Uplift
Uplift
Visual Culture at the Banff School of Fine Arts
In 1933, the Banff School was established as a summer outreach program of the University of Alberta, offering a single course in drama. Since then, it has become a renowned cultural destination and educational institution, today known as the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
As PearlAnn Reichwein and Karen Wall recount in this engaging history, over its first four decades the school produced and circulated ideals of culture and liberal democratic citizenship that were intrinsic to the development of modern Canada. Uplift traces the role of the school in shaping arts and cultural education, as reflected in its array of interests from the artistic to the political, economic, and ideological. Situated within Banff National Park, the school and its surroundings combined stunning natural scenery and cultural capital in a symbolic national landscape.
In an era of unstable cultural policy and state support for the arts, Uplift offers a nuanced account of one particular engine of nation building and tourism development. It draws attention to the past and present place of fine arts, culture, and the humanities in public education and in Canada’s history, exploring what they mean to democracy, citizenship, and a life well lived.
This book will find an audience with academics, policy makers, and practitioners in the fields of education, art, tourism, parks, recreation, and regional development. It will also appeal broadly to artists and to the many international readers who have visited or studied art in the Canadian Rockies.
Uplift reflects Reichwein’s expertise in social and environmental history and Wall’s expertise in communication, public art, and memory. They build the Banff School for readers and illustrate how attitudes around nature and Canadian identity prevalent in the 1920s were formalized and regionalized in the 1950s.
This is a thoughtful, at times entertaining book which provides a valuable lens through which to view no just the history of the Banff Centre but also the complex and vital relationships between culture, education, and the state.
Uplift is an impressive work of scholarship and will be of great value for academics in various fields.
Uplift is the first history of the Banff School of Fine Arts. The historical narrative presented therein is comprehensive and investigative ... Pearl Ann Reichwein and Karen Wall adroitly weave together a wealth of primary source information to show how the Banff School was embedded in a complex network of interactions between national park tourism, art, adult extension education, and cultural policy.
PearAnn Reichwein and Karen Wall have given a penetrative and critical account of the conception, institution, organization, and culture of the Banff School of Fine Arts in the twentieth century. Uplift stands as a solid foundation for future work in the interdisciplinary fields it encompasses.
I have come across no other work that explores the art history and visual culture of this landscape at this level of detail. The book provides a valuable history of the Banff School, and it will also influence ongoing discussions about education, art, and political and environmental issues in Alberta and Canada today.
PearlAnn Reichwein is a professor of history at the University of Alberta. She is the author of the award-winning Climber’s Paradise: Making Canada’s Mountain Parks, 1906–1974 and co-editor with Karen Fox of Mountain Diaries: The Alpine Adventures of Margaret Fleming, 1929–1980. Both titles were Banff Mountain Book Festival finalists. She is a founding member of the Canadian Mountain Network and an advocate for parks, heritage, and UNESCO sites.
Karen Wall is a professor of communication, media, and heritage studies at Athabasca University and teaches in the Heritage Resource Management Program. She is the author of Game Plan: A Social History of Sport in Alberta, as well as numerous articles about Edmonton and Alberta heritage and arts, tourism, Indigenous issues, and cultural landscapes.
Introduction: Artists, Tourists, and Citizens
1 Uplifting the People: Extension Education and the Arts
2 Branding Banff: Arts Education, Tourism, and Nation Building
3 Building a “Campus in the Clouds”: Space, Design, Modernity
4 “Wholesome, Understandable Pictures”: Practices of Landscape Painting and Production of Landscapes
5 Presence and Portrait: Indigeneity in the Park
6 “Leading Artists of the World”: Teachers as Tourist Attractions and Pedagogues
7 “Some Paint, Some Tan”: Students Coming to the Mountains
Conclusion: The Arts, Nature, and Democracy
Notes; Bibliography; Index
