Issue: 2015-05-14 PHOTO: Karen Dubois
On one of her frequent trips to Europe, Karen Dubois recently visited the stunning Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain
Karen Dubois knows how she wants to be remembered when she eventually leaves her job as executive director of the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (KIAC) in Dawson City. “I hope my legacy is going to be a new furnace for this building. It could be the Karen Dubois Memorial Furnace,” she jokes.
Dubois has been with KIAC since its inception in 1999, starting as program manager and moving into her current role in 2008.
Apart from a new heating source for the historic Odd Fellows Hall, she also hopes to see the fulfillment of the original dream of KIAC’s founders, the Dawson City Arts Society (DCAS), to re-purpose various Klondike heritage buildings for arts presentation and development. “Right now there’s kind of a movement to try to turn the Yukon Sawmill into artist studios. That would make me very happy,” she says. “I’d love to see the Palace Grand being used more. I’d like to see the Dawson Daily News being used more for printmaking. I’d like to see more of a craft centre at Bear Creek.”
As a third-generation Dawsonite on her father’s side, Dubois has known those buildings all her life. And she’s been actively involved in the town’s flourishing arts scene since the early days of the Dawson City Music Festival.
In the early ‘70s, she studied arts and crafts with the late Ted Harrison in Whitehorse and then went on to earn a degree in art education. “When I was in university, my area of concentration was weaving and fabric design, and I actually had a pottery studio for three years, but apart from taking the occasional course, I’m not a practising artist.”
From university, Dubois returned home to teach at the Robert Service School. “I did a bit of art, but I really wanted to be in Dawson, and there wasn’t a fulltime art position, so I just took a regular teaching position,” she says.
After three years of teaching, she took time off to do some travelling before embarking on a new career, teaching adults “for many, many years” at the local Yukon College campus. “I was very involved with the music festival during all those years, so I learned a lot about working in the non-profi t sector,” she says. “When KIAC opened, I thought it was a good opportunity to sort of marry my interest in the arts with my experience co-ordinating courses for adults,” she says.
During her time with the organization, KIAC has operated the refurbished Odd Fellows Hall as a performing space and art gallery, and launched the Dawson City International Short Film Festival, the Riverside Arts Festival, an artist residency program, and an art enrichment program for high school students.
In 2007, arts education in Dawson took another leap forward with the opening of the Yukon School of Visual Arts (SOVA), through a three-way partnership of DCAS, Yukon College, and the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation. “I mean, just think how lucky we are in Dawson to have exposure to all of this,” Dubois enthuses. “It’s not that we don’t have strategic plans, but they’ve been loose enough that there’s been the opportunity for all kinds of crazy things to happen.”
Having so many irons in the fire can also make it difficult to determine priorities, however. That’s why KIAC is currently involved in a strategic planning process “to help us try to focus our energy a little bit,” she explains.
Dubois has no regrets about deciding “quite awhile ago” and make her contribution to the arts through administration, rather than as a practising artist. “It’s really been an enriching experience. It’s going on 15 years, so it’s really hard to remember what life was like before KIAC.”
That doesn’t mean she can’t picture what life might look like after KIAC, when she retires in about four years.
Dubois says she’s “thrilled” at the thought of having time to work on some of her own projects, such as framing a lot of her own artwork and setting up a loom her grandmother gave her years ago, or perhaps she’ll “dabble a little bit” in piano and violin more often. “I’ve got a lot of books to read. I’ve got a lot of fi lms to watch. There’s a lot of places in the world that I want to see, and I have a lot of friends I’d like to visit that are all over the world, and a lot of concerts I’d like to go to.”
Who knows, there may even be time for an occasional visit to inspect the Karen Dubois Memorial Furnace at the Odd Fellows Hall.