James Gardner exhibition in the Campus Gallery, featuring mosaic oil paintings on the wall and a 3D display in the corner. All of the works are vibrantly colorful, abstract, and highly textures.
James Gardner’s exhibition, Selenotropic, at The Campus Gallery in 2017

The Campus Gallery

Georgian’s Campus Gallery is a vibrant multi-disciplinary exhibition space where students in Design and Visual Arts programs and established artists showcase their work. The Campus Gallery hosts a variety of exhibitions and artist talks that reflect regional, national and international art, craft and design.

Exhibitions

Arise: 2nd Year Fine Art Student Exhibition

Artists from Georgian College’s Graduating Fine Art program
Exhibiting Artists: Sirena Chipre, Paige Dickson, Hope Fogarty, Lily Grass, Ekjot Kaur, Parwinder Kaur, Sadie Menzies, Chaunte Norman, Tanu Sharma

March 28, 2024 – April 17, 2024

  • Opening reception: Thursday March 28 5-7pm.
  • Art Crawl with The MacLaren Art Centre: Thursday March 21 11am, start at The Campus Gallery

About the exhibition

The final graduating class of Georgian College’s Fine Art Diploma program is pleased to present a group exhibition at The Campus Gallery. Nine Artists will be featured in this exhibition with art ranging in media: printmaking, drawing, painting, and sculpture. As these artists transition from their school environment to their professional arts careers, Arise showcases their hard work over the course of their program and offers a vision of contemporary art through the lens of emerging artists.

Arise: 2nd Year Fine Art Student Exhibition

Over & Over & Over Again

An Exhibition of Work by Carl Beam and Anong Migwans Beam
Co-Curated by Virginia Eichhorn and Anong Migwans Beam

February 22 – March 24, 2024

  • Opening reception: Thursday February 22 5-8pm.
  • Artist Talk: Thursday March 14 11am, The Campus Gallery
  • Art Crawl with The MacLaren Art Centre: Thursday March 21 11am, start at The Campus Gallery

About the exhibition

One of the many things instilled by artist Carl Beam to his daughter, Anong Migwans Beam, is that an artist must keep working through their ideas. They need to commit to the process. And that means to explore images and ideas over and over and over again. The works by Carl Beam, from the Georgian College Collection, were a means for Carl to allow for the dissemination of his ideas in widespread ways. They deal with the environment, politics, history, and culture. In how they were created they go against the self-serving needs of aggressive greed that is evident in much of the art world and how it operates.

The works by Anong which are included with this exhibition create a dialogue with her father’s work but which also evidence her own strong voice and viewpoint. She also works through ideas – over and over and over again – and we see that commitment to her ideas and process in everything that she undertakes. Viewers of this exhibition are invited to challenge themselves, to make connection to the works on personal and global levels. The themes and messages presented in this exhibition merit one’s attention – and there is an opportunity to visit and revisit what is on view. Over and over and over again.

Over & Over & Over Again: An Exhibition of Work by Carl Beam and Anong Migwans Beam
Image credit: Art and photography of Carl Beam and Anong Migwans Beam. Personal collection.
Background informationGeorgian College Chevron

Anong Migwans Beam is an artist, mother, and paint maker who lives and works in her home community of M’chigeeng First Nation. She paints primarily large format oil paintings. Raised by artist parents Ann and Carl Beam, she was homeschooled and apprenticed with her father in his ceramic, pigment and clay gathering, and his painting/photography studio. She studied at School of the Museum Of Fine Arts Boston, Ontario College of Art and Design, and Institute of American Indian Art.

She has been active in Language and community and is the founder of Gimaa Radio 88.9CHYF fm Ojibwe Language Radio station, And also worked as the Executive Director/Curator for the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation from 2016-18.

And since 2018, Anong is the founder of Beam Paints: makers of plastic free paints and watercolors inspired by her culture and pigment gathering of her youth. With our Indigenous paint tradition, we seek to celebrate the colours of the wide world with the intimacy of the northern forest. And in this fusion, create paint plastic free paint that makes you and your paintings feel vibrantly human.

Carl Beam (1943 – 2005) is an artist who works in a variety of media to explore the tensions between Western and Indigenous relations. In his autobiographical work, he references himself as an Ojibwa, and places his Native culture within broader surroundings. He brings to attention problems that affect contemporary Native cultures and shows, through his juxtaposition of images, how these concerns relate to larger world issues. Through his work Beam integrates personal memory with issues related to the environment, brutality, and a rethinking of the ways histories are told.

Beam was born in West Bay on Manitoulin Island in 1943. His formal studies of art began at the Kootenay School of Art in British Columbia in 1971, and he transferred to the University of Victoria in 1973. Beam received his MFA at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1976. In his training he was influenced by artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg for their collaging of images from popular culture and expressive handling of paint and printing, and Andy Warhol for his use of photo-silkscreen processes.

Beam employs a range of media, including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. The collage and photo-transfer techniques he often uses allow him to visually bring together subjects and events from different historical moments that he infuses with political commentary. His contemporary art-making strategies serve and empower his engagement with the struggle of Indigenous Peoples in the late 20th century.

