MAYOR’S ART AWARDS
Lyndal Osborne saluted
Edmonton artist Lyndal Osborne, whose 45-year career has taken her highly distinctive sculptures and installations around the world, was the star of the 29th annual Mayor’s Celebration of the Arts on Thursday night at City Hall.
The Australian-born Osborne, who arrived here in 1971, received the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for her longtime and continuing contributions to the Edmonton arts scene. Her work, frequently created with recycled materials and found objects, often discovers its inspiration and metaphorical resonances in nature — witness such Art Gallery of Alberta exhibitions as Bowerbird and Archipelago.
Original Osbornes are to be found in more than 350 collections across the country and beyond, and her contributions extend to the next generation of artists through her work at the University of Alberta’s department of art and design.
Awards were presented in 11 categories in the course of an evening hosted by PACE (Professional Arts Coalition of Edmonton). The event is designed to showcase Edmonton’s arts and culture industry, as well as the network of artists, business people and media that supports and sustains it.
Catalyst Theatre, which has just announced an upcoming season that includes touring its original rock opera Vigilante to such highprofile Canadian theatre destinations as the National Arts Centre, was honoured with the Ambassador of the Arts Award.
In the Emerging Artist category, the six contenders included two versatile stars from Rapid Fire Theatre’s elite corps of improvisers. The winner was Ben Gorodetsky, the company’s associate artistic director, an artist of the experimental stripe, whose everexpanding theatrical skill set includes acting as well as improvisation, writing sketches and plays, and more recently, directing.
The arts scene has ample cause to salute the tirelessly inventive promotional chutzpah of the four-yearold What It Is podcast, which recently posted its 100th episode. As its title suggests, the podcast, which received the John Poole Award for Promotion of the Arts, is designed to be a liaison between artists and their audiences — mainly by asking the former to explain themselves, in entertaining fashion.
In a field that included five other artistic directors from diverse disciplines, the Artistic Leadership Award went to Christine Sokaymoh Frederick for her contributions to Alberta Aboriginal Performing Arts and to the Dreamspeakers Film Festival. It was the former outfit that paired with Workshop West to bring audiences Kenneth T. Williams’s powerful Cafe Daughter earlier this season.
April Dean, the executive director of SNAP, the Society of Northern Alberta Print Artists, was honoured for her work with that multi-faceted group that arranges exhibitions, offers studio space and workshops, and commissions work from printmakers.
And the spirit and achievement of guitarist/singer Sebastian Barrera, who founded Creart — a free school of music and art that runs Saturday mornings at Parkdale Cromdale Community League — was honoured with the Courage to Innovate Award.
The gifts of 16-year-old singer/ songwriter Olivia Rose, a standout student at the Victoria School of the Arts, were recognized with the CN Youth Award.
Night Moves, a 2015 short story collection set in the North, garnered versatile Dene author Richard Van Camp the City of Edmonton Book Award named. The collection reunites readers with some of Van Camp’s most popular characters.
The Mayor’s Award for Innovative Support by a Business for the Arts went to Langham Developments, and the company’s president Reza Mostashari.
The Sustained Support Award went to Rajammal Ram, founder and director of the Kalanilyam School of Dancing.