Three-time JUNO Award nominated singer-songwriter Jenn Grant is primarily known as a musician, but she also holds a degree from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University with a focus in painting and drawing. In fact, her paintings and design work appear on some of her album covers. When Grant’s music touring career came to a standstill during the pandemic, she returned to the canvas at her home in Lake Echo, Nova Scotia.   Originally from Prince Edward Island, Grant has been writing and recording for two decades. Her albums include Forever on Christmas Eve (2020); Love, Inevit ..read more

On July 9, 1975, Dutch conceptual and performance artist Bas Jan Ader left Cape Cod in a thirteen-foot boat on a solo voyage across the North Atlantic never to reach his destination. Ader’s final work left him lost at sea. Nearly fifty years later, artist Will Robinson invites viewers to sit in this grief and honour his disappearance. Just outside the entrance of Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery a student is seated, folding their laundry. The nervous energy of university students yelling in the hallways makes it all the more jarring to enter the dark gallery and the sombre tone inside. The ..read more

It is a bit overwhelming to walk into Mountains of Wonder and Tangles of Truth: Kathy Hooper, a Retrospective at the Saint John Arts Centre. Often overshadowed by her husband, the late sculptor John Hooper, Kathy Hooper has had an equally, if not more, significant impact in the Canadian art world. Over the course of her six-decades-long career, Hooper has worked furiously, creating literal mountains of work from her home studio in Hampton, New Brunswick. Her work spans a vast range of media: she draws, paints, sculpts in both wood and ceramic, makes prints, writes—you name it. The result is a ..read more

Séamus Gallagher knows better than most how cringeworthy it can feel to call yourself an artist and how imposter syndrome can creep in when that’s the reply to a stranger’s asking what you do. But when I ask them the moment they knew for sure they were an artist, they don’t miss a beat delivering a time and date: Moncton, New Brunswick, 2011. The feeling was a thrum in their bones that matched the sound of their computer connecting to the internet, sharing their earliest works—“pop culture-based drawings” inspired by the TV series Twin Peaks—on Tumblr.  “They’re not, like, drawings that I ..read more

Visual Arts News magazine is seeking a Copy Editor. Visual Arts News is a magazine that explores contemporary art practices in Atlantic Canada, on the unceded and unsurrendered lands of the Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik, Inuit, Innu, and the Southern Inuit of NunatuKavut. Published in Mi’kma’ki, Visual Arts News is a community-driven publication that seeks to enliven culture and keep record while supporting and celebrating the many overlapping communities in the Atlantic region, particularly those that have been historically ignored. We prioritize work that pushes back against white supr ..read more

There Is No One Story of Black Girlhood is a powerful and unyielding exhibition of Rebecca Fisk’s series of self-portrait paintings. As an African Nova Scotian artist based in Mahone Bay, Fisk’s acrylic paintings reveal what may lurk beneath the dominant culture of Nova Scotia’s mask of politeness. Her work alludes to the sinister insincerity of the social environment of the East Coast. Fisk’s paintings confront and challenge hurtful stereotyping, discrimination, and racist behavior that comes part and parcel with being Black in Nova Scotia. The artist clearly establishes these works as the r ..read more

Since October 2022, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery has consecutively presented solo exhibitions in their gallery spaces by Mi’kmaq artists from Ktaqmkuk, specifically highlighting the artistic practices of Kelsey Street, Nelson White, and Alex Antle. Weljesi, the most recent exhibition to unfold in the fourth level art gallery, celebrates Mi’kmaw and settler artist Jerry Evans enduring and significant cultural contributions to Ktaqmkuk’s art history through a retrospective curated by Jenelle Duval. Evans is a visual artist who was born and raised in central Ktaqmkuk. His career as a visual ..read more

Alanna Baird’s artwork infiltrates the New Brunswick vernacular, while also sparking important conversations around marine ecology in this time of climate crisis. As a longtime inhabitant of the small coastal community of St. Andrews, NB, Baird has closely observed the changing shoreline beyond her home. She maintains a dedicated ritual of engagement with the liminal, changeable space between shore and land. With curiosity she collects intertidal debris and spends time taking note of cycles, sporadically recurring events and changes. This dedication to the coast has informed her life’s work a ..read more

The team at Visual Arts News is eager to hear from writers, artists and critics to expand and deepen conversations inspired by the artistic vision of emerging and established artists who are pushing the boundaries of art and culture in the Atlantic region.  For this open call, we are seeking pitches for features, profiles and exhibition reviews.  We prioritize work that pushes back against white supremacy and colonialism. We are committed to anti-oppression and anti-racism practices, and we support Indigenous sovereignty, Black liberation, Queer positivity and gender diversity. For m ..read more

Embedded within a matrix of dark stone on the second-floor landing gallery at The Rooms is the vivid and materially diverse exhibition Njikam (My Younger Brother) by emerging L’nu artist Alex Antle. Originally from Qapskuk (Grand Falls-Windsor), Antle is currently based in Elmastukwek (Bay of Islands) where her maternal Mi’kmaw ancestors are from, and where she has been nourishing her artistic practice since 2017. Antle primarily utilizes slow stitching practices like beadwork and caribou tufting, and in the last several yearshas expanded her practice to incorporate print media and photograph ..read more