Exhibits & Outdoor Art

St. Catharines has a vibrant visual arts community that shares its bounty through exhibits, outdoor art and temporary art installations. The City of St. Catharines provides an ongoing exhibit program at City Hall, and has a public art collection of permanent and temporary artworks found throughout City buildings, parks and property. Additional art exhibits by community organizations can be found outside the walls of St. Catharines many galleries. Information about these can be found under Exhibits.

Artists interested in the City's public art commissions and calls for artists can access current information through this page and the City's Cultural Services office.

Public Art Selected for Kiwanis Aquatics Centre

The City of St. Catharines has commissioned its first work of public art for the future Kiwanis Aquatics Centre and new Grantham Branch of the St. Catharines Public Library.

Aquatic Movement is an abstract mural that will be installed inside the facility on a wall in the main lobby. It will be constructed with acrylic paint on 0.6 metres by 0.6 metres (2' x 2') plywood tiles that are then scratched by the artist to add texture. The final artwork will be made up of a series of these tiles with the intended size estimated at three metres by four metres (9.8' x 13.1'). The completed tiles will have several coatings of varnish for a high sheen effect, which will also allow for easy maintenance.

Aquatic Movement

Artist's Intent

The images here have feelings of movement and a cheerful but elegant atmosphere; the total composition is suggestive of aquatic excitement. I am seeking to create an acrylic painting in brilliant colours, with semi-abstract shapes suggestive of aquatic movement. To convey a three-dimensional quality, and to give the whole piece more vigour, I would cut and scratch onto the painted surface in the same manner as carving a woodcut block and also apply collages on 1/8" painted plywood.
                                                                          - Naoko Matsubara

Mural Placement

The mural will be located in the inner lobby of the Kiwanis Aquatics Centre on the lefthand wall across from pool entrance.

Naoko Matsubara

Naoko Matsubara graduated from the Kyoto Academy of Fine Arts (now Kyoto Fine Arts University), and was a Fulbright scholar at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, where she received her MFA. Subsequently, she studied at the Royal College of Art in London and travelled extensively in Europe and Asia before returning to Japan.

In 1965, she returned to the United States as personal assistant to Prof. Fritz Eichenberg and taught at the Pratt Graphic Center in New York and the University of Rhode Island. She moved to Canada in 1972, following her marriage, and established her studio in Oakville. She remains extremely active as an artist of single-sheet woodcuts, paintings and murals, and has published some 20 portfolios and books. In 1981, she became a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and in 2009 received an honorary doctorate from Chatham University, Pittsburgh.

Naoko Matsubara's work is in many public collections, including the British Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Cincinnati Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The White House, The Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museums of Modem Art, Tokyo and Kyoto, Royal Ontario Museum, Yale University and Harvard University. She has had solo or group exhibitions on four continents, and her work has been the subject of monographs, articles, reviews, newspaper reports and films: notably the 300-page catalogue Tree Spirit (Royal Ontario Museum, 2003). In 2007, she had an invited solo exhibition at the Canadian Embassy, Tokyo and three large works were commissioned by the Royal Ontario Museum. In 2009, a retrospective exhibition, Celebration in Pittsburgh, took place at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Click Here for more information on Naoko Matsubara & examples of her work

Meet the Artist

Residents will have an opportunity to meet Naoko Matsubara at a public presentation of her selected work.

Please check back later for the date of this event.

Selection of Aquatic Movement

To embark on the process of securing a piece of public art, the Aquatics Library Public Art Selection Team (ALPAST) was developed. This team was comprised of representatives from the Public Art Advisory Committee, Recreation and Community Services, the architectural community, the library, the swim community, sponsor Water Communications Inc., and the CAO's office. The role of the team was to identify possible locations, develop proposal requirements, establish selection criteria, develop a request for proposals and develop the evaluation process. The request for proposals was issued through local and national cultural databases and 17 submissions were received for evaluation.

ALPAST scored the three finalist designs with a scoring matrix based on the evaluation criteria in the request for proposals;

• Intrigue viewers and stimulate imagination
• Be suitable for all ages
• Resonate with the Niagara public and distinguish St. Catharines
• Be innovative, durable and long-term in intent
• Respond to both the particular and general environment through:
  • awareness of the site's history and/or the history of Niagara
    and/or
  • expression of the facility uses and users
  • relationship to the architectural design of the facility