We want to give an enormous thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for hosting this week’s gathering in Winnipeg.

Artists, musicians, cultural connectors and administrators gathered at the incredible Urban Shaman Art Gallery for a sharing circle about Manitoba’s arts and culture sector. The event was a tremendous success, which brought together First Nations and Red River Metis from across the province.

This year’s programming, Niriqatiginnga, was originally seeded as a pilot project in late 2021 with strategic innovation funding from the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Greenhouse program. In June 2022, one of our main facilities flooded, substantially compromising everything we had worked for. It’s taken two years for our program to rebuild. Over that time, we’ve been incredibly fortunate to have support from other arts organizations such as the Manitoba Arts Council’s Indigenous 360 Program along with students and staff from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

With their new project on Indigenous Intellectual Property Protection and Indigenous Cultural Expressions, the experience of being at the Urban Shaman Art Gallery really made members of the team reflect on how we could be integrating arts more into IIPP-0071.

Thank you to everyone at the Canada Council for the Arts, Manitoba Arts Council, Manitoba Agriculture, Agri-Food and Agriculture Canada, Manitoba Agriculture and OpenAI for supporting our programming. We really appreciate this chance to come together with so many of Manitoba’s incredible artists, cultural connectors and creators.

Perhaps it’s time to plan our next exhibition.