Beaverbrook Art Gallery

About

The Beaverbrook Art Gallery (French: Musée des beaux-arts Beaverbrook) commonly referred to simply as The Beaverbrook, is a public art gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. It is named after William Maxwell "Max" Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, who funded the building of the gallery and assembled the original collection. It opened in 1959 with over 300 works, including paintings by J. M. W. Turner and Salvador Dalí. The Beaverbrook Art Gallery is New Brunswick's officially designated provincial art gallery. The building has undergone several expansions, the latest of which opened in 2017 via a design by Halifax-based MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects. Former director Terry Graff stated that this "expansion and revitalization" aimed to make the gallery "an important destination for national and international contemporary art".

In 1954 Lord Beaverbrook made an offer to Hugh John Flemming, the Premier of New Brunswick, to build and stock an art gallery in Fredericton. The Province accepted the proposal, and provided him with a site directly across from the New Brunswick Legislative Building on the southern bank of the Saint John River. Neil Stewart, of the Fredericton architectural firm Howell & Stewart, designed the mid-century modern building as a flat-roofed single-storey structure, faced with pale semi-glazed brick. It has a granite base, with cornices and a frieze of white marble quarried at Philipsburg, Quebec. The original exhibition space consisted of a high-ceilinged central gallery with a square gallery on either side. In 1983, the building was expanded with the addition of east and west wings. These additions, funded by Marguerite Vaughan and the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation respectively, housed the Hosmer Pillow Vaughan collection of china and other decorative arts, and the Sir Max Aitken Gallery. In 1995, another expansion, housing the Marion McCain Atlantic Gallery, was opened. Its name honours the late wife of New Brunswick businessman Harrison McCain, who contributed $1 million to the project.

On 20 May 2015, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery unveiled plans for a large expansion project following a 6-year $25 million fundraising campaign. The expansion includes a substantial increase to gallery space, an artist-in-residence studio, a learning theatre, a café, and an outdoor sculpture courtyard. It also features new mobility access features, including an elevator and ramps. Construction of the new pavilion began in October 2015. On 20 July 2016, the Gallery announced that it was increasing its fundraising goal from $25 million to $28 million after an outpouring of generosity from private donors and government sources. The increased capital will allow for more amenities, as well as increased programming and more. Construction of the new pavilion was completed in October 2017, making the Beaverbrook Art Gallery the largest art gallery in the Atlantic region.

In 2009, a sculpture garden was inaugurated adjacent to the Gallery. The first sculpture to be commissioned was The Birth of Venus by New Brunswick Acadian artist André Lapointe. In 2012 the Gallery received a $300,000 donation from TD Bank Group to support the initiative, which was named the TD Sculpture Garden. A sculpture by Marie-Hélène Allain (Awakening/Éveil) has been on display on the lawns in front of the Gallery since 1985. In October 2015 the Gallery acquired the sculpture Arriving Home by American sculptor Dennis Oppenheim. The sculpture was installed permanently in the TD Sculpture Garden behind the Beaverbrook Art Gallery near the Saint John River. On September 16, 2016, the Gallery unveiled the installation of a newly acquired work by Sorel Etrog titled King and Queen.

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.