Contemporary Indigenous Art and the Bill Reid Gallery

Join gallery staff for an inspiring art-filled adventure learning about local Indigenous art. Highlights include touring the Marika Swan: A Circle Strong Enough to Carry Both Sides exhibition at the Burnaby Art Gallery, and a guided tour of the NDN Giver exhibition at the Bill Reid gallery. Have lunch at a local eatery or bring your own (cost of lunch not included in tour).

Enjoy lunch at a local eatery (cost of lunch not included) or bring your own. Our tour bus departs from the Ferry Building Gallery. Cost includes transportation, guided tour, and admissions.

About the NDN Giver exhibition at the Bill Reid Gallery: NDN Giver explores the layered meanings within both everyday and extraordinary gifts that circulate through the potlatch. Blankets, coppers, canoes, prints, mugs, trade beads and devil’s club strung into necklaces all become carriers of law, memory, and relation to one another.

The title NDN Giver reclaims a phrase rooted in colonialism that mocked Indigenous generosity. In reality, the practice of giving upheld in the potlatch reflects the complexity of responsibilities in Indigenous governance and exchange. To give is to strengthen ties, and to receive is to take on the responsibility of carrying them forward. This exhibition is not just about objects but about the stories they carry and the obligations they enact.

About the Marika Swan exhibition at the Burnaby Art Gallery, A Circle Strong Enough to Carry Both Sides. The artist’s first solo-exhibition explores her deeply woven understandings of the nature of duality held in all things. Using an emotional visual language entirely her own, Swan’s practice is informed by the rich philosophical and carving traditions of her Nuu-chah-nulth lineage.

Sponsored by PARC Retirement Living.