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Surrey Art Gallery’s ‘Southbank’ collection the subject of curator’s talk

Jordan Strom has organized more than 45 art exhibitions in Surrey since 2009
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Jordan Strom, curator of exhibitions and collections at Surrey Art Gallery. (submitted photo/SAG)

Surrey Art Gallery’s final Thursday Art Talk event this fall will focus on curator Jordan Strom on Dec. 6, from 7:30 to 9 p.m.

He’ll talk about the Bear Creek Park facility’s approach to collecting work by South Fraser artists. Admission is free.

Art by local artists can be repositories for understanding where we live, he says. They provide new perspectives on place, peoples, histories, and possible futures. They add to the stories of a place. But how does a gallery decide on which artists to collect?

“Since Surrey Art Gallery’s beginning in 1975, we are committed to engaging with artists in our community,” Strom says in a release. “We collect and show their work. Our permanent collection belongs to citizens of Surrey to enjoy and to discover new ways of seeing the world.”

The gallery’s 40th-anniversary celebration in 2015 featured Views from the Southbank, a three-part exhibition that ran all year. The show included works by more than 70 local artists.

Over the years, Strom notes, Surrey Art Gallery has given many local artists the chance to show their work, from group to solo exhibits. Recent exhibits have highlighted the work of the late Don Hutchinson, Jim Adams and Elizabeth Hollick.

In January, SAG will present its first solo exhibition of Surrey-based artist Nicoletta Baumeister, called In the Realm of Perception.

The gallery’s collection also informs recent thematic exhibits, including Small Stages: Still Life from the Permanent Collection (in 2016), Flow: From the Movement of Goods to the Circulation of Information (2017) and Connecting Threads, which is on display at SAG until Dec. 16, at 13750 88 Ave.

• RELATED: VIDEO: Surrey gallery’s Strom welcomes big, colourful Indian art on tour, from January 2018.

Strom, curator of exhibitions and collections at SAG, has organized more than 45 art exhibitions in Surrey since 2009. He also done similar work for Vancouver Art Gallery, Kamloops Art Gallery, Presentation House Gallery and Republic Gallery, among others. From 2004 to 2008, Jordan was editor of Fillip magazine, an international journal of art writing.



tom.zillich@surreynowleader.com

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Tom Zillich

About the Author: Tom Zillich

I cover entertainment, sports and news stories for the Surrey Now-Leader, where I've worked for more than half of my 30-plus years in the newspaper business.
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