Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
The Art and Art History Collection has approximately 700 works of art, primarily donated by graduating students, staff and faculty over the years. Some of the earliest works in the collection were produced in the 1940s by Jean Johnston, who after graduation from USASK, moved to the US to become both a commercial illustrator and arts educator. Johnston’s posthumous bequest to the Gallery supports the collection’s continuing development. Collecting art by graduating students evolved more systematically in the 1970s and database entries reflect this. The Collection is managed and its display is curated under the auspices of the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery.
In 2020, previous Snelgrove Gallery Director, Marcus Miller, framed the online content this way:
This database is a work in process, and contains many inadequate images and incomplete records. Its entries cover about 85% of the collection, but in the interests of accessibility and research, knowing that no archive is ever perfect or complete, we share what has been done to date. Archives reflect the interests, knowledge, perseverance and personalities of the archivists. In this case I’m greatly indebted to four assistant registrars: Shelby Lund, Mary Sarcauga, Emily Johnson and Dorothy Chung. Over the course of three summers, they worked like detectives to compile the scattered objects and records (in a myriad of formats including typed and hand-written notes, to small JPEGS saved in MS Word files) to create the database, which for all intents and purposes, is a ‘portrait’ of the Department of Art and Art History (sic) at the University of Saskatchewan.
The database will continue to grow and be refined, but a new approach to object-collecting has emerged that better serves the artists and their practice. Works by select graduating students will be physically borrowed for one year, displayed on sites throughout the school, and then returned. The documentation of these new artworks will continue to feed the database as it grows into an ever-richer lens with which to view this area of the newly emergent School for the Arts. In this way, we hope to serve students and researchers alike through publicly accessible living documents online and animated and ever-changing art spaces in real life.
In 2020, previous Snelgrove Gallery Director, Marcus Miller, framed the online content this way:
This database is a work in process, and contains many inadequate images and incomplete records. Its entries cover about 85% of the collection, but in the interests of accessibility and research, knowing that no archive is ever perfect or complete, we share what has been done to date. Archives reflect the interests, knowledge, perseverance and personalities of the archivists. In this case I’m greatly indebted to four assistant registrars: Shelby Lund, Mary Sarcauga, Emily Johnson and Dorothy Chung. Over the course of three summers, they worked like detectives to compile the scattered objects and records (in a myriad of formats including typed and hand-written notes, to small JPEGS saved in MS Word files) to create the database, which for all intents and purposes, is a ‘portrait’ of the Department of Art and Art History (sic) at the University of Saskatchewan.
The database will continue to grow and be refined, but a new approach to object-collecting has emerged that better serves the artists and their practice. Works by select graduating students will be physically borrowed for one year, displayed on sites throughout the school, and then returned. The documentation of these new artworks will continue to feed the database as it grows into an ever-richer lens with which to view this area of the newly emergent School for the Arts. In this way, we hope to serve students and researchers alike through publicly accessible living documents online and animated and ever-changing art spaces in real life.
Murray Building, First Level, Room 191, 3 Campus Drive
Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A4
Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A4
(306) 966-4208
Objects
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