Gallery
The VAG was founded in 1931 and had its first home at 1145 West Georgia Street. In 1983 it moved to the Hornby Street location, the former provincial courthouse. It was renovated at a cost of $20 million by architect Arthur Erickson, which completed his modern three city-block Robson Square complex. The Gallery connects to the rest of the complex via an underground passage below Robson Street to an outdoor plaza, restaurants, the University of British Columbia's downtown satellite campus, government offices, and the new Law Courts at the southern end.
The VAG has 41,400 square feet (3,850 m2) of exhibition space and about 10,000 works in its collection, most notably its Emily Carr collection. It has also amassed a significant collection of photographs. In addition to exhibitions of its own collection, the VAG regularly hosts touring exhibitions. The VAG regularly sponsors or hosts a number of public programmes and lectures.
The VAG is home to a gift shop, a café, and a library.
In March 2007, the 2010 Olympic countdown clock was placed in the front lawn of the VAG. It was open for free for the public to see. The clock has since been disassembled, with one half going to BC Place and the other to Whistler Village.
Read more about this topic: Vancouver Art Gallery
Famous quotes containing the word gallery:
“It doesn’t matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serves a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Each morning the manager of this gallery substituted some new picture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old upon the walls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)