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As one of the top fine arts schools in Canada, we have a vital impact on culture both at home and abroad. We also host over 200 events a year, both on- and off-campus. Read our blog for all the latest Fine Arts stories, follow for breaking news on Twitter or find us on or Instagram.

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Media archive

As acknowledged experts in fields ranging from classical and popular music to art history, digital media, pop culture and so much more, our faculty are frequently in the news. Catch up on our expert opinions by visiting our media archive, which offers story briefs and links to media coverage.

Orange Shirt Day events

September 26, 2023
Did you know this popular Orange Shirt Day design “Hearts & Hands” was created by multi-disciplinary Kwakwaka’wakw/Coast Salish artist Carey Newman? UVic’s Impact Chair in Indigenous Art Practices and a professor with both our departments of Visual...
Read more: Orange Shirt Day events

Southam Lecture: Erica Gies

September 25, 2023
“Nearly every human endeavor on the planet was conceived and constructed with a relatively stable climate in mind. But as new climate disasters remind us every day, our world is not stable — and it is changing in ways that expose the deep dysfunction of...
Read more: Southam Lecture: Erica Gies

See more of Fine Arts Research

Orion Lecture: Visiting Artist Anne Low
Anne Low creates sculptural forms, often using techniques and methodologies associated with histories of decorative arts and domestic interiors. Having trained as a weaver over the last decade, hand-woven textile history informs much of her work, alongside other arcane material histories, from that of utilitarian objects to furniture making. Despite being grounded in highly specific techniques, her work seeks to understand how these ways of making can provide a ground or conduit to explore the less tangible aspects of subjec-tivity, desire and memory. Low lives and works on Sointula Island. She has exhibitied extensively in North America and abroad, and was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2019 and the Loewe Craft Prize in 2017.
Orion Lecture: Visiting Artist Kade Twist
Kade L. Twist is an interdisciplinary artist working with video, sound, interactive media, text and installation environments. His work examines the unresolved tensions between market-driven systems, consumerism and American Indian cultural self-determination. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Twist currently serves as associate professor and curriculum area head of Art+Social Practice in the MFA Fine Arts Department at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles. A 2015 US Artist Klein Fellow for Visual Arts and recipient of the Native Writers Circle First Book Award, he is also co-founder of Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary artist collective, and has exhibited work nationally and internationally both individually and as part of Postcommodity. Postcommodity’s work has been included in the Sydney Biennale, Whitney Biennial, Carnegie International and documenta 14, as well as numerous solo exhibitions including the Art Institute of Chicago Museum, San Francisco Art Institute, LAXArt, Scottsdale Museum of Art, Remai Modern Museum and their historic land art installation Repellent Fence at the US/Mexico border in Arizona/Sonora.
Orion Lecture: Visiting Artist Amanda Boulos
Toronto-based visual artist Amanda Boulos engages with national narratives from Palestine, Lebanon and Canada. Exploring how fragmented narratives found in oral Palestinian archives do not align with a grand national narrative— but instead morph and shift into what she would like to think is the future of the Palestinian diaspora/shattat — Boulos’paintings take on the idea that our future is constantly undergoing what philosopher Catherine Malabou calls an “unprecedented metamorphosis,” a metamorphosis that is capable of abandoning a burdened body or identity to allow a new form to emerge. Amanda Boulos received her MFA from the University of Guelph in 2017 and has exhibited nationally and internationally.
Orion Lecture with Carmen Aguirre, (Author, Actor & Playwright)
Orion Lecture Series: Memoir & Satire with Author, Actor & Playwright Carmen Aguirre Carmen Aguirre reads from her bestselling memoir Mexican Hooker #1: Art, Love, and Forgiveness After Trauma, and from her new play The Consent Club. Her reading will be followed by a question and answer period. Carmen Aguirre is an Electric Company Theatre Core Artist and Artistic Associate of New Play Development at The Stratford Festival. She has written and co-written over twenty-five plays, the #1international bestseller Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter (CBC Canada Reads winner), and its bestselling sequel, Mexican Hooker #1: Art, Love, and Forgiveness After Trauma. She is adapting Euripides’ Medea, Moliere’s The Learned Ladies for Toronto’s Factory Theatre, Linebaugh and Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra for The Stratford Festival, and writing Fire Never Dies for Electric Company. Carmen is a 2020 Siminovitch Prize finalist and a Studio 58 graduate. www.carmenaguirre.ca (Advisory: Some content deals with subject matter related to sexual assault.)

See more videos from the Orion Lecture series playlist on YouTube.