Mentorship as Social Sculpture

Mentoring – which takes many forms across Western Canada –  can help emerging artists overcome barriers.

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Last year, Vancouver-based printmaker Edward Fu-Chen Juan finally fulfilled a long-time dream – learning how to make paper from an expert. 

“It’s a disappearing art form in Canada,” says Juan. “In other countries, it is just as respected as sculpture and painting.” 

The expert was a friend, Brigitte Potter-Mael, a German-born printmaker and papermaker. Juan asked her to mentor him after getting a chance to participate in a partnership with the Canadian Senior Artists Resource Network, a group that supports mentorships in various artistic disciplines by older established artists. Mentors, who receive a stipend of up to $3,000 from the network, must be at least 60 and have a minimum of 20 years of professional experience. 

Juan says Potter-Mael cautioned him not to make paper simply for fun and instead to treat it as a serious art in its own right. 

“She thinks that people have the attitude of looking down on certain art practices that aren’t aligned with Western colonial values,” he explains. 

Potter-Mael’s ideas gave me pause. Until then, as a recent art school graduate, I had been researching mentorship as a confidence-boosting add-on to a post-secondary education. But this made me think: Could mentorship be a viable alternative to the colonial model of the Western arts academy?

The pandemic has forced people to take a hard look at the world around them. Institutions are being interrogated, inequities brought to light and entrenched attitudes challenged. The art establishment, especially as reflected by major galleries and museums, is at the centre of many of these critiques. 

Art pedagogy is under scrutiny too. Every year, students enrol in post-secondary art programs, but few will end up making a living at art. Some hope to become professors themselves, and spend $10,000 or more to earn a master’s degree – now a basic requirement to teach art at a university. Not everyone who goes to graduate school wants to teach, but those who do face a highly competitive landscape. There are few full-time jobs with benefits, especially for rookies. And universities increasingly hire instructors on a term-to-term basis, offering little security or remuneration. 

Mentorship is not the opposite of a formal education, but it can provide a different path.

“Mentorship is much more organic, much more fluid,” says Potter-Mael. She considers her words with care, mentioning Joseph Beuys, an avant-garde German conceptualist with interesting ideas about art education.

“He believed in art as social sculpture,” says Potter-Mael. “The social sculpture is the discussion that comes out of the work, through a work, the dialogue that evolves. And that teaching can happen anywhere. It can happen in a garden. It can happen in a forest. Anywhere is a place for teaching.”

“The point is, where do we find knowledge? How can we have access to knowledge?” 

Given the inequities and barriers in the art world, these are useful questions. I talked to four different organizations that have offered or funded mentorship programs – the Canadian Senior Artists Resource Network, the First Peoples Cultural Council, CARFAC Alberta and Making Space – about ways knowledge can be shared outside of educational institutions.

Senior artists often have decades of hard-won knowledge to share with younger artists. The Canadian Senior Artists Resource Network, now called CSARN, recognizes this through the mentorship program it has offered since 2014. The organization has facilitated more than 100 mentorships across Canada and disbursed more than $300,000 in mentor stipends and mentee expenses. Its intergenerational model echoes age-old traditions in arts education that predate university degrees in the fine arts.

Vancouver-based printmaker Jocelyn Barrable Segal – a 2019 mentor – observes that printmaking was taught traditionally through apprenticeships. 

She says she felt an urgency about passing lithography techniques on to her mentee. Lithography is a physically strenuous practice, one that takes hours of preparation, not to mention the actual printing. 

“What’s going to happen to you when you are not able physically to do this?” she asks. “Do you hire someone to do it for you? Will there be any people that will know this knowledge?” 

The realities of aging artists don’t get much attention in a society that fetishizes fresh young faces. Instead of treating senior artists as respected repositories of knowledge, the art world often relegates them to the margins, deeming them irrelevant to contemporary discourse.

When emerging artist Emily Shin asked painter Lorraine Wellman to be her mentor in 2019, Wellman was hesitant. “You never think of yourself as being wise,” she says. 

Shin is a self-taught artist in Richmond, B.C. “Having somebody so professional and experienced standing next to you and saying that you’re doing it right … it really helps,” she says. 

It’s also useful to have someone who can help navigate and demystify the art world, explaining how to apply for a show or untangle a grant application. 

“The person sitting next to you may not have the degree that we seem to think we need to have in order to be successful,” says multidisciplinary artist Cat Sivertsen, a mentor from Prince George, B.C. “But people have a lot to offer each other.” 

Sivertsen mentored Sebastian Nicholson in 2019, helping him with a community-based project called Spores of Joy – painted concrete fungi that were installed on telephone poles around Prince George. 

Sivertsen compares mentorship to shining a flashlight in the dark. “This is the direction,” she’ll say. “Now go find your way through that.” 

Nicholson says the mentorship “made it feel really possible to accomplish my own goals” as an artist. “It was as valuable as any formal education I’ve ever had for art.” 

The value of mentorship has been recognized by Indigenous Peoples since time immemorial. 

