In tiny Beaverlodge, Alta., a DIY gallery in a former hospital draws artists from all over

Murray Quinn has a hunch. If you were to poll a thousand people in Grande Prairie, Alta., and ask them if they've heard of Doris, you wouldn't find a soul who'd say yes. For one thing, it's kind of a trick question. Doris isn't a who, but rather, a what. It's a gallery space in the town of Beaverlodge, Alta., a community of approximately 2,500 people that's half an hour west of Grande Prairie, the city where Quinn, 60, has lived his whole life.

Doris is something of an open secret, Quinn explains. Since the spring of 2023, it's operated out of the Beaverlodge Art and Culture Centre, a former hospital building off the Alaska Highway, just across the street from "Justin Beaver," the enormous polyurethane rodent that serves as the town's chief roadside attraction. Cars and trucks blow past the centre every day, but there's no sign for Doris posted outside, and visitors could probably spend an afternoon poking around the venue's other galleries — plus its tea room and gift shop — without realizing that Doris exists. 

To access it, you must go to the main office and ask to see Doris. The person at the desk might not know what you're going on about, says Quinn. (Most of the staff are volunteers.) But rest assured, Doris is indeed there. Once you've procured the key to the gallery, head to the second floor, look for the door marked "Doris" — and that's pretty much it.

It's one of those things where if you know, you know, says Quinn. "And within the art community, people know what's going on up there — and they're participating."

'We had space and an idea'

Quinn, who's an art collector, co-founded Doris with Maggie Tiesenhausen and Peter von Tiesenhausen. The latter is arguably one of the most well-regarded artists in the province. The recipient of a 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Award, he's exhibited and lectured throughout North America and Europe, and his public works can be found in cities including Edmonton and Toronto. Notably, his family homestead in Demmit, Alta., is a copyrighted work of art unto itself. 

According to Maggie, the trio launched the project with this aim in mind: "to bring boldly experimental art to a rural space, and to connect the local arts community with other art worlds further afield." Peter, who's Maggie's dad, has kept a studio at the Beaverlodge Art and Culture Centre for years, and when a room across the hall opened up, he saw the potential for something more than a new-to-him workspace. 

"Peter and I are always talking about art, cooking up ideas," says Quinn. "I was like, 'Sure, whatever you want, buddy.' It sounded like a good idea, and I mean, it was not expensive at all … I think it's like 1,800 bucks for the whole year," Quinn says with a laugh. "We had space and an idea. Let's see what happens."

As for the name, it's a tribute to Doris McFarlane, a woman who was something of a local hero in Beaverlodge before her passing in 2021. A nurse and active volunteer, McFarlane even helped to establish the Beaverlodge Art and Culture Centre where her namesake gallery now lives. "[She] did more for the arts communities in northern Alberta than anybody I could ever think of, and she lived in that building at one time," says Quinn. "Doris is the spirit of the whole place, for sure."    

The space itself is humble — a 400-square-foot room, by Quinn's estimate, with a window that provides some enviable natural light. Since launching, new shows appear there at a clip of every two months, if not more frequently. The inaugural exhibition featured work by Haley Bassett, an MFA candidate at Emily Carr University. Laura Marotta, a sculptor from Hamilton (who now teaches at Northwestern Polytechnic in Grande Prairie), brought her twisting, modular geometric forms to Doris last June. In February, the gallery hosted an exhibition of new landscape paintings by a local artist, John Kerl.

According to Maggie, Doris's co-founders share the responsibility of running the place. They're all volunteers, and nobody — including exhibiting artists — is paid. There's no board of directors; the programs aren't supported by grants or public money. "It's really an un-professional gallery," jokes Maggie, an art handler by trade who serves as the lead technician at Doris.

Peter fills the role of curator, and most of the artists who've shown work at the gallery were pulled from the elder von Tiesenhausen's personal rolodex. "My dad is always trying to put things in a line, trying to make sure there's no dead air," says Maggie. 

Maggie describes Quinn as the project's afterparty director, an official title that makes Quinn chuckle — although it is, he admits, pretty accurate. Doris throws an opening reception for every exhibition, and it's not unusual for Quinn to organize a dinner for 30 to 40 gallery-goers after it's done. "I almost feel like that's as important as the actual exhibition in some ways," he says.

'It feels like we needed this'

Talking with Quinn, there's the sense that Doris is more of a scene than a place. Community is a word that gets thrown around a lot by both him and Maggie. Doris has managed to cultivate a group of dedicated visitors, they say, all through word-of-mouth and a cryptic Instagram presence. At an opening party, Doris draws locals — which, as Maggie clarifies, includes visitors from "about 150 kilometres in every direction." They drive in from Dawson's Creek, B.C., Grande Prairie and assorted hamlets throughout the Peace Country region. "The network of connections is always expanding with every show," they say, and the visiting artists, too, are a mix of "local and distant" — Albertans living several hours away and even international folks.

