Hiding the Audience: Viewing Arts and Arts Institutions on the Prairies

This book examines how the development of Canadian prairie arts institutions in the context of an implicitly Euro- or Anglo-Canadian audience clashed with the creation of regional arts that needed to acknowledge a Native Canadian presence to flourish. It looks in detail at the regional versus international strains in the history of the Banff Centre, at the development of the Glenbow Museum and the controversy over the 'Spirit Sings' exhibition, at the two decades of contention regarding statues of Louis Riel in Regina and Winnipeg, and at the contrasts in audience participation in two of 25th Street Theatre's productions, one about farmers and the other about Metis people. Primarily a work of cultural history, this study uses archival sources, post-colonial theory, and the theories implied in the fiction of Cherokee author Thomas King to probe the ways in which the whitestream assumptions of the individuals who institutionalised the arts on the Prairies hid both a Native audience and the kinds of issues and presentations such an audience might reasonably expect to see - and that might help make the settler audience understand the responsibilities of becoming native to this place. The interdisciplinary nature of the book makes it useful to scholars in Native Studies, Museum Studies, Art History, Theatre, and English, as well as to arts administrators and patrons, art lovers, and artists.

About the Author :
Frances Kaye is Professor of Great Plains Studies and English at the University of Nebraska. She divides her time between Calgary, Alberta and Lincoln, Nebraska.

Review :
"Hiding the Audience provides fascinating and suggestive new lines of thought for students of Canadian cultural history. Its author, Frances W. Kaye, is a literary scholar and professor of Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In this book, she offers a commentary on the development of regional culture in Canada, a commentary that is informed by theoretical insights from literary and cultural studies as well as by traditional archive research...Anyone who believes in the power of art to transform society will find something of value in this book." Russell Johnston (Brock University), H-Net Reviews. "This major study of cultural production in western Canada by an American scholar is a significant contribution to our understanding of the formation of the western Canadian identity during the second half of the twentieth century...It was a pleasure to read about these episodes of western Canadian cultural history that I have personally lived through and watched with interest. Her case studies are insightfully argued. Together they provide an excellent summation of the current state of debate and dialogue in regional culture." -- George Melnyk (University of Calgary), The American Review of Canadian Studies, August 2004. "This book can read like polemic...Nevertheless, this is an essential book for anyone interested in Canadian culture and cultural practices west of Toronto. Frances W. Kaye unravels our cultural foibles, the extent of our blindness and general stumbling around. She also shows that even within institutions changes can be made, stereotypes abandoned, or at least modified, and new ways of looking, and even healing, embraced." University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 1, Winter 2004/5