Attend an artist talk with Sheryl Salloum

  • 2012-04-04
The April 12th Thursday Artist Talk at the Surrey Art Gallery will feature Sheryl Salloum who will be talking about West Coast artist Mildred Valley Thornton. The event is free and will take place from 7:30-9 pm.

Sheryl Salloum has written a recent biography of Mildred Valley Thornton, a not-so-well-known West Coast artist. Thornton is best-known for her watercolours and oils and her over 300 portraits of First Nations peoples of Western Canada and her landscapes. The artist was born in Ontario and moved to Vancouver during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In addition to being an artist, Mildred Valley Thornton was a journalist, an author and a human rights advocate for women and indigenous people. She died in 1967 at the age of 77.

The talk will be followed by a reception featuring refreshments, questions and answers and conversation. There will also be copies of the author’s book available for purchase and signing.

While many artists like Mildred Valley Thornton painted exclusively, many others started out having to support themselves as commercial artists, selling prints. As a result many printing companies established relationships with those artists; by supporting them in their work they were also supporting them in their creative pursuits. The Surrey Art Gallery offers a lot to the community including talks like this where the community is introduced to artists, mostly Canadian, that they might not be familiar with. We should be proud of our artistic heritage and celebrate the artists at every possible opportunity.