In 2011 we begin celebrations for our 40th year anniversary. Coinciding with my arrival, this marks a time of reflection leading toward renewal and reinvigoration across all aspects of our operation. You’ll have noticed some changes already to our graphic identity and announcements, at the gallery and on-line. This heralds a new spirit, the beginning of a new programme – exhibitions, projects, events and structural modifications as part of our overall campaign.

The Contemporary Art Gallery is a very different organization now to that which arrived at its current gallery premises on the corner of Nelson and Richards in 2001. It is mindful of its role in presenting international work whilst at the same time being very locally engaged through presentations of work by Canadian artists within this context. As a venue the CAG is increasingly acknowledged as key to Vancouver within an extensive network of visual arts activity. Our exhibitions and especially early stages off-site programme – including projects located in the public realm, touring and collaborations and educational outreach – is crucial to our identity, signifying a conviction that artistic experience is not the goal of some pseudo-religious pilgrimage. The CAG asserts a dynamic relationship with art, aspiring as much to accessibility as it does to excellence.

The CAG, originally the Greater Vancouver Artist’s Gallery, was established in 1971 by the City of Vancouver through federal employment programs for artists. It has consistently remained committed to serving artists and audiences, through its role as a generator and custodian of the City of Vancouver’s Art Collection in the 1970s, as an artist-run centre in the 1980s and as a public gallery since 1996. In 2001 the CAG moved from its longstanding home on Hamilton Street to its present location, a purpose-built facility.

As the new Executive Director, I see this legacy as one of which we are justly proud; the CAG’s existence in a city itself only 125 years old makes for a significant contribution to its artistic community and endeavours. This initial founding principle too is a position that chimes from our contemporary standpoint whereby it was not about the ’bricks and mortar’ of a building or institution that mattered but a resource for the city where the production of work happened in many places and its resultant forms found their way into presentations across a variety of spaces. This outward facing nature rooted in a local context of international significance is one that mirrors our contemporary vision of the CAG as a transmitter of ideas, proactive in response to a global art conversation and engaged in all aspects of cultural life, asserting the continuum between art and daily life.

Nigel Prince
Executive Director