Hiding the Audience: Viewing Arts and Arts Institutions on the Prairies

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

To produce this scholarly but accessible study, Frances Kaye drew on her
experiences as a long-time editor of the interdisciplinary journal Great
Plains Quarterly, as a professor of Great Plains studies and English at
the University of Nebraska, and as an occasional lecturer in Great
Plains history at the University of Calgary.

In concrete terms, Kaye integrates the history of European colonization
in Western Canada with the development of a regional concept of “the
prairies” in which the art forms of the Aboriginals lost out to those
of the increasingly dominant white settlers. Her primary focus is on the
relationship of audiences to the art forms and the institutions that
have been developed to sustain them and “on an often hidden or
unexamined relationship with the previous cultures of the region and
their present-day heirs.” Her study encompasses the years 1867 to 2001
and comprises case studies of Calgary’s Glenbow Alberta Institute, the
Banff Centre, and Saskatoon’s Twenty-Fifth Street House Theatre, as
well as an exploration of the relationships between the sculptures
depicting Louis Riel in Regina and Winnipeg.

Kaye relies heavily on the writings and representations of Native
authors and artists for the foundational context of her discourse.
Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water stands as a major source for
the Native critique of much of Western Canadian white culture.
Similarly, Henry Kreisel’s satiric story “The Travelling Nude”
becomes the touchstone for the tensions inherent in the development of
the arts, artists, and audiences for the Banff School of the Arts (now
the Banff Centre). The Riel sculptures serve as important focal points
for the geo-political-historical-cultural overview of a section of the
arts in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, while comparisons of two Twenty-Fifth
Street House Theatre productions, Paper Wheat and Jessica, illustrate
the author’s views of audience development.

Kaye’s book makes a compelling argument for her conclusion:
“Despite the West’s perennial complaint that Central Canada
dismisses our region as a hinterland, there exists in the West a mature
regional culture; ‘hinterland’ is a focus, not a handicap.”