Carleton University Art Gallery took home one-third of the major awards at the Ontario Association of Art Galleries (OAAG) Awards.
The gallery won three of nine major categories, including exhibition of the year, design, and curatorial writing.
Carleton President Roseann Runte said via email she is proud of the gallery staff and students.
“The gallery has a long tradition of outstanding work and very high quality publications and exhibits,” she said. “We have very talented and well qualified curators.”
The gallery has a long history of award-winning work, John Osborne, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, said via email.
“CUAG has won numerous awards for its exhibitions, and particularly its publications,” he said. “These depend on two things: a high standard of scholarship, and a high standard of writing. This in turn depends on the capabilities of the Director and Curator, the two individuals mostly responsible for exhibition and catalogue production.
Heather Anderson, one of CUAG’s curators, said the recognition is good for the gallery.
“CUAG has been receiving over the years quite a bit of attention and positive recognition of the publications that we produce and a number of our publications have won awards,” Anderson said.
“Those are the kinds of contributions that the gallery seeks to make,” she said. “We want to truly contribute to discussions about contemporary art.”
One award, ‘Exhibition of the Year,’ went to Photomontage, a co-organized exhibit which took place in 2012 between CUAG and Fundación Juan March in Madrid, Spain.
Two awards went to “Jocelyne Alloucherie: Climats,” a catalogue published by CUAG in 2012.
Anderson said finances and timing often have an effect on which exhibitions were going to be documented by a catalogue. For Alloucherie, the fact that she had a new body of work made her an ideal choice, Anderson said.
“She is a significant artist,” Anderson said. “It was important to document it and to write about it. It’s not necessarily something that you would find documented elsewhere, so we also pay attention to choosing exhibitions that by producing a catalogue about them we are making a contribution that doesn’t exist already. ”
Former director of CUAG, Diana Nemiroff, wrote extensively in the catalogue.
“She writes in a thoughtful and smart, engaging manner, but is also at times poetic and contemplative,” Anderson said. “She offers the reader another way to consider the artwork and really makes a contribution in terms of how that artist work can be interpreted and understood.”
