Opening Pandora’s Box: Bente Rehm Crashes Victoria’ s Artworld
September 24, 2025
by: Caroline Riedel, Interim Director, University Art Collections
A fascinating scrapbook compiled in the 1960s by a young Victoria gallerist and artist has now been digitized and offers a highly personalized look into Victoria's emerging mid-century art scene.
Bente Rehm was in her 20s when she opened Pandora’s Box Gallery (PBG) as the first commercial gallery space for modern art in Victoria. PBG had a brief but influential presence operating from 1966 to 1970 at two locations: first, a rented house at 750 Pandora Street; and then at 1208 Wharf Street in a repurposed munitions building. The gallery shared the building with the A-Go-Go Discotheque and a print shop run by Vincent Rickard. In both locations, Rehm represented local and recent émigré artists such as painters Maxwell Bates, Flemming Jorgensen and Herbert Siebner; potters Jan and Helga Grove; Kwakwaka'wakw carver Tony Hunt Sr.; and sculptor Elza Mayhew.
Rehm’s scrapbook contextualizes related collections in Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) and the University Art Collections (UAC) including influential local printmaker Vincent Rickard and Point Group artists such as Virginia Lewis and Herbert Siebner. Over 1,000 of Rickard’s artists proofs of works by Indigenous artists are held at the UAC and his cut books can be found in SCUA, documenting a generation of Northwest Coast Indigenous artists supported by Rickard over his 40+ year career. Other treasures include: a ticket stub for a Beatles concert in Vancouver that cost $3.25; articles about Siebner's murals and the “controversy” surrounding his impressionistic study of the Inner Harbour at Victoria City Hall; meeting minutes from January 22, 1965 to establish a non-profit society for the promotion of arts and crafts in the city of Victoria; and numerous celebratory and occasionally provocative exhibition reviews by local and national art critics.[1]
While many respected painters and sculptors were establishing their careers in Victoria, we learn from Rehm's scrapbook that Victoria art collectors were most interested in purchasing ceramics in the 1960s. She asserts that that it was pottery and jewelry, the latter often designed by Bente herself, that “kept the gallery afloat.” Rehm’s exhibitions were in fact reviewed twice by Canadian Art magazine in 1967 and regularly by local Victoria newspaper art critics Ted Lindberg and Robin Skelton. Rehm herself was an artist and her innovative weavings were shown at the National Gallery of Canada, and a 1965 review in Victoria’s Times-Colonist newspaper describes her weaving experiments as “crashing the artworld”.[2]
Browse this intriguing collection of ephemera and learn more about Victoria’s emerging modern art scene on UVic Libraries’ vault collections page.
[1] Skelton, R. (1966, March 5). Artistic vitality permeates Pandora’s Box. Times Colonist, p. 6
Boultbee, J. (1966, March 18). Pandora's Box to show city artists' treasures. Times Colonist, p.10.
Skelton, R. (1966, July 23). Pandora's Box feels hot breath of competition. Times Colonist, p. 14.
Lindberg, T. (1968, June 15). When will people support a gallery? Times Colonist, p. 10.
[2] Weaving experiment crashes art world. (1965, August 7), Times Colonist, p. 4.