Nuit Blanche Eve weaves creativity and community at USask

For third-year USask psychology and art student Mileva Elias – the chair of Nuit Blanche Eve – the exciting event is a celebration of inspiration and artistic adaptation and performances from students, faculty and staff of colleges and groups across campus.

“I think Nuit Blanche Eve is a unique opportunity for artist to show their work in interesting spaces for the installations,” said Elias. “It is great having such a breadth of artwork from the USask community being celebrated. We have artists from the Colleges of Arts and Science, Engineering, and Education involved for this upcoming festival … It is very exciting having this event come together throughout the year, with Eve primarily being a celebration of USask community engagement in the arts.”

Held the night before the city’s Nuit Blanche arts festival – which began in 2014 in Saskatoon and originated in Paris back in 2002 – this year’s Nuit Blanche Eve event at USask will spotlight 17 installations/performances and four museum/gallery spaces open to the public from 6-9 pm. The festival features 11 locations across campus, including the Observatory, Upper Place Riel, Nobel Plaza, The Bowl, and Gordon Oakes Red Bear Student Centre, as well as the Agriculture, Arts, Geology, Murray, Peter MacKinnon and Thorvaldson buildings.

“There is everything from professional artists with the Jeff Thomas and Audie Murray exhibitions in the College and Kenderdine Art Galleries, the Sessional Exhibition in the Gordon Snelgrove Art Gallery, student work with VASU (Visual Arts Students Union) and the Indigenous Students’ Union, works from prior digital media classes that were led by recent USask MFA (Master of Fine Arts) graduates, and artists at the very start of their journey with the USask Community Arts kids camps,” said Elias.

Among the innovative installations on display this year are a pair of research-related projects pairing visual art with campus research, including a quanTA collaboration led by Dr. Steven Rayan (PhD) – director of USask’s Centre for Quantum Topology and Its Applications – and outreach and community engagement officer Anna Elliott, while VASU artist Ally Seifert is creating an installation in collaboration with the Student Neuroscience Association.

“It's wonderful seeing multiple different parts of the USask community come together to help put on this event and this upcoming lineup looks great,” said Elias, one of the 70 volunteers working to host this year’s event.

Elias said a new creative collaboration with the Indigenous Students’ Union will also feature visual artist Tia-Lee McCallum, as well as rotating performances by musician Taihre Lafond, and dancers Tianna Sangwais, John Tootoosis, and Trayce Williams. Meanwhile, staff and students in the Indigenous Student Achievement Pathways (ISAP) program in the College of Arts and Science are also actively involved this year with presenting an innovative installation designed to connect with community on and off campus.

“We are excited,” said Dr. Sandy Bonny (PhD), team lead of ISAP and STEM access initiatives. “As members of the campus community, we have enjoyed Nuit Blanche Eve events and installations. Last year we had an open house in our centre for student success as kind of a home base for students and families who were coming out for the night and we had a great time with lots of people stopping by and we thought wouldn’t it be nice if we could not only encourage our students to come out, but to see themselves in the art that is being celebrated. So this was a really neat opportunity to bring together a few different activities that ISAP does in a public way that we can share with community and families.”

ISAP is presenting its interactive installation, titled Troposphere, that will weave words and messages and showcase stories in a variety of languages – including English, Cree, Dene and Michif – in a creative “cloud” as festival participants provide their own additions to a foundation of grounding words and stories. Those will be selected from conversations between ISAP students and language keepers, including Joseph Naytowhow (Cree) and Ronelda Robilliard (Dene), the preceding week in the ISAP Willow Hoop (Fine and Preforming Arts) Learning Community Gathering.

“They will work with small groups of students to pick some personally meaningful words and then learn and reflect on, so we hope that everyone that comes will be learning those words as well,” said Bonny, noting that the idea of building on a foundation of grounding words was the inspiration of Shae Zyznomirski, winner of the 2024 Peter Stoicheff ISAP Student Leadership Award.

“I think language is a reflection of the way that cultures view the world and so this is bringing together the climate in the sky with the climate in our Treaty spaces where we are sharing and learning, too … Troposphere will be interactive and we’re excited to see it grow and take shape as visitors contribute throughout the night on Nuit Blanche Eve.”

The USask event serves as an artistic appetizer for the main course the following night when the annual Nuit Blanche YXE free festival celebrates Saskatoon’s vibrant arts scene, showcasing contemporary art forms in public spaces across the city on Saturday, Sept. 28 from 7 pm to midnight. The city-wide festival features unique art and sculpture installations and projections, as well as performances, music, theatre, and other contemporary art forms.

As a Class of 2019 graduate of USask’s fine arts program, Nuit Blanche Saskatoon chair Kelsey Ford (BFA'19) says Nuit Blanche Eve on campus is the perfect precursor to the city-wide festival.

“We are so excited to have exposure in the wider USask community and really having the university’s support in the event is what we need to keep it going,” said Ford. “It almost acts as a primer to get young artists ready and engaged with the festival early, so that when they graduate and they have the means and the time to put together an even larger proposal for the main event, it works in such a great way to get future applicants for the festival. As a graduate of the fine arts program, it is so great to see this opportunity for students available to them. It brings me a lot of pride and excitement in sharing this event with future graduates of the same program.”

You can learn more about Nuit Blanche Eve on campus here and read more about the Nuit Blanche Saskatoon festival on the website here. If you are interested in volunteering with the festival, click this link to submit a volunteer form.

Article originally published on https://news.usask.ca