Visual arts & new media

Faye HeavyShield
blood, 2004
cotton, cotton string, acrylic

Two of Kainai artist Faye HeavySheild’s installation artworks, blood and homecoming, from the AFA’s Art Collection have been selected for Bold Women, a landmark exhibition at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. 

The show features over forty primarily Indigenous, Black, Newcomers and LGBT women artists as well as those of gender non-conforming identities whose visionary ideas and experimentation demonstrate the concept of boldness through challenging dominant institutional, cultural and social boundaries and reshaping historical narratives. 

Set to open February 18 and running through to July 6, 2025, the exhibition includes 75 artworks from various disciplines including photography, sculpture, textiles, paintings, video, installations and is organized across four galleries each exploring one element of boldness:

• Portrayal / Resistance: ways that portrayals can deny visibility
• Collective Preservation / Liberation: women preserving, healing, and liberating communities across generations
• Nature / Erasure: the erasure of women’s contributions, in conversation with nature
• Wisdom / Knowledge-keeping: transmitting knowledge and women as connectors

The exhibition was curated by Susan Earle, the Spencer Museum’s curator of European and American Art, along with a team of diverse curatorial collaborators from across North America including the Brooklyn Museum’s Curator Dr. Kimberli Grant and Wanda Nanibush, an Anishinaabe curator from the Beausoleil First Nation in Ontario among others. 

About the artist

Faye HeavyShield is a member of the Blood Nation. She graduated from the Alberta College of Art in 1985, and continued her studies at the University of Calgary. Gaining prominence and recognition in the past few years, her work has been the subject of many solo shows including major exhibitions of First Nations contemporary art. HeavyShield's work is a fusion of highly evolved personal and powerful imagery influenced by her Christian and Blood upbringing. Her minimalist installations are metaphors of the human body and a reflection of her personal experiences.

Join Alberta Printmakers and current exhibiting artists HOT 4 THE MOMENT as they discuss their collaborative practice and exhibition: NOTICE ME!

This free event is taking place online, and all are welcome.

Date: Friday, March 7, 2025

Time: 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm (MT)

Register here: us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/EeTPn-UVQPGZVLUD6SAjtg

About the Exhibition:

Giving ourselves the space to be soft and silly during these times is a radical act and deserves some attention!

HOT 4 THE MOMENT will be taking over the Alberta Printmakers Main Gallery with NOTICE ME!, a printed and quilted construction site. THE FIX-ITS is a parody performance, and installation work assuming the characters of a multi-talented duo of contract workers who critique systems of oppression and misogyny within professional spaces through hard work, physical labor and community care. Getting to work as THE FIX-ITS required the proper OHS approved signage, designating spaces to be soft and silly with yourself. This installation is the accumulation of the FIX-ITS body of work and will consist of the quilted signage used in our FIX-ITS performances, our constructed light box art crate signs, screenprints, and textile work.

About the Artists: 

Georgia Dawkin and Drew Pardy are the two halves of the friendship heart necklace that is HOT 4 THE MOMENT. A creative collective, HOT 4 THE MOMENT developed as a way for Georgia Dawkin and Drew Pardy to combine common themes within their work, and to provide a space for play within their art practices.

HOT 4 THE MOMENT has exhibited in Eastern Edge Gallery (NL), Neutral Ground Artist Run Centre (SK), designed sets for Lawnya Vawnya Music Festival (NL), and performed at CB Nuit (NL), and the Atlantic Arts Symposium (NB). They were the 2024 Elbow Room Artists in Residence at The Rooms (NL) and the VANL Emerging Artists of the Year in 2024. Both Georgia and Drew are currently based in St. John’s, NL and have received their BFAs from Grenfell Campus, Memorial University.

Alberta Council for the Ukrainian Arts presents

Carmella & Mika Haykowsky
Portrait Over Portrait Following the Matrilineal Line
A Mother/Daughter Art Exhibit

An ACUA Signature Artist Series Event

February 27 – April 12, 2025

Carmella & Mika Haykowsky have been collaborating as artists since 2015. Their projects revolve around memory, portraiture, and feminine subjectivity. In 2012, Mika Haykowsky’s inaugural art exhibit was alongside her mother in a duo exhibition. In 2022 they celebrated their 10 year artist anniversary and exhibited another duo show. Portrait Over Portrait: Following the Matrilineal Line will be their first exhibition of collaborative work.

“Portrait Over Portrait: Following the Matrilineal Line is an ancestral exploration following Ukrainian heritage in our matrilineal line. We are exploring loved ones from memory, imagining the faces and activities of passed relatives, as well as referencing old photos. Through this work we are making meaning from our family history. In oil, watercolor, pastel, crayon, graphite, and collage, we are experimenting with our mother-daughter-artist relationship. We respond to each other’s work, give each other prompts, and even co-create on the same canvas. We are also exploring self-portraiture and examining characteristics that have been passed down, noticing similarities and idiosyncrasies particular to the Haykowsky line. Through portraiture we are documenting stories of the women who came before us. These paintings are a way of bringing them to life and celebrating them.”

-Artists Carmella and Mika

Alberta Council for the Ukrainian Arts

10554 110 St NW Unit 100
Edmonton, AB
T5H 3C5

Please visit the website for exhibition hours

acuarts.ca/whats-on/mika-camilla-haykowsky-mother-daughter-art-exhibit