Dawson Fine Arts Faculty Biennial – Then and Now In 1992 Andres Manniste, with assistance from Al Pringle, initiated the first Fine Arts Faculty Biennial exhibition at Dawson College. Mr. Manniste, a highly respected senior member of the Fine Arts faculty, was motivated by the desire to share with the Dawson College community the rich and varied visual arts practices of the Fine Arts department. He and his colleagues decided to write a clause into the department’s mission statement, which reads; “Work produced by members of faculty is an integral part of the relationship between the college and the community and supports not only its cultural development but also the college’s mission to “contribute to the intellectual, economic and social development of our society.” With the seed of a Biennial planted, a designated space along the 5C corridor provided the original venue for the exhibition. Eventually the exhibition found a more permanent home in the new Warren G. Flowers Art Gallery, for which the Fine Arts department diligently lobbied to have built. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of the past, and to the support of the College, we now have the twelfth edition of the Fine Arts Department Faculty Biennial. By way of the recently enlarged gallery space, it is more prominent than ever. There have been many changes within the Fine Arts Department at Dawson College over the past twenty-four years. There have been two programme revisions in that period. The most recent, in 2013, resulted in a designation change from the Fine Arts to Visual Arts programme. What has remained constant is the commitment by the faculty to provide the highest level of arts education possible to our students. As practicing visual artists and writers our research and experimentation directly influences how we conduct our classroom activities. The lectures, demonstrations, presentations and critiques we carry out in the classroom have a direct correlation to the planning, execution and reflection to which we commit ourselves in our studios and offices. One activity really does inform the other. In the classroom we stress the concepts of technique, practice, discipline and patience to our students. It is a fallacy to think that art-making comes from some divine inspiration from above or beyond. It comes from hard work and open-mindedness. Artists, whether in the media of paint, wood, digital images or the written word, strive to be receptive to the world and in turn reflect upon it. This sense of self-reflection is what enables us to connect with our fellow man and woman. It is only by dedicating a significant portion of ourselves to this pursuit that we can ask our students to do as much; otherwise we run the risk of becoming irrelevant and disconnected from the field in which we teach. This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue allow the Fine Arts faculty an opportunity to present a diverse range of artistic practices, small examples of much larger bodies of work, to the Dawson College community, including the students we teach daily. As in the first Fine Arts Faculty Biennial it gives the teachers an occasion to communicate directly with their peers through the shared experience of art-making. David Hall Chairperson, Dawson College Fine Arts Department 2016
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