Blyth Festival Art Gallery's 2026 season to include documentary premiere, more
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
Recently approved by both its executive and exhibition committee, the Blyth Festival Art Gallery’s 2026 season will again see the space push the boundaries of a traditional art gallery with three challenging professional exhibits over the course of next summer.
The gallery’s executive met last week for its annual general meeting at Memorial Hall, where Exhibition Co-ordinator Kelly Stevenson presented the gallery’s 2026 professional season after a successful and boundary-pushing 2025 season, the gallery’s 50th anniversary season.
While specific dates have yet to be hashed out, the 2026 season will begin with the premiere of a documentary film and a corresponding art exhibition.
Cory Bilyea, a reporter with the Midwestern Newspapers Group, has been hard at work on a documentary on Michael “CY” Cywink, an internationally-recognized artist, author, curator and muralist who is a member of the Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory on Manitoulin Island. The gallery season will open with the premiere of the documentary and continue with an exhibition of Cywink’s work as its first professional show of the season.
Second, a joint photography exhibition by Chloé Norman and Ben Dickey will take over the space. Norman was one of the artists featured in 2024’s “Anything But Hysterical” group show at the gallery, while Dickey saw his photography featured in the CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto where he also launched a book of his photography.
Stevenson, in her report to the executive, said that both photographers will aim to “approach the body and the world as sites of inheritance - spaces shaped by belief, care and loss.”
She continued, “Where Chloé turns inward to reclaim the body from inherited narratives of control and shame, Ben looks outward to trace the echoes of mortality and environmental decay. Together, their works speak to the intertwined fragility of the personal and the collective, the intimate and the planetary.”
The final professional show of the season will be a group effort, curated by Katherine Percival from Guelph, who is an artist in her own right.
The exhibition will be called, “Colour is...” and a call for submissions will be issued in the near future, according to Stevenson’s report.
2025
While the meeting included the announcement of next year’s season, it also included a look back at the season that was and the success it saw in challenging art gallery norms and pushing the envelope in regards to its exhibitions.
In her report, Stevenson said the gallery found success not only with its professional exhibitions, but also with its continued outreach efforts and youth-oriented activities, such as the Student Show and the recently-resurrected Chalk Around the Block.
She also made mention of the collaborative community quilt art project, which was launched in the winter of 2024 and continued through to the spring of 2025 with the final product being unveiled as part of this year’s Community Show. For it, she said, 95 blocks were completed by community members ranging in age from toddlers to senior citizens.
As for the professional shows, Stevenson said that “The Rural Queer Agenda”, a group show curated by herself, displayed the work of over 40 artists, some of whom travelled nearly three hours to get to Blyth and to be part of the show.
Second, “The Apocryphal Photography of Jutland Norton” brought the photography and myth-making of The Citizen’s own Scott Stephenson and Chelsea Gamble to the gallery for an exhibition that Stevenson said brought forward questions about storytelling and the truth of history at a time in which people are confronted by possibly false narratives on a daily basis.
She said that the exhibition was a hit with audiences, especially its opening night, which featured words from Stephenson and Gamble and several musical performances by Stephenson, and regular patrons are already asking for a sequel.
The third show, “Body Doubles” by Amanda Baron, brought bright colours and a variety of textures to the gallery, as well as what she believes was the first-ever video installation project in the gallery. Furthermore, the show was extended to coincide with the extension of the Festival season.
In his report on the 2025 season, President Carl Stevenson said it was a season of “reflection, of growth, of experimentation and a season of storytelling.”
He lauded the expansion of collaboration with the Huron County Cultural Office and the continuing success of the Poetry in the Gallery series, which, next year, will be expanded to include “open mic” sessions after the professional readings, based on requests by gallery patrons.