Niamh Dooley (right) teaches a beading workshop April 2024
This year, MAWA is celebrating four decades of feminism, 40 years of art education, and 14,600 days of community and peer support. How will we mark this historic moment? With art!
Everyone is invited to Reverberations, an exciting exhibition curated by Abi Auld and Jenny Western, reflecting the history of MAWA’s Foundation Mentorship Program and the significant impact it has had on Manitoba women and gender diverse artists.
Jenny Western was Abi Auld’s mentor in the 2019/2020 mentorship year, and now they are collaborating. This kind of resonance is common at MAWA. Colleagues become friends, mentors and mentees become colleagues, connections are built. We work together, share resources, help each other to achieve our goals and rejoice in each other’s successes.
MAWA is grateful to VIEW Winnipeg for amplifying MAWA’s birthday by providing audio descriptions, to make the exhibition more accessible. We also thank the artists who are representing our shared herstory. But most of all, we are grateful to the 105 mentors and 316 mentees who have participated in the Foundation Mentorship Program over the past 40 years. Not everyone could be represented in this exhibition, but you have all contributed to a community in which we challenge ourselves to create ambitiously and rigorously and share our knowledge.
MAWA is you, so it’s your birthday, too! Please join us in celebrating this milestone.
–Shawna Dempsey and Dana Kletke