Week 12 - Supporting Emerging Artists

Theme of the week: the margin

Choosing to be an artist is definitely making the choice to explore the margin. Creating is choosing to go bare and accepting the extreme vulnerability associated with it. It is to be pushed by an immense force and need to express one's own voice. It is feeling deep down that what you have to say deserves to be heard and has the potential to perhaps change the world, even a little bit. Exploring, showing, and denouncing beauty or horror, poetry and injustice, the soft and the hard, all at the same time.

Exploring the margins can be disrupting. The visual arts community can deter some people. It is somehow little known, it seems strange, opaque, intimidating... Several initiatives aim to defeat this perception of elitism. I'm thinking of course about the Papier Art Fair, which for more than 10 years has been trying to make art accessible to a wider public. (This year it happens online from June 4 to 21!) I'm also thinking of the Facebook page INVISIBLES, a superb initiative by artist Christian Messier. Wanting to contribute to awakening the media and the general public to the diversity of creation in Quebec, this painter has committed to presenting a visual artist every day for a year.

I never cease to be impressed by the inventiveness and power of the vibrant arts community. The ingenious and unifying Sara A.Tremblay has succeeded in creating a true movement with Les Encans de la quarantaine. Her Facebook page offers over 5,300 subscribers online auctions of artworks by emerging artists who are not represented by commercial galleries. What an extraordinary way to promote the work of artists and provide them with a small income during this period of health and economic crisis!

The works offered for auction, selected by a jury of peers, are of high quality and allow us to discover brand new practices. I am delighted to share some of them with you!

Here is a selection of some of the works prensented by Les Encans de la quarantaine :

➔ Les Encans de la quarantaine : https://www.facebook.com/groups/encansdelaquarantaine/

➔ Papier Art Fair: https://www.papiermontreal.com/

➔ INVISIBLES: https://www.facebook.com/invisiblesartistesvisuels

This article was written by Émilie Grandmont Bérubé, Curator of Collections, Musée d'art de Joliette (until June 2020).

PARTICIPATE IN QUARANTINED MUSEUM

You have until Wednesday at noon to send us your creations inspired by the theme of the week.

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