In 1983, the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) opened its new location in the city’s old courthouse with the large survey exhibition Vancouver: Art and Artists 1931–1983. Coinciding with the VAG survey—in fact, opening on the same day—was the October Show, a 146 artist exhibition staged in a Yaletown warehouse, organized by Daina Augaitis, Todd Davis, then-CAG director/curator Christine Elving (working under her previous name, Mary Gingerich), Josie Kane, Robert Linsley, and Helga Pakasaar. The October Show took the VAG’s new facility to signal the city’s prioritization of “masterpieces,” in Davis’ words, over supporting artists at a grassroots level. As David MacWilliam, one of a number of artists whose work was featured in both exhibitions, wrote in the October Show catalogue: “[T]here are fewer places to show my work now than ever. Fewer artist-run spaces (since Pender Street closed in 1978 there has been no funded space dedicated specifically to showing object oriented work). The funding levels have been maintained in the parallel spaces, but inflation and burgeoning bureaucracies have eroded what little funds there are that ever filter down to individual artists. The best new spaces are run by artists privately.”
Leading up to and contemporaneous with the October Show were the founding of the artist-run centre Main Exit, run by artist Theodore Wan from 1980 to 1982; the merging of the Helen Pitt Gallery (founded in 1975 by the Student Society at the Vancouver School of Art) and Unit 306 Society for the Democratization of the Arts (a non-profit arts society with no space founded in 1980) as Unit/Pitt in 1981; and Issue magazine, an influential arts magazine that ran from 1983 to 1985.
Out of the critical energy that the October Show has come to represent in Vancouver art history came the Warehouse Show (1984), Artropolis (triennial group exhibitions of local artists held in non-traditional art venues from 1987 to 2003), and the founding of three artist-run centres that today remain at the heart of the city’s artist-run culture: Or Gallery, founded in 1983 by Laiwan; grunt gallery, founded in 1984 by a group of artists including longtime grunt director Glenn Alteen; and Artspeak, founded adjacent to the writers’ collective Kootenay School of Writing by Cate Rimmer, Kay Higgins and Jeff Derksen in 1987.
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