Fine Arts honours cultural leaders
Concordia paid tribute to three champions of arts and culture at the Fine Arts Awards of Distinction ceremony at the university’s FOFA Gallery on June 5.
“All three award recipients share qualities that we value,” said Catherine Wild, dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts. “They are committed to the practice, study and development of contemporary art at the highest level, they personify leadership and originality, and they support Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts as a leading national centre for cultural creation and debate and thriving incubator for top-notch emerging artists and scholars.”
Phoebe Greenberg
Director and Founder of DHC/ART and the Phi Centre
In accepting her award, Phoebe Greenberg spoke of the power of art in drawing humanity closer together. A visionary committed to presenting some of the most compelling art of our time, Greenberg founded the exhibition space DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art in downtown Montreal in 2007.
Offering free admission and flexible hours, DHC/ART’s mission is to promote a greater appreciation for, and understanding of, contemporary art by the public at large. Thought-provoking exhibitions by artists of international stature are making an impact beyond provincial boundaries.
Greenberg recently opened the Phi Centre, another innovative arts hub bringing together visual and performing artists, their work and their audiences. The Faculty of Fine Arts is collaborating with the Phi Centre on a number of programming ideas featuring the work of faculty, students and alumni to take place in the coming year.
Bruce Mallen
Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema Advisory Board member
“I am a Concordian for the rest of my life,” says Mallen, an entrepreneur, academic leader, advisor and donor with long-standing ties to the university. Mallen is both a graduate of and former dean of the Faculty of Commerce and Administration at one of Concordia’s founding institutions, Sir George Williams University. He received an honorary doctorate from Concordia in 2004.
Mallen is a member of the university’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema Advisory Board and a strong advocate of interdisciplinary collaboration between the art of cinema and the film industry.
He was the founding director of the Florida Atlantic University DeSantis Center for Motion Picture Industry Studies. Now based in Santa Monica, Calif., where he is the CEO of Krav Maga Worldwide, Mallen continues to pursue his strong interest in film. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and chair of the University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson School of Management’s annual Bruce Mallen Business and Economics Scholars Workshop in the Entertainment and Media Management Institute.
Gabor Szilasi
Professor Emeritus, Department of Studio Arts
A major figure in photography in Canada, Szilasi helped encourage and inspire several generations of artists over the course of his career. Szilasi began teaching photography in 1971 at the CEGEP du Vieux Montréal and then became a professor at Concordia from 1980 until his retirement in 1995. “I considered it a mutual exchange,” he says. “I taught my students and I learned from them.”
Heavily influenced by his experiences in his native Budapest and subsequent flight to Canada following the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, Szilasi’s expansive oeuvre is preoccupied with social documentary. His humanistic chronicle of landscape, cityscape and everyday life earned the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2010 and the Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas in 2009.
Szilasi shows no sign of slowing down. He will soon be on his way to Vendôme, France, where a mini-retrospective of his work, L’éloquence du quotidian, will be exhibited from June 22 to September 15, 2013.
The three new award recipients join a unique group of 11 other individuals and organizations who have been granted Fine Arts Awards of Distinction since their inauguration in 2002 by former dean Christopher Jackson.
The past recipients are René Blouin; Fondation J.A. DeSève; Leonard Ellen; Ydessa Hendeles; Mel Hoppenheim; Michal Hornstein; Stephen and Gail Jarislowsky; Christine Jones; Avrum Morrow; Noel Spinelli; and Liliane Stewart.
Related links:
• Faculty of Fine Arts
• DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art
• Phi Centre
• Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California
• Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas