Spring 2024 - Fall 2024: Signs of Peace: A Retrospective of Peace Posters
Featuring over 50 posters from organizations and initiatives connected to the Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement, this pop-up exhibit encourages viewers to reflect on the messaging and design work that goes into inspiring peace action.
The exhibit, curated by Paul Heidebrecht, draws on formal and informal collections, including the archives of Mennonite Central Committee, Project Ploughshares and Conrad Grebel University College. It confronts themes of war, weapons, displacement, hunger, justice and hope.
Printed posters are on the decline while virtual images of peace are more plentiful and diverse than ever. In an era of abundant digital images, what do we remember - and what can we learn - from this genre of peace communication?
Fall 2023 - Winter 2024: Trinity, Then and Now
Nearly eighty years after the detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb, the global threat dealt by nuclear weapons lurches perilously forward. Trinity, Then and Now brings into focus and proximity the grave impact of what is considered the first significant radiological event–the Trinity atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945 in the desert of New Mexico–with reflections on its continued ecological, physiological and psychological toll.
Spring 2023 Grebel Gallery Exhibit Launch
Summer 2023: A New History: Russlaender Painting in Ontario
The artworks that are exhibited share some common despite the different artists. Those of Woldemar Neufeld document the landscape and built environment of southwestern Ontario, the fruit of immediate, trained observations. They display confident experimentation with technique and medium over the course of decades-long professional career. Henry Pauls' paintings, by contrast, depict a subject - Mennonite village life in southern Ukraine - from great physical and temporal distance. In a folk-art tradition, the two artists in the gallery bring to visual form a retired man's memories of his childhood, a secure world marked by natural beauty and human industriousness.
Spring 2023 Grebel Gallery Exhibit Launch
May 2023: Your Wall Can (Not) Divide Us
This interactive exhibition features photos of street art pieces from a range of conflict-affected societies and an opportunity to leave your own ‘mark’. Street art makes an important contribution to understanding local conflict-dynamics and visions of peace. Street art tells narratives about everyday concerns and opinions, where multiple and often contradicting narratives by different artists and communities can be publicly viewed. This holds value in situations of conflict and censorship, as art can talk about issues that have no space in the mainstream political discourse.
September 6 - December 16, 2022: Unmasking, Breathing, Moving Forward
Unmasking, Breathing, Moving Forward is the theme that runs through each of the pieces that have found a new home in the Grebel Gallery at the Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement.
Through contributions by a diverse group of sixteen Black, Indigenous, and racialized artists, the exhibit features pieces of various mediums that place a future lens on the reckonings of the past few years, asking how we take what we have experienced and learned to inform our collective path forward.
March 14 - August 19, 2022: Voices Together: A Celebration of Art and Music
Featuring over a dozen works of art found in Voices Together, this exhibition gives a more intimate view of the art found in this new Mennonite hymnal and explores visual art and worship in the Mennonite Church.
There is an accompanying audio commentary by Grebel faculty members Carol Penner (Theological Studies) and Kate Kennedy Steiner (Music).
September 7, 2021 - March 7, 2022: Not Traumatic Enough for a Shock Blanket
Yasmeen Nematt Allas exhibition draws on providing art as a form of care. Yasmeen invited members of her community to answer the following question: What stories do we begin telling with, I wouldnt call it traumatic but...
Using the answers provided by her community, Yasmeen implemented narratives that arent seemingly traumatic or worthy enough and placed them on objects to provide validity to the narrative.
November 11, 2019 - April 24, 2020: The Cultural Life of Drones: KW Drone Dialogues
Sara Matthews exhibition employs installation and social documentary practices to provoke a dialogue about the logistics of drone technologies and our intimate relations with them. Matthews is excited to express years of research in the field of drones and global studies as a faculty member at Wilfrid Laurier University through this unique combination of installation, conceptual, and research-based art forms.
In 2022, Sara Matthews co-wrote an article reflecting on this exhibit in Surveillance Society. Read Art in Conversation: Visualizing Security Studies Research.
May 16 - October 25, 2019: New Fraktur
This exhibition created by Meg Harder draws on fraktur folk art historically produced by early Mennonite settlers to Ontario. In recognition of her ancestral traditions, Harders ink and gouache drawings carry forward the aesthetic sensibilities of fraktur, while reframing their contents with a queer, feminine, and bioregional optic. Through her art, Harder aims to disarm exploitative narratives and create space for new histories and futures.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Ontario Art Council Exhibition Assistance Grant that helped make this exhibit possible.
