Sandra Dyck is the director of Carleton University Art Gallery.
The CDCC Artist Profile Series – Q&A
Q. What drew you to visual arts and arts curation?
A. A love of art and a circuitous path led me to my career, for which I am extremely fortunate and grateful.
Q. What do you like most about being the director of CUAG (Carleton University Art Gallery)?
A. It is an honour to partner with artists and collaborators of wide-ranging lived experiences, to support the distinctive experiences and forms of learning their projects offer, and to facilitate open exchanges with the heterogeneous communities their projects coalesce.
Q. What is it like to host events at Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre?
A. CUAG loves collaborating with the CDCC team to dream and produce events in Woodside Hall—it’s been a hugely rewarding and revelatory experience to work with and connect to people downtown.
Q. What advice would you offer to someone trying to pursue a curatorial career?
A. I prefer to flip this question and emphasize that organizations are responsible for creating and providing meaningful opportunities for emerging cultural workers of diverse backgrounds to explore and gain experience in curatorial work.
Q. How has your work been impacted during COVID-19?
A. After being closed for approximately six months, CUAG reopened for three weeks in fall, and then closed for another month-long period. Even in February of this year, it would have been hard to imagine this! It is similarly challenging to succinctly describe the pandemic’s considerable impact on our work.
Generally speaking, however, the shutdown has impelled us to reflect on and experiment with what it means to be a gallery when you cannot invite people to experience exhibitions in person. The pandemic has so clearly exposed and exacerbated structural gaps and inequalities in society, increasing the urgency we feel to work continuously toward making CUAG a more equitable, representative, accessible and just institution, and to better deploying CUAG’s resources in service of others.
Q. What are the special projects that you have undertaken during the quarantine time?
A. During the shutdown, we have been learning and working with new (to us) digital tools to support and disseminate the work of artists, and are looking forward to continuing this work.
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