"It feels like we needed this, and it feels like it's filling a void both for artists and for people in the arts community — and just the community in general," says Quinn. 

He should know. Quinn's not an artist himself; he's the owner of a landscape contracting business. But for more than 30 years, he and his wife have been collecting art. It's a passion he picked up from his parents, who helped establish the local college (now known as Northwestern Polytechnic). While he was growing up, artists visiting the school were a fixture at family suppers. He has a particular interest in contemporary Canadian art, and when the magazine Galleries West profiled him in 2012, he had work by Evan Penny, Suzy Lake, Brian Jungen — plus his Doris co-conspirator, Peter von Tiesenhausen — in his collection already, a trove which is, he says, "growing all the time." 

It feels like [Doris] is filling a void both for artists and for people in the arts community — and just the community in general.- Murray Quinn, Doris co-founder

Quinn was once a frequent flyer, travelling to meet with galleries and art-world friends in Toronto, occasionally as much as six times a year. He hasn't been back since the pandemic, he says; air travel from Grande Prairie has grown too expensive and time-consuming. And while the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie — where he currently serves on the board — brings in exhibitions that make him feel connected to what's happening nationally and internationally, such as Brenda Draney's Drink from the River, Doris fills a different sort of niche. "It sometimes feels a little bit isolated up here, so [Doris] is great," says Quinn. It's an excuse to get people together to talk about art — and just have a laugh — while discovering work by an artist who's perhaps never shown in town before. Doris doesn't have an official mandate, Quinn says, but it does strive to give folks something unexpected.

The most recent show at Doris assembled work by Miruna Drăgan, an artist based in the Rosebud River valley outside of Drumheller, Alta. "It's this warm and embracing installation that you just sort of disappear into," says Quinn, referring to the central piece, Torpor — a cocoon of military bedsheets, the sort used by former patients at the Beaverlodge hospital. The artist dyed them a brackish hue using tea, salt, wine, vinegar, rust and beeswax.

Drăgan was personally invited to show her work at Doris, and says she's known the Tiesenhausens for years. (She actually worked on Torpor while doing a "mini residency" at their home in Demmit.) But she didn't actually set foot in Doris until this summer. Entering the space with its "crunchy wooden floors," she wanted to know more about the building, and its past life as a hospital fascinated her immediately. 

Torpor and the other works appearing at Doris — including a series of iridescent resin blades — previously appeared in a 2021 exhibition that Drăgan created with Jason de Haan and Warren McLachlan, her collaborators in the art collective Corbin Union. That show, Ososo, reflected on the bloody 1935 miners' strike in Corbin, B.C. (The blades, for example, are named after eight women, miners' wives, who were maimed by a tractor during the worker protests.) "I haven't made the work specifically for Doris, but it almost felt like it was coming home," says Drăgan. For Torpor, she's hung the sheets with their ties exposed to suggest hospital gowns — a nod to the history of the building where Doris is located.

An experience worth the 800 km drive

Drăgan works as an associate professor at the Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, but she moved to the Drumheller area during the pandemic, compelled by the abundance of space that a teacher's salary can afford. Before leaving the city, she says she would have been surprised to find a gallery like Doris in a community as remote as Beaverlodge. Now, she realizes there's all sorts of art happening in small places, things you wouldn't expect. She and de Haan are the founders of their own DIY project space, in fact. Badlands Art Department is a studio and residency that they run on their property. 

Still, she says life in a rural community can be lonely. There are creative people everywhere in this country, but it's a challenge to find — and gather — with folks who want to see and discuss contemporary art and ideas. "One of the hardest things for me, living in Drumheller right now, is I don't have that community yet," says Drăgan. But she found one at Doris this summer. In June, she loaded up her car and drove the 800 km to Beaverlodge. The conversations she had at Doris — and the new friends and colleagues she met — made the trip worth it, she says.

According to Quinn, most of the people who've become Doris devotees already have some professional connection to the arts; they're artists themselves or they work at one of the galleries or colleges in the region. "It's a little bit of an insider's gallery right now, but we know that's not what we want it to be," says Quinn. "We want to grow, we want to be bigger. Otherwise, it's a little like we're preaching to the choir all the time." Everyone is welcome, he says, and so long as Doris can keep on running as a scrappy and self-funded "guerilla project," it will persist.

"There's no master plan here, trust me. It's like, 'Oh man, we're just making it up as we go,'" says Quinn. "The minute we aren't doing it that way, I think it's over."