Celebrating 100-years of Community-Building

Unknown Photographer. Skating behind the Legislature Buildings, ca, 1921. Photograph. Collection of the Archives of Manitoba

Celebrating its centennial year in 2021, The Winnipeg Foundation is Canada’s first community foundation. As one of Canada’s oldest civic art galleries, the Winnipeg Art Gallery has a long history of collaboration with the Foundation, working together to connect the community with art.

The Alloways’ Gift tells the story of the early days of land, business, and community development in Winnipeg, from the perspective of The Winnipeg Foundation’s founding donors, William and Elizabeth Alloway. The exhibition features archival photographs, rare artifacts, and paintings drawn from the collections of the WAG, the Oseredok’s Ivan Bobersky Collection, the Manitoba Archives, the Manitoba Museum, and the City of Winnipeg Archives.

In Rosalie Favell: Family Legacy, Metis (Cree/English) artist Rosalie Favell uses a variety of sources – from family albums to pictures from popular culture – to construct a complex self-portrait through the lens of her family lineage in the Red River Valley, which dates back to before the 1700s. Favell pieces together the intersecting histories of the City of Winnipeg and the Indigenous Peoples of the Red River settlement. Artworks were commissioned especially for this show and are exhibited along with a selection of the artist’s paintings and photo-based work. The commissioned works experiment with lenticular photography – where you’re able to view two images at once, demonstrating two realities.

The first exhibition reflects a distinctly settler experience, a fact that has inspired our second exhibition recognizing the Indigenous, First Nations, and Métis peoples who lived and flourished here long before the arrival of the Alloways.

The Alloways’ Gift and Rosalie Favell: Family Legacy are on view now in Galleries 1&2 until September 12.