Richmond Art Gallery starts 2024 with two exhibitions that explore the social and political power of communication.

Artist Dion Smith-Dokkie’s This Will Be the First of a Thousand Worlds We Give Life To exhibition is a physical manifestation of research, ideas and themes concerning neo-colonial expansive terraformation and gestures that mark Indigenous autonomy and presence in the face of continuing settler colonial dispossession.

Eastside Arts Society (EAS) presents the return of its highly anticipated two-day summer art-making event, CREATE! Arts Festival. A community initiative designed to welcome guests to explore, learn, and create art together with local artists, CREATE! Arts Festival features a wide variety of accessible visual and performing arts workshops for adults and youth.

// Liminal Futures // intends to examine the potentiality of liminality as a portal to a better future and include works by Rah Eleh, Diasporic Futurisms (Vanessa Godden and Adrienne Matheuszik), Skawennati, and Audie Murray. The artists centre diverse knowledge and pluralistic forms of agency that undermine the current hegemonic notion of ‘humanity’. In contrast to an apocalyptic future, they embrace nonlinear temporalities and forms of liminality to put forth multiple futures.

Fresh & steaming hot from Dreamwalker Dance is the Giant Dumpling Sealed Secrets Keeper, an installation art piece of a “giant” dumpling set upon a red tablecloth. The dumpling will be in ‘residence’, collecting anonymous offerings in various spaces across the region until the end of August, and then ‘released’ through a ceremonial fire during Light Up Chinatown in September.

From June 23 to Sept. 24, 2023, The Polygon Gallery presents the North American premiere of Phase Shifting Index by North Vancouver-born, Berlin-based artist Jeremy Shaw. The immersive installation combines film, sound, and light to tell a story about an imagined future in which human beliefs and survival are at stake.

What Is Welcome? includes works from the Belkin’s collection and long-term residency that question the art institution’s language, boundaries and potential for change. From performance to works-in-process that effect institutional practices, the artists included operate with, and at the same time counter, the institution to address the what, how and the why of gallery operations.

The 5X Fest is back this year, and it's acting as a portal back to our collective selves. The multi-day, multi-venue festival explores themes in music, visual art, fashion, and South Asian youth culture.

Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art presents the Canadian premiere exhibition of Bright Futures from April 26, 2023–January 14, 2024. Bright Futures examines the lasting influence of Bill Reid’s iconic art on the development and creation of contemporary Northwest Coast art today, 25 years after his death, alongside fourteen emerging and established Northwest Coast artists.

Richmond Art Gallery (RAG), in partnership with the Richmond Public Library, presents A Small but Comfy House and Maybe a Dog from April 22 to June 11, 2023. Guest curated by Su-Ying Lee, the exhibition is Amy Ching-Yan Lam’s first major solo show and features sculptures made in collaboration with HaeAhn Woo Kwon, in addition to objects from the collections of the Gallery and the neighbouring Richmond Public Library.

Unthought Known, a haunting new installation of art and text by Seema Shah, opens at The Beaumont Studios’ B1 Gallery in Vancouver, BC on April 21, 2023.

 Seema Shah is a self-taught collage artist and writer, piecing together narratives that are dark and questioning. he was a recipient of The Beaumont Studio’s 2022 Artist To Watch Award and a highly commended artist in the 2022 Contemporary Collage Magazine Awards.

Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is proud to announce The Living Room 2.0: Intimate Entanglements and Ominous Chaos, marking the start of Centre A’s exciting line up for exhibitions in 2023.

Gallery Gachet presents two exhibits: A Bag Full of Acorns, A Bag Full of Ashes and Dialectics of Fugitivity from April 7th to May 20th, 2023.

The Polygon Gallery presents As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic from Feb. 24–May 14, 2023. The international touring exhibition, curated by The Polygon Gallery’s Elliott Ramsey, is dedicated entirely to the Wedge Collection as featured in Aperture’s recently published book of more than 100 photographs from African diasporic culture. The exhibition celebrates Black life in its myriad forms, drawing from cultures around the Atlantic to illustrate a polyphonic sense of community and family.

Saltwater Cures All is a compilation of video works featuring Racquel Rowe in her native island of Barbados. Rowe explores ideas of the formation of the Black Atlantic, personal and familial connections to the sea, relationships between Black people and water and the idea of rebirth. Many of the works feature the East coast of the island, the first point of contact that European colonialists would have made; through the juxtaposition of land and sea, Rowe asks viewers to consider the implications of these idealized scenes and their historical and present-day implications for the Black populations that call these islands home.

The Polygon Gallery presents Cloud Album, a new exhibition that celebrates a subject that has long captured the imagination of artists, scientists, and amateur photographers. The exhibition features more than 250 historically and culturally significant works drawn from the collection of the London-based Archive of Modern Conflict, an organization dedicated to the preservation of vernacular photographs, artifacts, and ephemera.

Centre A’s “The Living Room” is a unique exhibition-installation that transforms the gallery space into a furnished living room. By converting the gallery rooms into a (semi-)domestic area, the project aims to challenge and restructure the oftentimes unapproachable space of the contemporary art gallery.

The Dusk Meridian is a multimedia installation by the Vancouver– and Kelowna–based artist Keith Langergraber. Its principal features are scaled-down representations of two fire towers that are physically close but imaginatively separated: the real-life versions sit on either side of the border that divides Canada and the US at the southern boundary of E.C. Manning Provincial Park.

The Polygon Gallery presents Steven Shearer, an expansive solo show on display from Nov. 20, 2021, to Feb. 13, 2022. The exhibition highlights the influence of Shearer’s monumental archive of more than 74,000 images — collected over several decades — on his artistic practice. A new commission comprised of 33 individual photolaminate paintings will be on display, alongside a selection of drawings, prints, and a sculpture installation.

The Burrard Arts Foundation (BAF) in collaboration with The Architecture Foundation of British Columbia (AFBC) presents Emerging From Architecture, an exhibition that highlights notable emerging architecture practitioners as exemplified by past and present winners of the AFBC’s annual Emerging Firm Award.

Eastside Culture Crawl Visual Art, Design & Craft Festival
Celebrates 25th Anniversary with Enhanced Hybrid Visual Arts Event

The Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at UBC is exhibiting Sankofa: African Routes, Canadian Roots, on display from November 4, 2021–March 27, 2022. The vital exhibition shines a light on the different ways of understanding the world through the lenses of African and Black communities by exploring the relationships between traditional and contemporary African art and Black Canadian contemporary art. The exhibition is a celebration of these diverse practices and the lasting legacy of African and Black Canadian artists.

GROWING FREEDOM: The instructions of Yoko Ono / The art of John and Yoko is a major exhibition organized in two parts. The first section focuses on Ono’s instruction works, which break down barriers between artistic disciplines and emphasize her radical approach to art-making.

In Index, Avenue, Skylight, Nicolas Sassoon evokes the culture and communities surrounding these spaces using idiomatic visual elements from his practice: pixelated patterns, digital moirés and isometric perspective. Stemming from his accounts of operating within these venues, Sassoon recalls his memories — the infrastructure, the objects, the events and the energies that unfolded over a period of time.