One of the most famous works in Canadian Art History, Beam’s “The North American Iceberg” marked the beginning of a sea change in the nation’s galleries. The genre-defining painting became the first piece by an artist from a First Nations community to be purchased by the National Gallery of Canada as contemporary art. Beam’s powerful composition juxtaposed images from First Nations histories with current events to illustrate the tensions between Western and Indigenous relations – and it opened doors for generations of Indigenous artists.

When Beam died in 2005 at the age of 62, a posthumous retrospective was organized by the National Gallery in 2010 that travelled across Canada and the USA. Although his life was tragically cut short, it was not before his reputation was cemented as one of the most important artists in Canadian history and as an advocate for Indigenous rights.

Virginia Eichhorn is an art historian, curator, artist, educator, and mother who has worked in the visual arts field for over thirty years.

With an emphasis on ecological, environmental, non-traditional exhibition spaces and community outreach and collaborations, her work as an independent curator has seen her presenting exhibitions at numerous prestigious venues including the XII Biennale of Art at Villa Nova Cerveira in Portugal. She has worked extensively with artists from across Canada and abroad, including Carl Beam, Judy Chicago, Vessna Perunovich, Jane Ash Poitras, Jack Sures, Peter Von Tiesenhausen, and Tim Whiten, developing exhibitions for high profile Canadian galleries and museums such as the Royal Ontario Museum. In addition to curating, she has written numerous catalogue essays and has contributed articles to prominent Canadian magazines including Artichoke, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, ESPACE Sculpture and international magazines such as Ceramics Monthly and for institutions including the National Gallery of Canada, the MacKenzie Art Gallery and others.

In 2009 she won the Jean Johnson/Melanie Egan Award for Curatorial Excellence awarded by the Ontario Crafts Council. Her art practice is focused on alternative narratives and voices – particularly that of the feminine, using traditional and non-traditional art and craft forms.

“I am fascinated by creative families: how the arts inform and echo in daily life, legacy, and practice. This exhibition honours the sacred relationship between parent and child and the meaningful conversations that continue between art works.” – Amy Bagshaw, Director of The Campus Gallery

About the gallery

Location

The Campus Gallery is located in room 140, D building (Helen and Arch Brown Centre for Design and Visual Arts) at the Barrie Campus, Georgian College, 1 Georgian Drive.

Hours of operation

Effective Sept. 21:

  • Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
  • Saturday to Sunday, noon to 4 p.m.

For more information, please contact us.

Organizational mandateGeorgian College Chevron

The Campus Gallery objective and mandate is to deliver a diversity of visual to the City of Barrie, its immediate region and within the Georgian College campus community.

The exhibitions celebrate emerging, mid-career and established artists, designers and craftspersons, as well as students within post-secondary arts education. The Campus Gallery will support the exhibition objectives with informative artist lectures that will be open to the immediate community, high schools and the college community, thus creating an environment of critical thinking, insight and appreciation.

Through outreach and exchange, the Campus Gallery will host and present international exchange exhibitions and lectures as well as exhibitions of community outreach at our partner venues. We exhibit our significant collection and bring visual arts to distinctly different audiences, facilitating and encouraging a dialogue and awareness of the arts in our community.

Artistic visionGeorgian College Chevron

The Campus Gallery is committed to delivering a diverse program of exhibitions by visual artists, designers and crafts people to the Barrie and the Simcoe County arts community. A policy of inclusivity guides our programming, giving equal voice to emerging, mid career and senior artist with diverse practices.

The gallery space allows artists to realize special projects, surveys or retrospectives, and to see large groups of work together in an excellent facility, sometimes for the first time.

We are committed to furthering the knowledge of contemporary practice to the community with our on going artist lecture series, which has consistently featured insightful dialogue form the frontlines of creativity by exceptional regional, national and international artists.

The Campus Gallery identifies its exhibition roster three years in advance and books its artist lecture series on a yearly basis. We provide a diversity of visual arts programming to the community and continue to foster an environment of learning, engagement and dialogue in the visual arts which is only available in one other Barrie location.

The Campus Gallery provides a laboratory space for our Museum and Gallery Studies graduate certificate students to engage with artists, the campus collection, and to develop programming in locations outside of the gallery, based on the Campus Gallery Collection. This offsite programming allows us to bring unique, contemporary art to an even more diverse audience, creating another level of dialogue, awareness and engagement.

Over the past years, we have partnered with the Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH), Five Points Theatre (formerly The Mady Centre for the Performing Arts) and the Barrie Courthouse to create exhibition space and thoughtful, unique programming from some of over 2,500 works in the Campus Gallery collection.

An exhibition of paintings and sculptures in the Campus Gallery. The paintings feature stylized portraits and scenes. The two sculptural works in the centre are two figures, one standing with hands in pocket, and the other crouching down.
Group exhibition, The Glass House, at The Campus Gallery in 2014

Contact us

If you have questions or require more information, please email Amy Bagshaw, Director, The Campus Gallery.