Banff Artist in Residence: Early Career 2024

Adriana Kuiper (b.1973) lives and works in Sackville, New Brunswick in the territory of Mi’kma’ki. Her interdisciplinary work centres around themes that explore sheltering spaces, fear, protection, and human fallibility. Through strategies of reinvention, she re-examines a structure’s ability to provide safety and refuge against overwhelming forces, natural or otherwise. Kuiper’s work looks at how fears and justified anxieties relating to current events such as climate change, the global pandemic, divisive politics, and silenced voices have driven people to both retreat and to resist. Kuiper often collaborates with her partner Ryan Suter and has completed a number of public site-specific works in the Magdalen Islands, QC; Halifax, NS: and in Dawson City, YK. Kuiper has shown her work extensively across Canada and internationally. She is a professor in sculpture and drawing at Mount Allison University.

Alyssa Fearon holds the position of Director/Curator at Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan. Integral to Fearon’s curatorial practice is a community-based approach that seeks to foster connections with groups that have been historically and systemically excluded from the gallery milieu. In 2018, Fearon was inaugural Curator of Nuit Blanche Toronto’s Scarborough zone. Fearon was also Curator at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, 2018 – 2020. Raised in Scarborough, Ontario, Fearon is now based on Treaty 4 territory in Regina, Saskatchewan. She holds an MBA in Arts Management from the Schulich School of Business, an MA in Art History from York University, and was a Salzburg Global Fellow.

April Britski is the National Executive Director of CARFAC, Canada’s national association for visual artists. She has worked and volunteered as an arts administrator since 1998, and joined the staff of CARFAC in 2005. She is a co-founder of Artists’ Legal Services Ottawa and the Visual Arts Alliance, and she has served on several boards of cultural policy and artist-run organizations. April’s primary responsibility at CARFAC is the development and implementation of organizational policies and strategies related to artists’ legal and economic rights. She is actively involved in the research, development, and coordination of advocacy efforts, including CARFAC’s Artist’s Resale Right campaign. She assists with negotiating collective agreements for visual and media artists under the Status of the Artist Act, as well as other national voluntary agreements with presenters. Originally from Saskatchewan, April currently resides on the traditional unceded territories of the Coast Salish Nations including the Kwikwetlem, Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples.