A generous and dedicated patron of the arts, Michael Audain is also one of Canada’s most notable collectors. At this Vancouver launch of his memoir, Pictures on the Wall: Building a Canadian Art Collection, he tells the story of his inspiration and his assemblage. He then joins Jeannie Marshall (All Things Move), lauded for depicting “personal experience in the face of great art and especially the right to have [such] personal experience,” and Max Wyman (The Compassionate Imagination), one of Canada’s foremost cultural commentators, who asks us to use creative imagination in our response to great social challenges. Together, they discuss the role art can play in our personal and public lives, and the joys of paying a little more attention to the beauty surrounding us. Moderated by Sirish Rao.
Presented in partnership with the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Event Participants:
MICHAEL AUDAIN is the founder and chairman of Polygon Homes Ltd., an officer of the Order of Canada and a member of the Order of British Columbia. He lives with his wife Yoshiko Karasawa in Vancouver, BC.
JEANNIE MARSHALL is a writer who has been living in Italy with her family since 2002. A nonfiction author, journalist, and former staff features writer at the National Post in Toronto, she contributes articles to Maclean’s and the Walrus and has published literary nonfiction in The Common, the Literary Review of Canada, Brick, and elsewhere.
SIRISH RAO is an arts leader, writer, and cultural innovator. He is the co-founder of the Indian Summer Festival, and Director of Public Engagement and Learning at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Sirish is also a published writer, whose books have been translated into twenty languages.
MAX WYMAN is one of Canada’s foremost cultural commentators. For more than three decades he wrote arts criticism and analysis for Vancouver newspapers and CBC radio. The Compassionate Imagination is his seventh book on the arts in Canada. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a former member of the board of the Canada Council for the Arts, and a former President of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO. He lives in Lions Bay, near Vancouver, BC.
