By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
Be True to Your School is an online exhibition and silent auction celebrating SFU’s School of Contemporary Arts’ (SCA) 50th anniversary. Launched online on November 12, it features the work of 50 visual artists whose practices have emerged from or were shaped by the SCA. All proceeds from the silent auction will go to supporting student-led programming at the Audain Gallery.
The works on auction are rich, intimate, and politically attuned. Sena Cleave’s And Such Matter (2024) is an inquiry into the forms of care and labour that sustain life. The blue mesh used to weave this piece is taken from Cleave’s grandparents’ fruit-farming work, while the pine needles draw on Japanese symbolism, where pine, plum, and bamboo stand for resilience through the winter. As the pine needles dry and warp over time, the piece becomes a dynamic material record of both impermanence and continuity.
A different visual grammar shapes Lauren Crazybull’s Red Selfie in measuring cup (2023) of red-filtered paintings exploring the constraints placed on Indigenous representation. Crazybull reflects how Indigenous Peoples continue to be seen through projections that flatten the complexity of lived experiences. And even so, she suggests that these inherited signs can be negotiated and that colonial legacies can be transformed into space for new understandings of Indigeneity to emerge.
Some of my other favourites are Aakansha Gosh’s Rooms Inside Me 1 (2021) and Elizabeth Milton’s FPA 111 Changed My Life (2025). Susan Schuppli’s Nature Represents Itself (2018) also stands out. It is a reprinted Landsat satellite image originally part of installations examining the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Her work asks what becomes visible or invisible in a slow ecological catastrophe, and how visuals distribute attention, responsibility, and justice.
Taken together, Be True to Your School prompts a difficult question. Is this exhibition-turned-fundraiser an indication that cultural institutions are now being asked to justify their own existence? That SFU’s SCA is celebrating its 50th anniversary while also crowdsourcing support for student programming feels painfully on the nose for Canada in 2025. And I wonder, what does it mean when even the institutions historically upheld by wealth and empire now crowdsource support for emerging artists?
I see this exhibition as both a warning and an invitation, a reminder of what is at stake, and what we stand to lose if we fail to imagine more sustainable futures for cultural education. In this sense, this exhibition/fundraiser also offers possibilities: where art institutions reclaim their role not as bastions of prestige but as generative spaces for critical cultural dialogue and experimentation.
If we choose to reimagine the future of art and cultural production as a place where student-artists are supported in breaking disciplinary boundaries, and where political and aesthetic questions can be freely asked, then exhibitions like this one become more than measures of austerity.
Perhaps the value of this exhibition is not only in the funds raised but also in the questions invoked. It is an invitation for SCA and the Audain Gallery to reimagine their role in Vancouver’s cultural space.
The exhibition and auction are live online until December 13.
