Western Front

For more than 50 years, Western Front has been Vancouver’s home for artistic creation and presentation across visual arts, music, performance, dance, and literature. Housed in a landmark heritage building in vibrant Mount Pleasant, the arts hub presents an annual program of exhibitions, live performances, screenings, readings, artist residencies, and outreach events with local, national, and international artists. It also preserves and provides access to an archive documenting the Western Front’s history of artistic programming and production. 

Western Front was founded in 1973 by artists Kate Craig, Glenn Lewis, Eric Metcalfe, Michael Morris, and Vincent Trasov, composer Martin Bartlett, architect Mo van Nostrand, and writer Henry Greenhow, who collectively purchased a former Knights of Pythias Lodge in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Vancouver’s East Side. Recognizing the unique potential of the heritage building to create a communal space in which to live and work, they transformed the ceremonial and recreation halls into an intimate 120-seat performance space and dance studio, the dining room into a 530-square-metre gallery, and the lodging rooms into artist-residency suites. They incorporated as a nonprofit society in 1974, and named the organization Western Front in reference to the building’s pioneer-like façade, its geographic location on the West Coast of Canada, and their pursuits with avant-garde art.

Together, the founders conceived of Western Front as a place where multidisciplinary exchange, experimentation, and a synthesis of art and life could occur. Through their early involvement with correspondence art, new media, and telecommunications, the founders connected local artist-run practices to a vast network of visual artists, musicians, dancers, performance artists, and curators. Today, Western Front remains responsive to the ever-changing conditions of the arts ecology, while offering an internationally renowned platform for interdisciplinary artists and curators to develop their ideas and establish their practices.   

Admission to Western Front’s exhibitions are always free, while its live events are ticketed by donation and available by livestream for free.

Western Front acknowledges that it is located on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples, including the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.