Friends of the Owens

18 août 2008, Cirque du Soleil, siège sociale internationale
GAGNON, Clarence. Granges, 1926. Monotype sur papier japon, 18.0 x 22.5 cm (image); 20.1 x 24.9 cm (feuille). Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Accession no. 3397. (Reproduit de Art Canadien : Catalogue du Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa Vol. 2 / G-K. Ed. Pierre B. Landry. Ottawa : Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, 1994. p. 17.)Traded to be willed to the Owens Art Gallery.

Boltenhouse Museum, Sackville

Saturday included tea and cookies with Mrs. Spatz at the house that was built by her grandfather in the 1920s. She grew up in Sackville but moved away with her husband to Buffalo where she became very involved with the Albright-Knox Gallery. But her husband always said they would retire to Sackville. She is willing her art collection to the Owens Art Gallery (she has some very nice prints by Dali, Miro, Whistler and Goya as well as paintings and sculpture from contemporary Atlantic artists). I left her with one of my paintings of the Quebec landscape to will to the Gallery along with her other well documented works.

Mrs. Spatz continues to be actively involved at the Owens Art Gallery and was instrumental in opening the Gallery to the greater Sackville community with the Friends of the Owens Art Gallery. Symbolically, the “town side” doors were reopened and the John McEwan sculpture was put in place. Another example of the flexible boundary that exists as an interface between the university community and the people who live in Sackville.

She told me many stories about her ancestors. She is the last in the line of a Yorkshire settler family that came over at the end of the 18th century. The Boltenhouse Museum of local history has a full room of artefacts that she has donated to them. She has no children and feels a great responsibility to honor the history of her family and of Sackville.