Andrea and the Reader, The Warehouse Show, Vancouver, 1984

The Warehouse Show, advertised as “The largest Art Exhibition ever held in British Columbia,” grew from the October Show, launched in 1983.

The original alternative exhibition was conceived as a kind of Salon des Refusés for emerging Vancouver artists, though, as the Vancouver Sun‘s art critic pointed out at the time, it wasn’t as if the city had anything like the Academie des Beaux-Arts in 19^th century France, telling us what was and was not art. Nonetheless, many Vancouver artists felt excluded by the Vancouver Art Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Art and Artists: 1931 to 1983.

The Warehouse Show occupied a warehouse at 522 Beatty, featuring works by 190 artists. Running through November, it attracted an estimated 10,000 people, including myself and roommates Brian Hay and Andrea Cowen (nee Lawlor). As I’ve written here, my social circle included members of the Melmoth Group of surrealist artists — I’d attended a number of their shows — and it was through them that we ended up at the show

It wasn’t until 6 years later, after a stint in Toronto, that I discovered my new love and future wife had, at the time of the Warehouse Show, worked for co-organizer, Ed Varney.

The Artropolis shows, as they became known, continued through the ’90s. The 1993 event occupied the vacant Woodward’s building. The last Artropolis, held in 2003 at CBC Television Studios, was curated by some of the insiders criticized by the original art iconoclasts. Artropolis had become the establishment.