Dynamic Outreach at Grand Forks Art Gallery, Welcoming Young Artists, New Voices

Last summer, Preview visited Grand Forks Art Gallery, where we met with director/ curator Jon Worth and saw young artists engaged in a studio setting. Below are ex- cerpts from a more recent conversation:

Preview: You began your art career as a studio practitioner and started at GFAG in a communications role before taking up your current position. How has your journey influenced your vision as a director/curator?

Jon Worth: I studied economics at the University of Manitoba and UBC, print production at Vancouver Community College and fine art at Emily Carr. Over the next 25-plus years, I worked with large corporations. During this period, I carried my own studio spaces in Vancouver. I also travelled extensively, visiting museums and galleries around the world.

Preview: Your annual open call juried exhibition, Salon Libre, invites artists from across the Kootenay-Boundary region. You’ve mentioned you were lining up studio visits, some of them far afield. Are you looking for anything in particular?

Worth: I want to find artists who can move minds and hearts and push conversations forward, sometimes in unexpected places. That means stepping outside the usual networks but still paying attention to them. Culture is found across a broad base.... I want to hear voices that aren’t always given a platform. The same idea informs how we work with young people. Through our connection with School District 51, we bring children into large-scale studio expe- riences and show them their ideas can fill a gallery, not just a notebook margin.

Worth’s engagement with SD 51 can be seen in LAYERCAKE, a multi-week collaborative art project involving 600 students that took place in the gallery during fall 2025. Using colour paints, markers, pastels and more, students of all ages pursued their own projects while contrib- uting to a larger collective work. Once the artwork was completed, local tradespeople assisted students to reorient the large swaths of canvas on the walls into individual pieces that were then displayed in the very place in which they were created.

Salon Libre opening reception Nov 20, 6–9pm

gfag.ca