The Vancouver Art Gallery and Emily Carr University of Art + Design have announced a five-year partnership that will greatly widen public access to one of British Columbia's most distinctive research collections. Under the agreement, announced on November 4, 2026, roughly 5,000 historic artist files will be loaned by the Gallery to the university's Library + Archives.

The files span almost a century, from the Gallery's founding in 1931 to the present day, and document the history of art and artists across the province. They hold rare photographs, personal and artistic correspondence, artist statements, exhibition catalogues, newspaper and journal clippings and other ephemera, preserving an intimate record of practices that are often poorly documented anywhere else.

The loan will sit alongside the university's own artist files, which largely hold institutional material such as prospectuses, student publications, newsletters, memos and exhibition records. Brought together at the Library + Archives, the two holdings form a far more complete primary-source record of art-making in British Columbia, open to artists, researchers, students and the wider public.

The university's archivist, Kristy Waller, will oversee the ongoing care, cataloguing and reference requests for the material, which is available to consult by appointment. The partnership arrives as Emily Carr University marks its centenary, a year of programming that began in October 2025 and includes projects to reactivate the archives and deepen ties with the broader community. Housed together at the Library + Archives, the records give artists, researchers, students and the public a new way into the stories that shaped the province's artistic life, from its earliest modernist circles to the present.