Charles Durning Carroll

We’re the Vancouver Art Gallery. Our permanent collection is full of local and contemporary art. If you’ve spent most of your life looking at great art (e.g. art of enduring historical value) you won’t recognize anything much in our collection. Somewhere–deep in our storage vaults–we apparently have some Dutch paintings from the 17th century, but we basically never take them out. (We’re going to take them out in 2013 but pair them with some contemporary art so that you don’t really need to look at those silly old Dutch paintings. When you come to them simply let your eyes glaze over!)

Speaking of which–if you’re coming to our gallery for international art you’d best go elsewhere. The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria–a metro area about a tenth the size of ours–has an outstanding collection of Japanese prints. Do we own any Asian art? Not that I can tell. Africa, Oceana, Latin America? Not even on our map.

We’d like to tell you that we have good art from our local region–but frankly, Berlin (that’s over in Europe boys and girls) has art from British Columbia that blows away anything in our collection. Go see it!

You said Emily Carr? We LOVE Emily Carr. She’s our idea of a real historical Canadian artist. Hell, she’s practically all we know from Canada. Haida masks, Jean-Paul Riopelle, B.C. Binning (yes, he’s even from B.C), or anything in Canada from before 1900? We’re not really interested.