Community Projects and Restitutions

Donald Ellis Gallery is featured in the first issue of Convergence, a bi-annual magazine dedicated to the Arts of the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania. Featured under the category Best Practice, the gallery is highlighted for giving back through community-oriented projects and restitution in the Pacific Northwest. “Through its ever-evolving trajectory,” the author Louise Deglin comments, “the Donald Ellis Gallery demonstrates that the art market and activism are, indeed, compatible enterprises. Efforts can continuously be made at the individual and collective level to listen, learn from, communicate with, and help finance Indigenous projects for a more diverse and just future.”

The article discusses Donald Ellis’s involvement with a number of Indigenous-led initiatives, among them the restitution of an important Kwakwaka’wakw Sun Mask and an architectural house plank to the U’mista Cultural Center in Alert Bay, BC as well as the restitution of a Haida shaman’s rattle and pre-contact stone mortar to the Haida Gwaii Museum in Skidegate, BC. In addition, the article references the Beau Dick Scholarship, awarded annually to a female student from the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation, and the Donald Ellis Scholarship in Art History, Visual Art and Theory for an Indigenous student at the University of British Columbia (UBC).

Convergence Magazine is a new project that emphasises "movement, exchange, dialogue, and openness within and between the arts of the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania" by highlighting specific artists, objects and practices deemed visually striking and conceptually innovative. Best Practice features an initiative in the world of non-European art that is making a positive impact on the field. The first issue of Convergence Magazine is available here.