Why you should donate to the Pitt

This has been a great year for UNIT/PITT. This fall was the 40th anniversary of the day in 1975 that students from the Vancouver School of Art rented the premises of a defunct shoe store in the main floor of the Avalon Hotel and founded the Helen Pitt Gallery. We have been through a lot of changes and transformations in four decades, and there were many people who never expected the Pitt to survive. It has been six years now since we were declared dead, and today we’re not only up and running, but bigger and more vital than before.

The Pitt has a longstanding and well-deserved reputation for providing opportunities for artists at the beginning of their careers, for opening the door to new practices and new ideas, and for showing work that for whatever reason is not getting the attention it really deserves.

Take a look at the past year:

A career survey of the work of Elizabeth Fischer, a talented, intelligent, sharp, and under-appreciated Vancouver artist, would never have happened without the Pitt.

An Exact Vertigo, an innovative cross-disciplinary collision of dance, choreography, text, and visual culture provided space for a dialogue and performance that you won’t find anywhere else.

As always, we took chances on early-career artists, with exhibitions like Joël Doyle: It’s a long way from the wishbone to the backbone, The Facility for Consideration, Cultivating Equilibrium, and of course Rachel & Sarah Seburn: We Should Take Below – The Gambling Splinter. We also supported artistic risk-taking in projects like www.2055project.website and Limited Time Library, and new critical ideas through ISSUE Magazine, the Musik Klub series, KSW’s Projector Verse series, and the recent Vancouver Noise and the Harmoniously Productive City.

While we were doing this, we kept on providing affordable space for artists and organizations in our building.

Your donation — no matter what size — has a bigger effect than you might think. Every little bit you give us now helps us make sure there will be another 40 years of artists, projects, and critical ideas that you will find here first. Every little bit of support we get from our community shows those people who would like to see us shut down that we’re here to stay.