The Board of Governors Alumni Award of Excellence is awarded to outstanding alumni who have demonstrated an exceptional achievement in their art practice and/or field of endeavor; have achieved prominence in their field bringing honour and prestige to ACAD; have contributed to their community and/or has demonstrated public service and is an inspiration and/or role model to others.
The award will be conferred at ACAD’s 2012 Convocation Ceremony to be held May 2012 at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium.
This award is a wonderful way to publically recognize the contributions and successes of ACAD alumni. ACAD Faculty, Staff, Students, and Alumni are encouraged to think about alumni that are deserving of this honour and to submit a nomination using the form below or by sending an email to alumni@acad.ca by October 1, 2012.
Do you have someone you’d like to nominate for the ACAD Board of Governors Alumni Award of Excellence?
ACAD Awards Prestigious Board of Governors’ Alumni Award to Les Manning
May 16, 2012 (Calgary, Alberta) - The Alberta College of Art + Design (ACAD) is pleased to announce the 2012 Board of Governors’ Alumni Award of Excellence will be awarded to internationally...
This award is given annually to an alumnus or alumna of ACAD who has made a significant contribution to the arts community and has demonstrated excellence in their field of practice.
Inaugural Recipient of the ACAD Board of Governors Alumni Award of Excellence.
Nelson Henricks was born in Bow Island, Alberta and is a graduate of the Alberta College of Art (1986). He moved to Montreal in 1991, where he received a BFA from Concordia University (1994). Henricks continues to live and work in Montreal, where he has taught at Concordia University and McGill University. A musician, writer, curator and artist, Henricks is best known for his videotapes, which have been exhibited worldwide. A focus on his video work was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of the Video Viewpoints series (2000). His writings have been published in Fuse, Public, Coil magazines, and in the anthologies So, To Speak (Editions Artexte, 1999), Lux (YYZ Press, 2000) and Caught in the Act (YYZ Press, 2004). With Steve Reinke, Henricks coedited an anthology of artist's video scripts entitled By the Skin of Their Tongues (YYZ Press, 1997). Henricks was the recipient of the Bell Canada Award in Video Art (2002) and the Board of Governors' Alumni Award of Excellence from the Alberta College of Art and Design (2005).
With a career that spans several years in both Los Angeles and New York, Kim's list of accomplishments reads as a Creative Director's dream. She was a driving force in branding the UK based Soap&Glory and FitFlop footwear. Kim has held senior management positions for three major music labels and was Co-founder/Creative Director of Popglory and SMOG design. Some of Kim's extraordinary clients include: Nike, Yahoo!, Lucasfilm, MTV Networks, Aerosmith, Seal and Madonna. An alumna of Canada's fertile ACAD, Kim's work has been acknowledged by the AIGA, Art Directors Club of New York, Communication Arts, Graphics, Print and National Academy Recording Arts & Sciences.
Entry from www.museevirtuel-virtualmuseum.ca: Joane Cardinal-Schubert was born in 1942 in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. She attended the Alberta College of Art and Design from 1962 to 1964 and 1966 to 1967, studying painting, printmaking, and multi-media. In 1973 she began a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Alberta, transferred to the University of Calgary, and graduated in 1977 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. For the past 20 years, her writing has been published internationally in art magazines, catalogues, and books. She has worked as a curator, an artist, a lecturer and as a director of video and native theatre. She has received numerous awards, including election to the Royal Canadian Academy in 1985. In 1993 she received the Commemorative Medal of Canada for her contribution to the arts.
Christian Eckart is best known for his Andachtsbild, Eidolon, White Painting and Icon-Type series. They all employ, to some extent, some of the materials and techniques traditional in religious artworks since the beginning of the Renaissance. In these works gilded mouldings and panels in configurations that recall altarpieces, cruciforms and so forth were presented in combination with contemporary materials such as plexiglass, formica and industrial paints. However, his focus in recent years has been on other hyper-realized paintings generally made from aluminum and hand-polished automobile lacquer. Series such as the Sacra Conversazione Paintings, Regular Paintings, Zootrope Paintings and Curved Monochrome Paintings are made in this way. The actual paint process used in these works is one developed by Rolls Royce early in the 20th century and based on the techniques of Chinese Lacquer Ware.
