Visual artist and sculptor Ron Noganosh and publishing house Coach House Books received the 2008 Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts tonight.
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Click here for information on eligibility, nomination forms and guidelines.
ACCEPTANCE SPEECH: RON NOGANOSH
The Honorable Aileen Carroll, Minister of Culture, Ladies and Gentlemen: it is a
tremendous honour to receive this award, especially in view of the high caliber of their work, and the major contributions to the arts, of my fellow nominees.
In one’s life, there are a few persons who make a great impression on you, who create turning points in your life and who help to ensure that you become the best person you can be. My mother Marjorie Blacksky, was an artist in her own right who wove beautiful symmetry into porcupine quill baskets. At Magnetawan First Nations, on Georgian Bay, where I grew up, she opened my childish eyes to the wonders of nature, to the need for taking care of our environment, and to the necessity to thank the universe for ensuring that our needs are met. I thank her for instilling in me the belief that I could be successful at whatever I dared to dream.
Then there was Eric Hailstone, who received all A’s in Grade Nine and looked down his royal nose at me because I didn’t do well in reading. After all, I was “just an Indian” as he put it... I vowed that this would never happen again. Instead of pounding the bejeesus out of him, as was my first inclination, over the next year, I read 364 books, just missing my target of 365. Needless to say, I got more ‘A’s than he did in Grade 10, and have been an omnivorous reader ever since. So, Eric, I could not have been an artist without reading widely and I have you to thank for that.
Finally, in the Fine Arts Department of the University of Ottawa, my Professor Peter Gnass,
opened up my eyes to the amazing possibilities of making sculpture from found objects. I was hooked! I am sure he is looking down from heaven in amazement today, that I am still at it!
My work focuses on issues such as protecting the environment; valuing and preserving First Nations’ peoples, cultures, and land; and defending Native identity and community. It examines the pain, impotence and fury that First Nations people experience when forced to live lives of abject poverty in one of the world’s wealthiest countries. While my sculpture speaks of the destruction of whole civilizations, on a more personal level, some of my pieces have examined the effects of cultural decimation on my own family.
I utilize 20th century garbage to speak with cynicism about a disappearing world given up to urban encroachments, and the human and social costs involved. Although my themes and materials reflect my native ancestry, the pieces I create comment on issues such as ecology, racism, and socioeconomic hierarchies that are universal to all.
I have been lucky to have had my work exhibited in major national and international museums and galleries around the world - from the National Gallery of Canada to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian; from the Museo Nacional de Mexico, to the Ethnological Museum of St. Petersburg, Russia; and in national museums and galleries in Europe, the Far East, Australia and New Zealand. I have often thought that critics and curators will one day discover the truth - that I would do art even if no one ever wrote about it -and even if it were never exhibited - because it is what I have always wanted to do and what I truly love.
I have been very fortunate to receive grants from the City of Ottawa, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Usually they would arrive just in the nick of time, when things were particularly tight and would help me to create more art, just as this award will do.
I would like to thank the Ontario Arts Council and the Ministry of Culture for all they have done to facilitate this award, in particular Annette Mangaard, Awards Officer at the Arts Council and and Lisa Robart, Communications Planner with the Ministry, for all their hard work.
Also, a big thank you to Bahija Dottridge, my neighbor in Ottawa, who not only suffers through strange and weird stuff emanating from my garden and driveway, but who got the ball rolling by nominating me for this award.
To the Honorable Aileen Carroll and to the Premier of Ontario, Mr. McGuinty who hails from Ottawa, I would like to say how much I appreciate this award and your commitment to the arts in Ontario - it is so important to foster arts and culture in our communities; to create an infrastructure for the arts; and to cause creativity to flourish for our children and our children’s children. As we say in Ojibway, Meegwetch.
ACCEPTANCE SPEECH: ALANA WILCOX, COACH HOUSE BOOKS
We love the writing that our authors do. We love their poems, their novels, their essays, their stories.
Heck, we even love their email. Most of the time. And so, when Tanya Chapman, novelist extraordinaire, showed us a letter she had written, unprompted by us, extolling the virtues of Coach House, and told us she would like to nominate us for this exciting new Premier’s Award for arts organizations – well, we loved that too.
We loved that someone as unbelievably busy as Tanya would take the timeto do this. And then we read the letter, blushing all the while, and we figured that was reward enough for us; it was so 
gratifying to know that young writers think of us as doing brave and interesting and important work, and even more pleasing to hear that someone we worked so closely with grew to like and respect us more, not less!
On behalf of everyone at Coach House, I’d like to thank, profusely, the Ontario government, the Ministry of Culture and the Premier’s Office. At a time when there are a million different demands on government budgets – all urgent – it’s reassuring to know that this government is still able to see the extraordinary value of the arts and their absolute necessity. We’re tremendously grateful for not only this supremely generous gift but also the ongoing support through the Ontario Arts Council – a big thank you to Lorraine Filyer! – and the Ontario Media Development Corporation that allows to keep doing what we do.
And I’d like to thank the Coach House team. Most importantly, owner and Head Coach Stan Bevington for allowing the whole endeavour to continue. And Christina Palassio, our intrepid managing editor; Evan Munday, our tireless and sartorially gifted publicist; Poetry Editor Kevin Connolly; web editor Bill Kennedy; and past staff Darren Wershler and Jason McBride. For those of you who don’t know, we print all of our books in-house, on two old Heidelberg presses in our charming and squirrel-ridden old coach house in the Annex, right in downtown Toronto.
Enormous thanks to those who make the books: Tony Glenesk, Rick/Simon, John Barbeito, Nicky Drumbolis, Ron McAlpin, Orlan Barnett-Jang and, most of all, John De Jesus, who has the patience of a saint.
And a huge thanks to Tanya Chapman, for nominating us, and to all our other authors. They’re the reason we do this. It is a tremendous honour to work with every one of them, and to have the opportunity to curate a body of literature that has to speak for our time and our place: to publish the uTOpia series about the future of the city of Toronto, or Christian Bok’s
Eunoia, which has changed how we think about poetry, or Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down, a novel about how we contend with fear, or Nicole Brossard’s Notebook of Roses and Civilization, shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, or Andrew Kaufman’s All My Friends Are Superheroes, a big hit in seven different countries, or Rachel Zolf’s Human Resources, which won the Trillium Book Award last week …
Anyway, I could go on, but there are snacks and conversation to be had. There’s no way to articulate how grateful we are, how life-changing this award is. Thank you.