Wanda Koop Near You

I wrote a short piece that focuses on the works of Wanda Koop in the Canada Council Art Bank for the Summer 2016 of The Hub Magazine in Winnipeg and it's now online. While Koop has traveled extensively for her work and has exhibited around the world, she continues to live, work and be highly involved in her hometown of Winnipeg. She began making art in the prairie city as a child when she took free art classes at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in the 1950s. Since then, she has earned international acclaim, and in March 2016 she became a laureate of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.

Marroon Cloud (1979) by Wanda Koop

Koop’s career has developed in parallel with the Art Bank, and a wide range of her work from different periods is in the collection. Early works like Marroon Cloud, from 1979, shows that even then, Koop was working with an unorthodox colour scheme and a large scale, as it measures approximately 9 x 11 feet. In a 2010 interview with art critic Robin Laurence, Koop said that at art school in the 1970s one of her professors told her she was “taking up too much room.”

There are also smaller, more intimate works by Koop in the Art Bank collection, including sketches, and examples of her use of video as a compositional tool starting in the 1990s, as in Evening Without Angels/ Video Scroll Poem (1993). All of her work in the collection can be browsed online at the Art Bank’s website. You can read my full text here.