A Decade of Collecting Art at the West Vancouver Museum

The West Vancouver Museum’s permanent art collection was established in 2006 with a donation of work by local artist Jane Billaux, who immigrated to Canada from London in 1934. The donation coincided with the Museum’s successful exhibitions on the important history of modernism in the community and the influence of creative individuals, who chose West Vancouver as a place to live and cultivate their careers. In the intervening decade the collection has grown in both size and scope and now includes over 300 historical and contemporary works by important Canadian artists, including Emily Carr, Gordon Smith, Douglas Coupland, Ian Wallace, Kim Kennedy Austin, and Babak Golkar, just to name a few. Gordon Smith’s major donation of his personal collection in 2015 added substantially to the Museum’s holdings of Canadian art. This exhibition provides an overview of the breadth of the Museum’s art collection and highlights recent donations.