January 14 - April 12, 2019: Gichitwaawiziigewin: Honouring
Building understanding between indigenous and non-indigenous worldviews is an important step toward peace and conciliation in the Canadian context. Creating space for indigenous wisdom to guide culture and policy is an integral part of building peace and justice. Artist Catherine Dallairere-examines the original indigenous values in animals and plant life that are vilified by contemporary Western settler culture.
October 18 - December 20, 2018: Cultural Translation: Negotiated Third Spaces and Those Who Live There
This exhibition is created by Iranian Canadian cultural translator and artist Soheila Esfahani. As an Iranian Canadian, Soheila has lived in what she calls a negotiated third space and her artwork emerges from her reflections on this experience. Through this exhibit, community members are invited to observe, reflect on, and celebrate moments of cultural translation.
July 12 - October 5, 2018: A New Era of Peace and a Peaceful Land
Curated by Heng-Gil Han, director of the Korea Art Forum based in New York City, this exhibition collects rarely seen artwork from North and South Korea, China, and the United States, focusing on diverse aspects of people and landscape. The exhibit is intended to expand the international community of people interested in supporting peace on the Korean peninsula and beyond.
January 8 - April 13, 2018: Beyond Essays: Approaching peace education differently
Through this exhibit, we are celebrating many of the Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) students who have chosen to express their research findings through art. In doing so, we are celebrating Conrad Grebel University College PACS departments inclusive and creative approach to teaching, and are elevating the CPAs strategic commitment to peace through artistic expression.
September 7 - December 15, 2017: Painting a Picture of Dignity
An initiative of Marlena Books, this exhibition explores the theme of dignity through paintings created by people with Alzheimers and dementia. We honour the stories, wisdom, and beauty that these artists bring to our communities.
August 16 - September 6, 2017: Indigenous Reconciliation/Decolonization Circle
The content produced by Kandace Boos for this exhibit centred on the theme of indigenous rights and indigenous solidarity, as well as land rights, and the teachings of UNDRIP. She was participating in a 21 day Pilgrimage for Indigenous Rights in April and May 2017 from Kitchener-Waterloo to Ottawa. She sketched fellow walkers, scenes, and landscapes observed from her real life experience along the Pilgrimage.
May 15 - August 11, 2017: Collage Connectedness
The product of a community art project led by Catherine Mellinger, where 5 youth in KW explored the theme of connectedness through art. The exhibit showcased the art produced throughout the 6 sessions the youth gathered for.
January 9, 2017 - April 13, 2017: Tesatawiyat
An exhibition of a community art project featuring 19 photographs of First Nations families in their homes.
August 22, 2016 - December 05, 2016: Together: When We Are Engaged
An exhibition of photograph made by Tamarack: An Institute for Community Engagement. This exhibit celebrates everyday acts that deepen our sense of community and empower us to collectively change the world for good.
May 23, 2016 - August 13, 2016: Stories in Art from Iraqi Kurdistan
An exhibition exploring story-telling through art by youth now living in Iraqi Kurdistan as a result of displacement. Deepen your awareness of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq and strengthen your understanding of the experiences of the refugees we are in the midst of welcoming.
Iraqi Kurdistan (northern Iraq) hosts a diverse group of people brought together in a very small geographical area. This region is home to the Iraqi Kurds, Syrian Kurds, Yazidis, Assyrian Christians, and Iraqi Arabs who have offered their stories in this exhibit.
January 11, 2016 - April 23, 2016: As the Women Sew: Community Quilts of Mampujan, Colombia
An exhibition of 4 quilts and 10 photographs which showed how quilting has become a way of recovering the past and weaving a better future.
September 7, 2015 - December 18, 2015: Exploring Resilience through the artwork of Shannon Moroney
An exhibition of the honest, dynamic artwork of Shannon Moroney. This exhibit invited our community to ask the question: What role does resilience play in advancing peace?
February 11, 2015 - April 30, 2015: Taking Community from the Farm to the World
An exhibition of David L. Hunsberger's photographs from the 1950s and 60s that provides glimpses into the experiences of community within one particular group of people: Ontario Mennonites in the 1950s and 1960s. These glimpses speak to more than Mennonites, capturing the essence of community upon which peace becomes possible.
September 8, 2014 - January 18, 2015: Along the Road to Freedom
An exhibition of 22 paintings by Winnipeg artist Ray Dirks. A project of the Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery, Winnipeg.
This exhibit tells the dramatic stories of women and their families who fled the Soviet Union in the decade after the Russian Revolution and during World War II. Despite the despair, horror and loss each of these families faced, at its core, this exhibit is about love, courage, humility, determination and faith.
May 20, 2014 - August 15, 2014: Bertha von Suttner: A Life of Peace
An exhibition of photos and documents about the life and work of Bertha, who won the first female Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.