This exhibition is part of an ongoing series of projects and class seminars featuring artwork from the University of Victoria’s Michael Williams Collection led by Dr. Carolyn Butler-Palmer who occupies the Williams Legacy Chair.

Last semester, students discussed and debated the intersections between art and homelessness and how to most effectively and empathetically develop an exhibition on this topic.  In addition to class discussion there were several projects fulfilled by the students that can now be viewed on the website or experienced in the Legacy Gallery.  The class was separated into groups to collect oral histories of people in Victoria who work with the homeless community or have made art dealing with the subject. 

The final project was entirely different. Each student selected a piece of art from the Williams Collection and investigated the works provenance, the artists’ oeuvre, and the way in which the work explored the subject of wealth.  The students wrote an essay and created in-depth research portfolio about their process of learning about their artwork. These research portfolios can be viewed online or in the gallery.

In the winter seminar of Dr. Carolyn Butler-Palmer’s the focus of the class was to actually curate the exhibition that had been discussed in the previous semester. To make the project more manageable, the class was broken up into four groups: Installation, Labels, Public Relations, and Web Design.  The Installation team was given the task of choosing the images for the exhibition, their placement in the gallery, and to create a cohesive message that questions the different concepts of wealth. The Label group was in charge of creating all of the text panels, labels, and to select research questions for specific artworks to give the viewer points of reflection with different works.  Public Relations was in charge of putting together press releases for the exhibition as well as the Conversational Café, and to create promotional material for the exhibition. The Web Design group created a website that accompanied the exhibition and communicated its message, displayed the work that was included along with the previous research from earlier classes, and to make it accessible to a wider audience.

The next stage of this project is a seminar to be held in 2010-11 that will focus on therapeutic curating at ACCESS Health, Cool-Aid’s new health facility for indigent residents of Victoria.