Guide to Concordia’s Art Galleries
Fall Brings Exciting New Exhibitions to the Centres of University Talent
Between the Loyola campus and the Sir George Williams campus, Concordia is home to five art galleries
Though often overshadowed by the ever-popular McCord Museum, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, each one offers its own unique experiences
Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery is located on the ground floor of the Sir George Williams Campus’ Library Building. Through its exhibitions, it presents the delicate shifts in our communities that shape today’s society. The gallery is also home to a permanent collection of Canadian and Quebec art.
Each year, the curators present three main projects between the months of September and April. The gallery reopens officially on Sept. 7 and premiers Thinking again and supposing. Trajectory of an exhibition, a collaborative work between Sarah Greig and Thérèse Mastroiacovo, two conceptual drawing artists who teach Drawing at Concordia. Other upcoming projects include Deanna Bowen’s The Golden Square Mile, a five-chapter video and photo project that explores the history of slavery in the Canadian Pacific Railway.
The Communication Studies Media Gallery and Mobile Media Gallery
Created by the Department of Communication Studies, the works showcased in this gallery usually explore themes of ephemeral occurrences as well as time-based and location-specific transitory events. The gallery is at Loyola campus, in the Communication Studies & Journalism Building, in CJ 1.419.
FOFA Gallery
This gallery is the main stage for any work presented by Faculty of Fine Arts students, alumni, faculty and staff. Hosting events, publications, and exhibitions, the venue seeks to innovate by approaching art in a pedagogical way, fostering curatorial experiments, training opportunities and more.
Some works that will be featured in the coming weeks include Caroline Gagnon’s Fetish Territories, Madelaine Mayo’s Vex-Visceral, and Adam Gunn’s Regretté de Tous. The three projects will be exhibited from Sept. 12 to Oct. 21 at FOFA, situated in the Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex, in EV 1-715.
VAV Gallery
The VAV Gallery is a student-run exhibition space seeking to highlight the work of undergraduate students in the Fine Arts department. Working as a mediator between its budding artists and the Montreal art scene, the gallery helps create accessible exhibition opportunities for young creatives.
Open throughout the year, the exhibits rotate on a three-week basis. Alongside their normal programming schedule, VAV hosts a number of different workshops, events, panel discussions and lectures, among other functions. It is located in the SGW campus’ Visual Arts Building, in room VA-100.
MFA Gallery
As opposed to the VAV Gallery, which is for undergraduate students, MFA promotes and exhibits the installations and thesis shows of graduate students from the Master of Fine Arts Program in Studio Arts. The gallery can be found in the downtown campus, in the Visual Arts Building—room VA-102.
Encouraging local artists has always been important, and with this easily accessible list of Concordia galleries, the hardest choice will be to pick which one to visit first.
This article originally appeared in Volume 43, Issue 1, published August 30, 2022.
