There are only hours left to make a donation and get a charitable receipt for the 2017 tax year!

Here are some of the things we did in 2017, with the help and support of our community. We hope you’ll consider helping us out now for a successful 2018!

  • We opened 2017 with Juan Cisneros’s epic wall drawings, done with crayons hand-made from wax and chili peppers, with an opening featuring a surprise performance by Los Dorados.
  • In April we hosted Casey Wei’s intensive video residency and Karaoke Video Maker Free Store, which brought songwriters, bands, visual artists and everyone else into the gallery. Stay tuned for a future screening of some of the results.
  • Jamey Braden’s SHE _____ THE _____ was more than an exhibition, with works appearing all around Vancouver as street posters during the late spring and early summer. There’s also an amazing book.
  • During the summer, we hosted the School of Collaboration and Invention. A group of youth (16-20) spent six weeks talking and working, resulting in a one-day exhibition and performance event titled IMMIGRATION/AF.
  • Gio Swaby’s We All Know Each Other opened in fall 2017. This series of stitched portraits became a focal point for discussions about racism and solidarity.
  • Matthew Shields’s ever-shifting sculpture Papa Was A Garbage Man will be on until January 13 once we are back from our holiday closure.
  • Through all of this, we hosted the Spectre of Fascism Free School (series I and II), a series of free talks by scholars and activists on the subject of the looming worldwide threat to freedom posed by the development of new authoritarian governments and repressive movements. We’re especially proud that our exhibitions and artists’ projects served as a backdrop for these discussions (and of the topical playlists developed by the Pitt’s Associate Director Jamie Ward). Thanks to the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University for bringing this series to us!

We did all of this and more with a budget that is tiny compared to many visual art institutions. In 2018 we’ll be moving more of our programming out of the gallery and into the streets, and moving our discussions beyond interesting ideas and into plans for action, and your support will help us bring new art and new ideas to even more people, and will make a difference to the early-career artists whose work is important for the future.

Your donation of $20 or $50 or $100 now makes a huge difference to us, to our artists, and to our audiences. And if you’re mostly broke (lots of the best people are!), please consider setting up a small monthly donation instead (you can cancel it at any time if it gets to be too much).

Thanks for your support!

Posted by:Kay Higgins

Executive Director of UNIT/PITT from 2010 to 2018. Artist, writer, publisher.