As the sole national organization dedicated to servicing the visual arts of Francophone and Acadian minority communities in Canada, the Association des groupes en arts visuels francophones (AGAVF) is committed to consolidating a professional network across the country. The association currently brings together more than fifteen member organizations across the provinces. These francophone collectives, artist-run centres, art galleries and professional associations play important roles in the professionalization, circulation and cultural mediation of visual arts, and contribute to the vitality of French-speaking communities and of the discipline.
The AGAVF envisions and traces a path for the future of the francophone visual arts sector by defending its stakes and interests to governmental, political and associative entities. Through its activities, it acts as a catalyst, allowing Franco-Canadian arts organizations to network and professionalize with the goal of offering better creative conditions to artists in their communities.
Our Members
The AGAVF is a group of professional visual arts organizations working in francophone and Acadian communities, along with a few individual artists in provinces or territories where there are no French-language visual arts organizations. AGAVF works closely with provincial francophone organizations that serve professional artists by sharing tools, career development activities, etc.
Member organizations are:
- Social spaces and incubators for creative projects that attract young audiences eager to engage with contemporary art discourse;
- Event producers who incorporate French-speaking artists into major events (e.g. Nuit Blanche, culture festivals, etc.);
- Art mediators with culturally diverse audiences who create connections between communities, including Indigenous communities;
- Organizations that bridge official language communities, promoting the integration of exogamous families.
The consolidation of the AGAVF and its network allows communities to access, in their language, the activities and structures they require to evolve. This network provides these communities with artists, spaces, equipments, services and specialized resources.
Study on the State of the Visual Arts in Francophone Minority Communities (2023)
The observations compiled in the seven chapters of the study conducted by the AGAVF in 2023 demonstrate that the challenges of Francophone artists in minority situations are similar in many respects to those of artists from dominant groups. Artists and cultural workers face economic precariousness and arts organizations struggle with limited public funding. Furthermore, the study highlights a number of issues specific to francophone minority contexts, namely in terms of education and opportunities for professional development, as well as dissemination, infrastructure, and funding.
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Our team
Elise Anne LaPlante, Co-director
Elise Anne LaPlante (she/her) is an independent curator, writer, and cultural worker. She flourishes in the grey areas, intrigued and driven by the political possibilities of the poetic. She explores affect and imaginaries while remaining acutely attentive to the dehierarchization of knowledge.
Some of her recent exhibitions as a curator include the three-cycle project Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre in partnership with La Maison des artistes visuels francophones (St. Boniface, MB, 2022), the Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen (Moncton, NB, 2023) and the Galerie de l’UQAM (Montreal, QC, 2023-2024), Le murmure d’une empreinte (Arprim, Montréal, 2022, with Caroline Mauxion and Céline Huyghebaert), Images rémanentes (a public art itinerary in the city of Moncton), Tombées dans les interstices : A Contemporary Look at the Contribution of a Few Women Artists to Modern-day Acadie (Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen, 2017; Galerie Colline, 2018) and Dérouler l’archive : LASART (1982) revisité (Galerie Sans Nom, 2015; Langage Plus, 2017). Her words have appeared in various publications and gallery texts, and in the magazines esse arts + opinions, Espace art actuel, and Vie des arts.
As a cultural worker, she has been involved in various projects since 2014, providing artistic and administrative coordination, mentoring as well as editorial work. In particular, she has worked closely with the Musée d’art de Joliette, Galerie de l’UQAM, Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen, AAAPNB, Galerie Sans Nom and Festival RE:FLUX.
Véronique Leblanc, Co-director
Véronique Leblanc (she/her) is an independent curator, art writer, teacher and cultural worker. Her research focuses on the imaginary of the common in contemporary art through a range of artistic practices that combine collaborative and performative approaches with documentary strategies.
Recent exhibitions include: Anne-Marie Ouellet – Cohésion. Une enquête sur le faire groupe (Musée d’art de Joliette, 2023), Franchissements (Galerie UQO, Gatineau, 2021-2022), Les histoires nécessaires | Instrumental Stories (Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen and Musée acadien de l’Université de Moncton, 2019), Chto Delat? Performative Practices of Our Time (Vox, 2018), Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens. Putting Life to Work (Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, Montreal, 2016), Polyphonies (Optica, Montreal, 2015) and faire avec (AdMare, Îles-de-la-Madeleine, 2013).
A lecturer in art history at UQAM and involved in the artist-run centers milieu for over ten years, she sees the exhibition projects, pedagogical adventures and administrative practices in which she engages as shared learning opportunities. As mentor for the first four editions of AGAVF’s Curatorial incubator (2019-2022), she accompanied a dozen emerging curators from the francophone communities across the country in the development of exhibition projects, in addition to getting to learn more about member’s realities.
Before teaming up as AGAVF codirectors, Elise Anne LaPlante and Véronique Leblanc also worked closely together as curators of the 7th edition of the ORANGE triennial, entitled Cultivating Humility | M8jagen piwihozw8gan (Saint-Hyacinthe, 2022).
