Curator's Notebook, Terry Graff, Curator and Deputy Director, Beaverbrook Art Gallery

This fall, if you happen to be walking near the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, along Queen Street or the trail by the Saint John River, you will notice an exquisite granite sculpture located on the site of the Gallery’s new sculpture garden. At once representational and abstract, contemporary and traditional, The Birth of Venus, by New Brunswick artist André Lapointe, was commissioned in 2009 to mark the Gallery’s 50th anniversary and the designation of the City of Fredericton as a 2009 Cultural Capital of Canada. A gigantic scallop shell, in combination with other biomorphic forms suggestive of a wave and a flower, and positioned between two trees representative of time and wind, stands at the intersection where culture meets nature, symbolizing the beginning of all art in the natural world. Emblematic of the sea, the primal, archetypal form of the scallop shell has a rich, multi-layered history in art and myth, symbolically referring to birth, resurrection, and the pilgrimage of life. A form of symmetry and grace associated with Saint James, it is an important motif in Salvador Dalí’s iconic masterpiece, Santiago El Grande, 1957, in the Gallery’s permanent collection. And, of course, it is a most familiar component in Botticelli’s famous depiction of the creation myth of Venus, the goddess of love, beauty, and fertility who was carried to shore on a half shell. Lapointe’s inspirational and poetic sculpture enriches the cityscape of Fredericton, while also serving as a site of pilgrimage for visitors to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Connecting both visually and conceptually with the surrounding waterfront environment, it reflects the changing weather conditions and light of the seasons. Its universal message is one of hope, regeneration, and fecundity, which is most fitting for the cultural legacy and future of both the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and the City of Fredericton in this most memorable of years.