Thank you Maya Wilson-Sánchez and CMagazine for such a thoughtful review of Beyond the Vanishing Maya (curated by Diego Ventura Puac-Coyoy)! An excerpt from the review: “I am grateful that I could come here to visit you—that I could come to Tkaronto to bring you a word. A sweet word, a happy word, a word of honey. Maybe you feel lonely, maybe you feel sad. Maybe, in this place—I don’t know—you’re happy. Maybe when they made you, you knew this was going to be your destiny. To be here in our name, in the name of our community, in the name of our land.” This is what Diego Ventura Puac-Coyoy uttered to an ancient Maya ceramic whistle in the shape of a dancer and musician while holding ceremony at the Gardiner Museum. He is the curator of “Beyond the Vanishing Maya: Voices of a Land in Resistance” at the Textile Museum—a landmark exhibition that brings together Maya works across time. The show includes pieces from the Textile Museum, private collections, the Gardiner Museum, and most notably, Ventura’s family’s own collection of Maya art from the 20th and 21st centuries. After saying these words, Ventura took out the whistle figure from a storage box and wrapped it in a textile like an infant. Holding the piece with one arm and bells in the other, he rocked up and down, ringing the bells as he danced with the ceramic. This was the beginning of a procession from the Gardiner Museum to the Textile Museum that marked the opening of the exhibition, with a stop at the memorial for residential schools in Queen’s Park, where Ventura exclaimed to a crowd, “We are still here!” His words drew solidarity between the colonial history of Canada and that of Guatemala. Read the full review in C Magazine, Issue 160: Extra Life! https://bit.ly/4dg8Tzz (fb)

The latest on our blog: we take a closer look at the printed textiles by Danish-Canadian designer Thor Hansen. An artist, designer, and tireless advocate for the craft movement in Canada from the mid-1950s through the 1960s, Hansen produced notable works during his corporate career as an art director for the British-American Oil Company. Influenced by his Scandinavian roots, Hansen rejected artistic hierarchies and the division between art, design, and craft, believing all crafts held equal importance. His mission to capture "the essence of Canada" in his designs led him to incorporate regional motifs such as deer, mountain sheep, and musk ox, alongside inspirations from folk art and First Nations imagery. However, this approach has also drawn criticism for cultural appropriation. 🔗 Visit our blog to learn more about Hansen and his mid-century textiles that blend naturalism and abstraction: https://bit.ly/4k2q1uQ (fb)