“This idea of mentorship is not new to us,” says Cathi Charles Wherry, an artist and curator who was arts manager at the First Peoples Cultural Council for 23 years, and now serves as a special advisor. An Indigenous-led provincial Crown corporation in British Columbia, the council supports language revitalization and provides a suite of grant programs that support Indigenous art, including mentorships and internships.

Traditional systems of arts mentorship were disrupted because of federal government restrictions, which made various Indigenous ceremonies, including potlatches, illegal between 1885 and 1951. “All of the art that was associated with ceremony was outlawed – the making of masks, regalia, tools, musical instruments, songs – all of those things were disrupted,” says Charles Wherry.

Mid-career Ts'msyen artist Kelli Clifton – an Indigenous youth intern with the First People’s Cultural Council in 2013 – is a painter and carver from the Northwest Coast. She’s currently being mentored long distance by Kasga/Tlingit artist Dean Heron, her former teacher at the Freda Diesing School of Northwest Coast Art, part of Terrace-based Coast Mountain College.

Heron has been helping Clifton get back into carving over the last two years. Since they live in different communities, the mentorship has taken place over the phone and via text. “It’s nice to have him there for constant advice,” says Clifton. She uses technology to her advantage, sending Heron photos of her carvings. He digitally draws on her pictures and sends them back to her, so they can easily swap ideas.

Today, mentorships in traditional arts are a way to reclaim Indigenous culture and pass it down to the next generation. Charles Wherry says mentees don’t just learn techniques, but also “teachings around the practice,” including spiritual and linguistic aspects that add a depth of understanding. 

“If the Elder artist has someone they can share with as a mentor, it makes the knowledge they carry a gift,” she says. “If it’s something they have no way of sharing, it’s a burden.” 

Mentorship is different than a teacher-student relationship with deadlines and grades, where power is heavily weighted to the instructor. The mentor and mentee are equals who share knowledge back and forth. 

“Mentorship is kind of like friendship,” says Calgary artist Chris Cran. “Easy talking between people.”

Métis carver and painter Jacqueline Fiala was mentored through a program CARFAC Alberta, an arts advocacy organization, ran for two years, until 2018, for Indigenous and new Canadian visual artists. 

Fiala speaks about the importance of having an equal relationship with her mentor. She says Edmonton artist Marlena Wyman “never made me feel less-than” as an artist. “She always respected me,” says Fiala. “We were on equal footing, and that’s because she knows who she is as a woman.”

Irina Kruglyakova, an immigrant from Russia and another of Wyman’s mentees, says Wyman is “real.” 

“She is not pretending,” says Kruglyakova. “I’m 60-years-old … it’s not many people who I can call real. All of her support was real, not just token.” 

Wyman describes both mentees as strong women. “Because they didn’t know the system here, they didn’t feel confident. But I saw, as they started to learn things, the confidence came out.”

Without a balance of give and take, mentorships can sour, becoming unhelpful transactions or even an abuse of power. For that reason, many programs require mentors and mentees to sign agreements that outline expectations before the process begins.

Mentorship programs in Western Canada seem to come and go as funding allows. When they are active, they can help artists navigate a system that, in Wyman’s words, is “quite intimidating.”  

“It’s intimidating enough for those of us who have plumbed its depths for years,” she says. “But for those who are new to it, there are lots more barriers and challenges.”

Although mentorship programs can support artists and build their confidence, they don’t change entrenched systems of inequity. 

“By no means is this a fix,” Wyman says. “It doesn’t fix everything that’s wrong. It just gives them a little more of an advantage.” 

Peer mentorship is another model that can help artists move forward.

Last summer, two emerging artists, Kiona Ligtvoet and Sanaa Humayun, began talking about the barriers they face. 

“Racialized artists are often afraid to talk to each other about the harms that they have experienced, which is a way that we stay isolated,” says Humayun. 

The two started Making Space, a Black, Indigenous and People of Colour peer mentorship program that has run online during the pandemic. Although Ligtvoet and Humayun are both based in Alberta, Making Space’s virtual programming, all of it free, is open to racialized artists across the country. It provides studio hangouts, a speaker series and workshops with BIPOC artists at different stages of their careers. Topics have included everything from research methodologies to natural dyes.

“A piece of advice that Kiona got that really resonated with both of us was that, as racialized artists, we could either choose to work within the institutions and try to change them from the inside, or we can create our own spaces,” says Humayun. 

“This space wouldn’t have come about if Kiona and I hadn’t just stopped one day and been like, all right, has it been like this for you too? If you can get to that honest phase, you can really start to develop an actual community based in trust and support.”

“The better connected we are, the more we all flourish,” says Humayun.

Sometimes, a mentor is simply a person you meet in the right place, at the right time. 

“We have instances of mentoring,” says Vancouver artist and poet Pierre Coupey, “just as we have instances of encountering angels.”

I’m still thinking about Brigitte Potter-Mael’s ideas. Papermaking techniques are not the only thing she shared with her mentee. Their conversations sparked him to rethink his creative process and how his identity shapes his art. 

“There is the mentor,” says Potter-Mael. “Then there’s the mentee. Then there is the other, the third entity which grows out of that relationship, that, you know, one cannot really name.”

“It’s something other. It’s the work that comes out of it – the work that one takes away from it in terms of gaining insight.” ■  

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