Find work-around for mom’s grandkid fixation

World-touring rock star comes home for street-naming

Memories of burning Wayne Gretzky rookie cards while biking up and down Bellavista Crescent came flooding back to Brent Fitz on Friday morning as the local rocker revisited his childhood neighbourhood for a street-naming ceremony in his honour.

Bellavista Crescent has been given the honorary name Brent Fitz Way to celebrate the prolific Winnipeg musician, who has played drums and keyboards alongside such rock legends as Slash, Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, Gene Simmons and Vince Neil.

“Having this location now officially geotagged, it’s incredible. But it’s geotagged attached to people and friends and family,” Fitz said to a crowd of supporters gathered at the corner of Bellavista and Voyageur Avenue.

The Toque and Streetheart member said growing up in the community is where he learned how to connect with people, which led him to form countless relationships that would change the course of his life.

The view from here: Phyllis Green. Boob Tree, 1975

Staycation: The Art of Being Here feautres more than 100 Manitoba-related artworks from the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq collection, spanning the past 50 years. These pieces reveal how the places around us are layered with memory, story and lived experience. Over the coming weeks, the Free Press will spotlight works from this eclectic exhibition, each one offering a new way of seeing home. Experience it in person and enjoy some staycation time at the gallery, on view until December.

Phyllis Green. Boob Tree, 1975

(Yarn, wood. Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery; Acquired with funds from the Estate of Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Naylor, funds administered by The Winnipeg Foundation, 2014-128. Photo: Ernest Mayer.)

The year 1975 was designated International Women’s Year by the United Nations, and in celebration, the WAG staged the show Images of Women, which explored how women had historically been depicted, an impressive selection but by mostly male artists. Amid pushback from the community, Sharron Zenith Corne and Marian Yeo organized a second exhibition, Woman as Viewer, which challenged those portrayals by only featuring works by women. It was called the first Canadian exhibition of feminist art. American artist Phyllis Green’s Boob Tree, a four-foot-tall crochet sculpture of a cluster of breasts, adorned the exhibit posters, which were so popular they were snatched by passersby! The sculpture is playful and unsettling, re-appropriating the objectification of women’s bodies.

A measure of hope a decade after senseless death, injustice

I’m a few hundred kilometres from the farm near Biggar, Sask. — the place where 22-year old Colten Boushie from Cree Red Pheasant First Nation was shot and killed by farmer Gerald Stanley precisely 10 years ago.

“You need to remind people about the 10-year anniversary,” a nearby, rural school principal tells me at the education conference I just finished speaking at.

“That death is a wound that continues to bleed in all of us,” a principal from Regina adds. “I hear about it from our students all the time.”

On Aug. 9, 2016, Boushie’s death entered the Canadian consciousness, representing what then-Saskatoon mayor Charlie Clark declared “a defining moment for this community and this country.”

Kinder, gentler drug crackdown finds support, tempered expectations in Main Street area

Drawing a lighter from his pocket, a shirtless man perched on a concrete wall outside United Way Winnipeg’s Main Street headquarters heats a substance in a glass pipe and moves the tube toward his mouth.

New lab a win for Winnipeg’s long game

It would be easy to overlook the announcement this week that the federal government was green-lighting a quarter-billion-dollar expansion of the National Microbiology Laboratory’s Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health on Arlington Street.

Easy to overlook, in part, because it will take a decade to build the new 140,000-square-foot laboratory specializing in medical countermeasures.

But make no mistake, this latest investment from Ottawa galvanizes Winnipeg’s reputation as a global leader in the research of the world’s most infectious diseases. It also confirms that a wager made by Manitoba political leaders nearly 40 years ago is paying off in spades.

The existing NML was, to be frank, hastily conceived compensation for one of the most egregious examples of political pork-barrelling ever seen in Canada.