “Everyone seems to really care about the arts that I’ve met. Everyone seems really invested in the Gallery and arts programming and I’ve been really impressed with the amount of collaboration between arts organizations here.
“For a population this size it’s really impressive how many resources there are for artists here. I have been really blown away and everyone’s been making me feel so welcome and there seems to be a lot of really interesting things happening in Prince Albert.”
Her first official exhibition is ‘Tone Poems’ by Rob Froese, which had its opening on Thursday, July 11. She was excited by the opportunity to curate her first exhibit.
“I really enjoyed getting to work with the space and it’s a really great facility,” she said. “The lighting system is really exciting and the movable walls are designed really well, so it was a real pleasure to actually design the exhibition and install it in the space.”
La Marre said the partnership with the adjoining EA Rawlinson Centre has advantages because the two can coordinate for opening and share resources.
“That’s a really nice thing that I didn’t anticipate coming into the job,” she said.
She also appreciated how excited everyone in attendance was for the new exhibition and how people came from surrounding communities.
“That was really nice. Just seeing the conversation and the buzz that started happening at the opening was really encouraging.
Because Froese is also a traveling mentor for CARFAC, a nonprofit voice for artists in Canada, she was also impressed by the ability Froese had to interact.
“He travels all around Saskatchewan and has mentorship sessions with different artists, and he’s mentoring several artists in Prince Albert, so it was really neat to see them come to the opening and see how their conversations with Rob were then pushed further by being able to see his work,” La Marre said.
michael.oleksyn@paherald.sk.ca
