The Museum of Vancouver and the University of British Columbia proudly present a new feature exhibition, A Seat at the Table, Chinese Immigration and British Columbia. This exhibition explores historical and contemporary stories of Chinese Canadians in BC and their struggles for belonging. It looks to food and restaurant culture as an entry point to feature stories that reveal the great diversity of immigrant experience and of the communities immigrants develop.

A Seat at the Table is an opportunity to consider the contributions that Chinese migrants and their descendants have made to British Columbia, a province built from the interaction of successive and concurrent waves of migration and uninterrupted occupation by Indigenous peoples.

Restaurants and food offer compelling portals to understanding the Chinese Canadian experience in British Columbia. A close look at the food industry reveals the impact of racial discrimination on Chinese Canadians, but it also tells us much about their ability to resist, organize, seek justice and thrive.

Vancouver Special: Disorientations and Echo is the second in what is envisioned as a series of exhibitions intended to provide an expansive look at contemporary art in the Greater Vancouver region. For the 2021 version of Vancouver Special, primary emphasis is on recent works that hold a particular resonance for this time and place that have not been previously exhibited in Vancouver. The exhibition reflects the activity of both artists at an early point in their career and more established artists whose practices span several decades. Encompassing a variety of media, scale and modes of presentation, the artworks on display address themes that include cultural resilience, the articulation of suppressed histories, the imagining of emancipated futures, the performance of identity and embodied knowledge.

Edith Heath and Emily Carr: From the Earth brings together the work of two artists whose art was profoundly influenced by the land and landscape—its colours, light and materials. Emily Carr (1871–1945) and Edith Heath (1911–2005) never met, but both were modernist women living on the West Coast who built careers in the creative arts that spoke to their time and place. This project builds on an ongoing program of exhibitions that offer an opportunity to consider the art of Emily Carr in a different light. Some of the exhibitions have focused on directly shared histories or on stylistic affinities, while others have pointed to the significance of Carr’s influence on modern and contemporary artists.

For over thirty years, Jan Wade has been creating mixed-media paintings, textiles and sculptural objects, drawing upon her lived experience as an African Canadian person and her mixed cultural heritage. Jan Wade: Soul Power brings together the artist’s diverse body of work alongside new pieces made specifically for the exhibition.

Personal experience and sustained research inform Wade’s unique practice, which she conceptualizes as an ongoing journey—one that is philosophical, cultural, intellectual and embodied—as she explores the places and practices of her ancestors alongside contemporary political concerns and social issues.

Political, social, spiritual and material transformations are integral to Wade’s practice, and she often uses found objects and recycled materials in her works. Picked up in alleys, given to her by friends and sourced from thrift stores, these objects are used to point to a “generational ecological consciousness practiced by the disenfranchised.” In other words, Wade’s unique aesthetic was born out of necessity as well as social conscience.

For If I Lived in the Ocean, artist Paula Nishikawara creates an immersive underwater environment filled with evidence of humanity’s footprints. The artist tells stories of past and present throughout the space with bamboo poles, jute sacks, massive beds of plastic kelp and traditional Japanese gyotaku (made from real fish and hand-made paper).

In what the experimental artist calls a museum intervention, waste plastics and traditional art, weave together to create a hopeful environmental message. Plastic is one of the most troubling materials in the ocean today, while Jute, extensively used in shipping is one of the most sustainable and environmentally friendly. In exhibiting these materials together Nishikawara has created a provocative display that offers layers of meaning and presents challenges and possibilities for the future.

If I Lived in the Ocean asks an important question: What will it take to be completely responsible and create circular systems that will protect the environment and sustain life?

In a career spanning more than thirty years, artist Faye HeavyShield has developed a practice of profound influence, renowned as readily for its poetic use of form and material as its evocative embodiments of memory, community and place.

A powerfully concise aesthetic vocabulary gives shape to HeavyShield’s work, one rooted in the topography and texture of her homeland in the foothills of Southern Alberta and her upbringing in the Kainai community. Whether drawing on the winds, grasses and rivers of the Northern Plains; staging scenes redolent of gathering or exchange; or exploring elemental geometries that signal continuities and connections, the objects, images and installations of HeavyShield’s work manifest as extensions of land, language and body.