For five afternoons in late October, the second floor of the Godfrey Dean Cultural Centre in Yorkton will look less like a finished exhibition and more like a working studio. Art in Motion, presented jointly by the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery and Arts Guild Yorkton, runs Oct. 20 through Oct. 24, 2026, with doors open daily from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. in the Godfrey Dean Project Gallery at 49 Smith Street East. Admission is free and visitors are welcome to drop in at any point during the week.
The premise is simple and, in a regional gallery context, unusual: instead of arriving to find walls hung with completed work, gallery-goers will find artists at their tables and easels, mid-process. Ten local artists are taking part — Carol Bolt, Lynda Dawson, Shannon Erickson, Marie Happy, Angelina Kardynal, Cherish Lazaroff, Stephanie Newsham, Bernice Puritch, Wendy Schmidt and Jeann Spilak — working across a range of styles and mediums. Visitors can watch pieces take shape, ask questions about technique and materials, and talk with the artists about where an idea came from and how it got to the point it is at on any given afternoon.
Organizers describe the event as a way of building connections between artists and the wider community, and of pulling back the curtain on the craftsmanship that goes into original work. That framing matters in a small prairie city, where the distance between the people who make art and the people who look at it is often short but rarely crossed in a formal gallery setting. Art in Motion closes that gap by making conversation the point rather than an optional extra.
The setting has its own history. The Godfrey Dean Art Gallery traces its roots to decades of work by the Yorkton Arts Council, which as far back as the 1960s organized visual art exhibitions at various locations in Yorkton — long before there was a dedicated gallery to hang them in. That changed with the construction of the Godfrey Dean Cultural Centre, which opened on October 28, 1981, with two galleries and office space built on the second floor next to the historic Land Titles Building. Through the 1990s the galleries were managed by the Yorkton Arts Council, its volunteer board, a visual arts committee and part-time staff. In 2003, a newly incorporated Godfrey Dean Art Gallery took over exhibition and education programming, and it has carried that mandate since — describing itself as the only professional public art gallery in the area, with a focus on artists from the region alongside others from across Saskatchewan and Canada.
The gallery sits on Treaty 4 territory, the land of the Cree, Ojibwe, Saulteaux, Dakota, Nakota and Lakota, and the homeland of the Métis Nation — an acknowledgement the gallery makes in its own materials.
The participating artists reflect the breadth of practice that has grown up around that institutional history. Angelina Kardynal, for instance, is a graphic designer with a quarter-century of experience who also works in fine art across oil paint and wool fibre, and who has served as Culture Days coordinator in Yorkton; her past public programming has included needle-felting workshops and colouring-page projects with the Yorkton Public Library and the Yorkton Arts Council. Wendy Schmidt, a self-taught potter from the Yorkton area, specializes in flower pots and planters, piggy banks and pet urns, and takes custom commissions — the kind of practical, handmade work that rarely appears on a gallery wall but is central to the region's craft culture. Others on the roster, including Puritch and Newsham, are familiar names in the local arts scene; Puritch and Newsham both sit on the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery's board of directors, which means some of the people demonstrating their craft this week are also the people who keep the institution running.
That overlap is part of what makes the event feel homegrown rather than imported. Arts Guild Yorkton, the co-presenter, is a local artists' organization that has partnered on Culture Days programming in past years, including the Great Yorkton Art Challenge, which invited residents to make work on a theme and, optionally, display it in public spaces around town. Art in Motion follows the same instinct: put the making where people can see it.
For anyone who has ever wondered how a pot gets thrown, how a landscape gets built up in layers of oil, or how a piece of fibre art goes from loose wool to a finished scene, the week offers a rare chance to ask. Visitors are encouraged to stop by more than once — a work that is a rough sketch on Tuesday may be something else entirely by Saturday afternoon — and to stay long enough to talk. The gallery is on the second floor of the Godfrey Dean Cultural Centre at 49 Smith Street East in Yorkton, open 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. daily from Oct. 20 to Oct. 24, 2026, with no admission charge.