Details
Update: Position filled
The Haisla Artists Exhibition Committee (with the Kitimat Museum & Archives) is seeking a person with interviewing and writing competency to create the content for an exhibition booklet for the Haisla Artists 2024 exhibition (May 8 – July 13, 2024).
Familiarity with your community and its artists will be key. The goals are to provide a space for Haisla artists to display their artwork, and to welcome all artists from the Haisla community to participate in the show. The booklet will provide a snapshot/picture of Haisla artistry at this moment in time, including both emerging and professional artists.
The position will involve liaising with the Exhibition Committee and the artists and encouraging artists to display their artwork and to be interviewed and photographed.
Compensation – $3,000 total ($1,500 to begin and $1,500 upon completion). This is a contract position, anticipated to be 100 work hours total. The contract will include further details regarding the booklet (size, length, etc.), interviewing artists (number of artists, potential questions to ask, etc.), and contract length/deadline, anticipated to end Friday, April 5, 2024.
Primary Areas of Responsibility
- Schedule interviews with artists planning to participate in the show.
- Interview the artists. Could be by phone, online, or in person. Could be recorded if that is of interest to the artist and contractor. Recordings are optional.
- Gather information on the artist’s life and artwork. What influences do they have? What are the pieces? Gather information about the specific pieces. The contractor has flexibility and independence in asking questions pertinent to the artist.
- Encourage artists who have not submitted entry forms to do so. This task is secondary to the Exhibition Committee members promoting the show and encouraging artists.
- Book the photographer to take images of the artists, their finished pieces, and/or their work in progress.
- Education and Experience Requirements
- Writing and interviewing interest and skill.
- High school or equivalent, or post-secondary.
- Artistic knowledge an asset.
Effective Skills
- Great listener
- Communicates with confidence
- Social ability
- Competent writer
- Organized and meets deadlines
- Independent
How to Apply
Send an email to info@kitimatmuseum.ca or call 250-632-8950 and identify your interest and your experience (with interviewing, writing, and in the arts). Provide a sample of your writing.
Application deadline is Friday, January 5, 2024, but the position will remain open until filled.
About the Museum
The Kitimat Museum & Archives has worked together with the Haisla Nation since 1969 on diverse projects including the Haisla Inventory Project, Archaeological Field School, Haisla Basketry Project, and the commissioning of Little Blackfish, a one-man Haisla canoe by Tom Nyce Sr. The Museum has hosted Haisla artist solo and group shows and continues to hold Haisla Nation artifacts in trust.
Recently, the Museum installed nine cultural information panels to accompany the Haisla Heritage Collection now rehoused in new cases in the Upstairs Gallery. The Haisla Artists exhibition will occupy the temporary exhibition space beside that collection of contemporary and traditional pieces, honoring that collection for the show’s run.
Haisla Artists is an opportunity to celebrate cultural and artistic identity. It is outreach to foster relationships between local artists and the Kitimat Museum & Archives. It is the way forward with reconciliation and with the plan to eventually share a facility for arts, heritage, and culture, two communities together.