Every day as a student in the textile arts program at Kootenay Studio Arts, Julia Cedar learned a new practical skill.
“Each project led to a truckload of ideas, so many ideas, germinating from one initial idea. It just felt unstoppable. I feel like it propelled my skills to a whole different level. … I was fully smitten by it.”
She speaks reverently about her instructor Angelika Werth, who has since retired, and her classmates.
“I felt very honoured that I got to be her student, and I met a cohort of students who are still my friends today. We are each other’s inspiration.”
Cedar has practised part time as fabric artist since, and plans to upgrade to a full-time business soon.
She said she would be tempted to take the program all over again, but for Selkirk College’s recent decision to close it. The college has announced the small campus on Victoria Street in Nelson that offers blacksmithing and metal arts, ceramics and textile arts will be shut down at the end of this academic year, and its programs terminated.
This comes after Selkirk College’s announcement that it must trim $9 million from its budget (including $3-4 million in 2026-27) to compensate for lost revenue from international students, whose numbers have been significantly restricted by changes in federal immigration policy.
Selkirk says the KSA program has been operating at a deficit for several years, and that operating the program, which costs $615,000 annually, is too expensive to maintain given the campus’ annual average of 25 students and its maximum capacity of 33.
Planning for arts education, again
The closure comes as another in a series of changes for arts education, which has held a consistent but precarious position in Nelson for the past 60 years. Many who have followed that history, while regretting the closure announced last month, are already asking what form the resurrection of studio arts training could take.
Selkirk ceramics instructor Robin DuPont is collecting testimonials and letters supporting a rebirth, whether at the present campus or not.
As of Oct. 27 he had received 324 testimonials from across the province and the country, as well 42 letters of support from local businesses, organizations and institutions.
He says his call-out was for “expressions of support for arts education, to make our community, particularly the City of Nelson, understand the value of the arts education. It is not a call-out to criticize Selkirk.”
The college will host a meeting for Nelson arts organizations in early November to discuss how to continue the programs outside of the college.
DuPont graduated from KSA in 1997 and has since taught clay at universities in Utah, Alberta, and Manitoba as well as the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. He has earned a number of national and international awards for his work as an artist and educator, and was named Nelson’s cultural ambassador for 2023.
“I’m optimistic that our community will come together and the right diversity of people will roll up their sleeves and find us a solution, with me included.”
‘Best little arts town’
DuPont says he teaches around the world and he often meets people who “don’t know where Calgary is, but they know where Nelson is, and it’s because we’re on the map because of culture, not just because we’re another beautiful mountain town.”
Nelson ceramic artist Eva Myers-McKimm supports the idea of a local solution for the arts programs, and hopes some momentum will build.
“I think that will happen again in some way, but I don’t want people to hear that and say, ‘Oh, good, I’m just going to wait for it to happen.’ People need to come forward and say, ‘This is what I can contribute.’”
Myers-McKimm re-took the ceramics program in 2024 after having already graduated from it 25 years ago. She has run a part-time and then full-time ceramics business in Nelson since. She needed a boost in both inspiration and skills, and said taking the program again was a “huge renewal.”
She says KSA is “baked into the fabric of this community” and that Nelson’s status as an arts town is threatened by the closure.
“I don’t think you can have a ‘best little arts town’ without an incubator for artists.”
Cedar agrees that Nelson needs to find a way to keep its reputation.
“Of all the places where the programs should be thriving, it should be here. You can come and learn a technique from some of those amazing artists, and then you can become one of them.”
Responding to the college’s rationale for the cutback, Myers-McKimm says there is no escaping the fact that post-secondary arts education costs money.
“But it’s worth it. It’s not a money maker. It requires funding. And the benefit is that whatever municipality the institution is in, they have this rich cultural legacy that they can continue to weave into the fabric of the community.”
‘It was magic’
KSA originated with a slightly different name –the Kootenay School of Art – in 1960 (with 105 full-time students by 1968) as part of the former B.C. Vocational School in collaboration with Notre Dame University. The provincial government phased out vocational schools in the 1970s and closed the university in 1977.
The David Thompson University Centre (DTUC) opened at the Tenth Street campus in 1979 with KSA as part of it, offering a large variety of fine arts and studio arts courses. After the provincial government closed DTUC in 1984, the non-profit DTUC Support Society re-started the school, calling it Kootenay School of the Arts, in 1991.
The school ran a variety of courses in various locations around town, started full-time credit programs in 1994, moved into the Victoria Street building in 1996 with funding from the province, and also offered a variety of courses at other locations in Nelson.
Dupont was a 19-year-old ceramics student at the new facility in 1996, and says the arts education scene in Nelson was very dynamic.
“It was magic. Even looking back it it now, it seemed like it was well and truly the heyday of what KSA was. It seemed like there was the most support KSA had ever seen. … There were many programs and many students in all of them. There was energy, there was money.”
In the late 1990s the school had more than 400 full-and part-time students at the Victoria Street campus and other locations in the city.
But these offerings gradually diminished over time, especially after the 2001 election of the B.C. Liberal party that cut the funding to the school.
In 2006, Selkirk College took over the programs at the campus building and offered training in ceramics, metalwork, jewelry and textile arts to a total capacity of 33 students. In 2012 the college changed the name to Kootenay Studio Arts. The City of Nelson, which owns the Victoria Street building, had been charging nominal rent of $1 per year since 1996 but in 2020 started charging market rent.
Since Selkirk took over, the ceramics program has been reduced from a three-year to a one-year program, the bronze casting part of metal arts program has been discontinued, jewelry has been discontinued, and textile arts program has been reduced.
‘A tragedy without a villain’
Nelson jeweler Lily Anderson graduated from KSA’s jewelry program in 2018.
“It really was everything to me,” she says. “It just opened me up to a whole new world. I didn’t realize that jewelry could be a successful career. It was always kind of looked at … as a hobby. And so it really opened my eyes to the fact that it could be a business and it could sustain you.”
Nelson artist Naomi Bourque is an Indigenous artist who grew up in the Northwest Territories and has taken three programs at KSA: jewelry, metal arts and textiles. She sells her work across the continent and at local markets. Her jewelry uses, in addition to silver, a range of materials she sources in the Territories including antler, horn, tusk, and claws, along with tanned hides and fur for textile work.
“Where else can you go to learn these old-world techniques for a year and come out accredited, and be here in a place like Nelson? What other options do people have now?”
When Bourque took the textile program there were only two people in the class, and she was surprised that it ran at all. She wonders if Selkirk College had marketed the program effectively.
“I often go to trade shows and such with my mom’s (furrier) business. Often there are scouts from colleges and universities trying to attract (students). How do people know about KSA?”
Corky Evans wonders the same thing. He was the local MLA who was instrumental in getting the Victoria Street location provincially funded and renovated into an art school after DTUC closed.
He says some other institutions, like the Banff Centre, “are hugely skilled at telling their story and recruiting.”
In an interview on Oct. 24, Selkirk College president Maggie Matear told the Nelson Star that the college uses a range of marketing and recruitment techniques.
“I know that they are featured in our Viewbook (the program guide for prospective students). I know that there are specific flyers and things like that that are available for all of our programs across the college. That being said, marketing is sort of beside the point. Even if we were full, we still couldn’t afford to offer these programs.”
Evans added that Selkirk’s rationale for closing the campus – the facility is too expensive for such a small student capacity, in light of the cut in revenue from international students – is understandable.
“This is a tragedy without a villain,” he said.
Evans said it’s clear why Selkirk did not put an equivalent amount of resources into recruiting art students as they did recruiting international students.
“International students have money, and artists don’t.”