A Conversation with Ian Wallace + Dr. Trish Kelly

100 Years in the Making | This event is organized in support of ECU 100, Emily Carr University of Art + Design’s centennial anniversary. 

Please join us for a special presentation in conjunction with the exhibition En Route: mobile forms of art and education, currently on view at Libby Leshgold Gallery. Renowned artist, writer and educator Ian Wallace will be in conversation with award-winning art historian and ECU President and Vice-Chancellor Dr. Trish Kelly.  

Taking the exhibition as a starting point, the conversation will explore Wallace’s influence as an educator, his profound effect through programs such as ECU’s Visiting Artist Program (1979 – 89) and his approach to teaching, learning and making as an engaged process crossing the boundaries of classroom, studio, gallery and the street. Drawing on Dr. Kelly’s experience as an art historian and research into artistic communities of practice, the conversation will acknowledge the wide-ranging effects of artist-led educational models that work within and alongside institutional contexts.  

RSVP here.

Since 1965, Ian Wallace has been active as an exhibiting artist, writer, and educator. He has been an influential figure in the development of an internationally acknowledged photographic and conceptual approach to artistic practice. Wallace uses photography and painting to investigate the relationship between these and other media, with a focus on the production of narrative, cinematic, literary, and otherwise. After graduating with a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of British Columbia, Wallace taught art history at the university from 1967 to 1970, and then at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design from 1972 to 1998. In 2014, he was awarded the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2013, Wallace was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada, and was honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. In 2004, he was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award for the Visual Arts. 

Dr. Trish Kelly began her term as the 10th President + Vice Chancellor of Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU) on October 3, 2024. An award-winning educator and researcher, she brings extensive leadership and academic experience from art and design institutions across North America. Originally from the United States, she holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, an MA from Tufts University and a PhD in art history from the University of British Columbia. As an art historian and educator, her research involves a range of subjects, including minimal art and abstraction, art and politics, alternative art networks, and time and duration in new media production. Throughout, an interest in viewership and art-making as a form of knowledge production is central. Currently, she is working on a book project titled On-Site: Art, Politics, and Viewers (New York, circa 1970), exploring modes of critical and embodied viewership explored in artist-run centres and alternative art networks of the early 1970s.