Black & Gold | Thursday 17 October

Black and Gold is the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery’s biggest fundraising event of the year, contributing $50,000 a year to exhibitions, education and public programming.

We are thrilled to announce the return of CIBC Wood Gundy – Allan Bush as the title sponsor for Black & Gold, which will take place at Bingeman's on Thursday 17 October.

Once again, our Silent Auction will be hosted online by Givergy. Visit https://blackandgoldauction.ca to see the art, experiences and gifts available in this year's auction and start placing your bids! The auction will close on Thursday 17 October at 9:45 pm EST.

The gala evening includes an impressive art and silent auction, cocktail hour, dinner, and smooth sounds from the Tavares Trio, a Latin jazz ensemble. We are also delighted to welcome celebrated Cree artist Kent Monkman as our Guest of Honour for the evening, who has also graciously donated one of his works to this year's Art Auction!

Kent Monkman is a Cree artist who is widely known for his provocative interventions into Western European and American art history. He explores themes of colonization, sexuality, loss, and resilience—the complexities of historic and contemporary Indigenous experiences—across a variety of mediums, including painting, film/video, performance, and installation. Monkman’s gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle often appears in his work as a time-traveling, shape-shifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples. 

While KWAG supporters will remember Monkman's incredibly popular 2017 exhibition The Four Continents, his painting and installation works have been exhibited internationally at numerous institutions including the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montréal; the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the Art Gallery of Ontario; the National Gallery of Canada; the Des Moines Art Centre; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art; the Musée d’art contemporain de Rochechouart, France; the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, France; Maison Rouge, Paris; and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Monkman’s second nationally touring solo exhibition, Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, will visit nine museums across Canada until 2020. In 2019, Kent accepted a commission from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to produce two large-scale works to hang in the museum’s Great Hall.