Éloïse LeBlanc, Assistant director
Éloïse LeBlanc (she/her) is an author and cultural worker who cultivates hypersensitivity, shares her texts with a low voice, and is actively broadening her knowledge of coastal maritime botany; she is interested in minute universes and in the myriad ways one can magnify them. She holds a master’s thesis on the emergence of Acadian literature from McGill University and a certificate in visual arts from the University of Quebec in Montreal. In 2022, she published a book of poems titled Le Hoquet en Pulpe with La Maison en Feu. Several of her texts are featured in literary journals, such as Estuaire, Saturne, Les Éphélides, and Nyx. Her video poem titled « Blurring the Threshold » was presented at the Acadian Poetry Festival. She was an editor for the literary creation magazine Nyx and editor/writer for the magazine Lieux Communs. She is the founder and director of Projet Borgitte in Cap-Pelé, New Brunswick.
Laura Demers, Communications and project coordinator
Laura Demers (she/her) is an artist-curator working in Toronto. Her works have been presented at Project Underwing, Art Mûr, Idea Exchange, Trinity Square Video, Centre Sagamie, L’Écart, the Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen art gallery, as well as in DIY spaces. As a curator, she has carried out exhibition projects at the Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario, La Maison des artistes visuels francophones, and The Power Plant, as well as event-based and virtual projects with organizations such as Art Spin Hamilton, this town is small, the Orange Triennale (2022), and the plumb, an artist-run project space of which she is a member and co-founder.
Board of Directors
Lou-Anne Bourdeau, president
Settled in Manitoba for a few years, Lou-Anne Bourdeau is involved in the programming of the Maison des artistes visuels francophones (House of Francophone Visual Artists) of Saint-Boniface in Manitoba. She also coordinated the first edition of the Contextualizations project of Réseau N.O. Recipient of a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Lou-Anne is a master’s candidate in art history at Laval University. She is interested, among other things, in the development of modern and contemporary artistic movements in Quebec and Canada, more particularly in abstract art. She is the recipient of the Michelle-de-la-Pradelle prize for an essay on the work of the painter Fernand Leduc published in the Proceedings of the 17th Artefact conference.
Tam-Ca Vo-Van, administrator
Tam-Can Vo-Van studied music at the Université de Moncton and ethnomusicology at the Université de Montréal. She worked in communications and programming for the Festival international du cinema francophone en Acadie from 1996 to 2000, and was a founding member of the collective Code Régional. She is currently the director of Galerie SAW Gallery in Ottawa, and has been a board member of AGAVF since 2005, serving as president from 2007 to 2014.
Nisk Imbeault, administrator
Nisk Imbeault has been the director-curator of the Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen at the Université de Moncton since 2010. She graduated from the Université de Moncton in 1996 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts before continuing her studies in history, philosophy, and art in Montréal. While in university, she worked at Imago printmaking studio, and for several years at the Festival international du cinema francophone en Acadie as a marketing and communications officer, activities coordinator, and assistant director of programming. She was also the director of Galerie Sans Nom from 2001 to 2011. Imbeault devotes much of her time to various boards and committees that support the visual arts.
Emilie Grace Lavoie, administrator
Emilie Grace Lavoie is an artist, curator and member of the 3E collective, originally from Edmundston (unceded traditional Wolastoqiyik territory), New Brunswick. Lavoie holds a college diploma in fashion design (2011) from LaSalle College in Montreal, a bachelor’s degree in visual arts (2016) from the Université de Moncton and a master’s degree in fine arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver (2018). In 2017, Lavoie received the silver medal at the VIII Games of La Francophonie in Abidjan (Ivory Coast) in the Sculpture and Installation category, representing Canada-New Brunswick. Lavoie’s work has been presented in various exhibitions including in British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, New Brunswick and will soon be showing in solo and group exhibitions throughout the province of New Brunswick, among others at the Galerie d’ art Beaverbrook, the New Brunswick Museum, the Center des Arts et de la Culture de Dieppe, Galerie Colline and Jones Gallery. Emilie currently sits on the board of directors of Galerie Sans Nom, Moncton.
Dyana Ouvrard, administrator
Dyana Ouvrard (she/her) is an emerging curator and cultural worker who questions the forward march of the world alongside artists. Influenced by geography, she thinks about spaces, places, distances and connections. As director of Le Laboratoire d’arts médiatiques francophone de Toronto since 2020, she questions the tyranny of artistic productivity, favouring slow work and collective research. Her intellectual contribution involves the defense of artistic exploration. She joins the AGAVF board in 2024.
Christine Comeau, administrator
Christine Comeau (she/her) lives and works in Moncton, NB where she has been the Executive Director of Atelier d’estampe Imago since 2019. Comeau is a graduate of the Université de Moncton, where she completed a multidisciplinary bachelor’s degree with concentrations in visual arts and administration in 2012. She is a part-time artist and works primarily in silkscreening and photography.
Illustration: Christine Comeau
Contact us
Association des groupes en arts visuels francophones (AGAVF)
450 Rideau Street, office 405
Ottawa (Ontario) K1N 5Z4, Canada
Tel. : 613-244-9584
direction [arobas] agavf [point] ca