Meg Van Rosendaal graduated from ACAD in 1989 as a Painting student, and has been contributing to the Calgary arts community since the time of her graduation. Meg was first a volunteer coordinator of ArtWalk, a one-day event started in the 1980?s by a group of Calgary gallery owners. Along with Anne McKenzie, her partner in the Arts Consulting firm McKenzie Van Rosendaal, Meg was a founder of The Visual Arts Week Society, and the annual ten-day ArtWeek, which is now the ArtCity festival. Hired as Outreach Programmer for the EPCOR CENTRE for the Performing Arts in 1999, Meg initiated the citywide RealLiveArts website and assembled a consortium of arts organizations, property owners and businesses to form the Olympic Plaza Cultural District. As the Cultural District momentum grew, she became the General Manager of the District, and produced year-round outdoor programming, such as the four-day Alberta Centennial celebration, Brilliant City, Winter Parties in the Plaza, Asian Night Markets, Movies in the Plaza and the popular year-round First Thursdays event series. The award-winning Cultural District Manifesto & Idea Bank, developed through a community-wide process, is one of her lasting legacies, shaping an exciting long-term vision for a well-loved urban destination in our downtown. Ms. Van Rosendaal connects Calgarians with the arts in new and engaging ways, and strongly believes in the arts as a vital factor in making Calgary a great and creative city for the world.
Graduating from the Alberta College of Art in 1980, Amy established an active practice as a visual artist and community supporter. She soon recognized that a vacuum existed in terms of serious writing about visual arts in the city, particularly regarding emerging artists and practices associated with craft. She helped found Texts, a journal of critical writing and the arts based in Calgary between 1989 and 1993. This journal introduced sophisticated theoretical writing into the community, connecting Calgary with similar communities across Canada. Her own writing focuses on women artists and artists working in craft disciplines. In a number of cases, her essays were among the first to be published on individual artists, many of whom had direct ties with ACAD. Overall, she has presented and/or published over eighty essays relating to visual arts and craft practice in Canada and abroad. Much of Amy's work is grounded in her career as a teacher at ACAD. For sixteen years, she taught in Liberal Studies. Throughout, she emphasized the importance of history and theory to articulating and shaping the nature of artistic practice. In 2006, Amy retired from ACAD to move to Vancouver where she continues her activities as an artist, writer and educator.
Alex Janvier received much of his formal art training from the Alberta College of Art in Calgary and graduated with honours in 1960. As a member of the commonly referred to “Indian Group of Seven”, Janvier is one of the significant pioneering aboriginal artists in Canada, and as such has influenced many generations of aboriginal artists. Although he has completed several murals nationally, Janvier speaks of the 450 meter squared masterpiece entitled “Morning Star” at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, as a major highlight in his career. In recognition of his success, Alex Janvier recently received three prestigious Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation, The Tribal Chiefs Institute, and Cold Lake First Nations. Janvier's passion and natural talents for creative expression remains strong to this day.
Chris Cran is a painter living and working in Calgary, Alberta. Cran studied art at the Kooteny School of Art in Nelson, British Columbia in 1976 and graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1979, where he is a current member of the faculty. Since graduating from ACAD he has continued an active exhibition history, obtaining numerous Canada Council grants and placing his work in many of Alberta's best collections, as well as in the National Gallery of Canada. Cran's work investigates perception and illusion, and the viewer's role in how images are formed. Widely exhibited across Canada and internationally recognized, Cran's paintings, included in numerous Canadian collections, have to do with visual tricks, images that appear one way but have been made another way.
Norman Faulkner has provided a vital and fundamental force to the shaping of the Canadian glass community. A graduate of the Alberta College of Art + Design (Ceramics, 1973) and of the Royal College of Art in London (MA, Glass, 1986), Faulkner is one of the founders of the studio glass movement, and the originator of ACAD's glass studio program. Faulkner has created a private hot glass studio in Calgary and continues to develop his own successful practice - focusing on all aspects of glass from large scale commission work to small scale conceptual sculpture to functional blown glass.