Mentor, curator, innovator

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This article was published 16/11/2020 (2063 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg’s arts community is remembering curator and artist Sigrid Dahle as a mentor who gave those often overlooked by the establishment a chance to show what they’d created.

Dahle, 65, died Oct. 31 of complications of COVID-19. She leaves behind an artistic legacy of more than 30 years across Western Canada, especially in Winnipeg.

She helped launch Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA) in 1984. Not only did she share in the day-to-day operations of the then-fledgling organization but also encouraged artists and steered MAWA’s approach to art, says Shawna Dempsey, the co-executive director of the artist-run centre on Main Street.

“She was very involved, almost from the inception of the organization,” Dempsey says. “At one point she was even running the joint. It was a time when a few very committed women were responsible for getting it off the ground and growing it into the thriving community that it is today.”

In the 1980s, female artists struggled to get exhibition space in galleries and land teaching jobs at art schools, and didn’t receive the same grants as male artists, Dempsey says. MAWA organizers such as Dahle helped make inroads in a difficult environment.

“Across all sectors, the boys’ club was very entrenched, so an upstart organization of women artists no doubt ruffled some feathers,” she says. “There was a lot of work to be done and Sigrid was in there with her shirtsleeves rolled up, helping to get it done.”

Born in Saskatchwan, Dahle earned her BA in psychology from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She then began her long relationship with the University of Manitoba and its School of Art, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1986, majoring in art history, and earning a master’s degree in 2013 with a focus on fine art and curation.

She curated many shows at the school’s gallery as a student and later as a guest curator on topics such as Manitoba’s female artists or Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, the Group of Seven painter and former director of the university’s School of Art.

One show, Blind Spot: The Gothic Unconscious, is particularly memorable for its complexity, says Oliver Botar, a professor at the School of Art. It focused on the history of marginalized groups of the Red River Valley — Indigenous people, women, immigrants and workers during the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike — and the difficulties they experienced.

“I remember going to that gallery, which is downstairs from my office, daily, and every day there would be new work installed there. It was quite extraordinary, I’d never seen anything like it,” Botar says. “There was a chart of some kind in which she tried to trace aspects of the history of trauma in the Red River Settlement and later Winnipeg, Treaty 1 territory.

“This was the early 2000s; there was not a lot of talk about this at the time. She was a pioneer of research on this, so she spoke in that exhibition about the many layers of trauma… That really struck me, this kind of different approach to history that she took.”

In 2011, Dahle was one of five Winnipeg curators behind the exhibition My Winnipeg, which was shown at La Maison Rouge in Paris and the Musée International des Arts Modestes in Sète, France.

The show, which was organized by the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, the University of Manitoba and the National Arts Centre with the French galleries, included works by more than 70 artists from Winnipeg. It was divided into chapters; in one titled There’s No Place Like Home, Dahle used archival images, artifacts, postcards and contemporary art to describe what makes a place become a home in Winnipeg.

‘She created a sort of a sitting room, like a psychoanalyst’s office with a couch,” recalls Anthony Kiendl, who was the director of the Plug In ICA in 2011 and was another of the exhibition’s curators. “It was kind of an immersive environment. There were dozens of objects (relating to Winnipeg).”

Kiendl, who is now the chief executive officer and director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, says Dahle’s contribution to the show followed in the footsteps of Blind Spot, and that many of her exhibitions dealt with what she described as Winnipeg’s Gothic background.

The size of My Winnipeg and its focus on a Canadian city unfamiliar to many in Europe caught the attention of French art aficionados, and Kiendl says he still meets people who remember seeing the exhibition.

“It was really celebrated by the media in Paris. It was a large and significant exhibition and Sigrid was definitely a big part of that,” he says.

Botar says Dahle’s impact on art goes far beyond her work in Winnipeg. She was the first director-curator of the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, in Brandon, from 1987 to 1990, and curated and wrote for exhibitions in galleries across Western Canada, including the Winnipeg Art Gallery. She was also the art critic for the Free Press from 2000 to 2002.

She had been the U of M’s art collections co-ordinator since 2014, and also was a sessional instructor. Botar often invited her to be a guest lecturer in his curation classes and her lessons continue to inspire the next generation of artists, he says.

“I teach her curatorial practice to my students as a very original and innovative approach,” Botar says. “She was always the smartest person in any gathering or in any room. She didn’t show it necessarily. She thought in a very original way.”

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter:@AlanDSmall