The Grantham Foundation for the Arts and the Environment announces the laureates of its first call for projects  

Artist Andreas Rutkauskas of Kelowna, British Columbia, and artist duo Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens of Durham-Sud, Quebec, are the first two laureates of the Grantham Foundation for the Arts and the Environment. The announcement was made on Thursday, February 6, at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.  

More than 100 artists and researchers responded to the Foundation’s first call for projects. The award committee, headed by Johanne Lamoureux, chairholder of the Canada Research Chair in Civic Museology, was made up of Sophie Bélair-Clément, artist and professor at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, Jean-François Bélisle, executive director and chief curator at the Musée d’art de Joliette, Suzanne Paquet, chair of the Department of Art History and Cinema Studies at the Université de Montréal, and Bénédicte Ramade, art critic, researcher, independent curator and an authority on the issues of the Anthropocene.  

Andreas Rutkauskas, lauréat de la résidence d’artistes 2020

The winner of the 2020 artist residency and the accompanying $10,000 scholarship is Andreas Rutkauskas. Rutkauskas teaches at the Okanagan Campus of the University of British Columbia, where he has developed a course on artistic practice and the Anthropocene. He uses photography to explore the ecological effects of forest fires, an issue he addresses in his proposal for the residency, titled After the Fire. In contrast with the usual catastrophic view presented in the media, and in light of the new climate reality, Rutkauskas favors a resilience approach in which fire as a dynamic entity is integrated into better-balanced ecosystems. He will be in residence at the Foundation in December 2020.

Richard Ibghy et Marilou Lemmens, lauréats de la résidence de chercheurs 2020

The $5,000 research residency has been awarded to Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, an artist duo based in Durham-Sud, in the Centre-du-Quebec region, who have been exhibiting internationally for over 15 years. Their project, The Hidden World Beneath Our Feet, proposes to explore the intensification and financialization of agriculture in Quebec, and to analyze the manner which agricultural land is conceived of, appropriated and managed. Their project seeks to enhance our appreciation of soil biodiversity and transform the relationship between human agents and arable land. Their residency, scheduled for spring and summer 2020, will be devoted to meetings with researchers and farmers; collecting data and cartographies that relate to recent transformations in our relationship with the soil; and a consideration of the methods and metrics involved. An exhibition will follow at the Foundation in the fall. 

Created as a private foundation and recognized as a charitable organization by the governments of Canada and Quebec in 2018, the Grantham Foundation for the Arts and the Environment has a twofold mission. First, it supports artistic productions and research on art that tackle environmental challenges in the Anthropocene age. Second, it works to promote these activities and make them more accessible, mainly to young people in school. “Integrating an educational component into the work of the artists and researchers is one of our key objectives,” explain the Foundation’s co-founders Michel Paradis and Bernard Landriault. With this in mind, the artists and researchers will be invited to meet and work with students in the Centre-du-Québec region in order to make them more mindful of the importance of environmental issues through the visual arts.