Famous Empty Sky lives and works in a funky heritage house just off Vancouver’s Commercial Drive. Busy, being an innovative artist, curator, arts educator, she is an active member of Avenue for/des Arts. She exhibits extensively in both group and solo shows. Currently, her main focus is her large series of mixed media pieces including
“The Nnots” and “Beyond the Secret Garden”.
Now a Canadian citizen and an enthusiastic Vancouverite, she was born in Manhattan, N.Y. and educated at New York University and the New School for Social Research. Her unusual name was acquired there, while studying Tibetan Buddhism and art history with scholar/artist John Brzostoski.
In 1967, she attended San Francisco State College and lived in the Haight-Asbury. This began a long phase of living in San Francisco and returning there after living in NYC and travelling in Europe. In San Francisco, she worked in visual art, short film and theatrical production. All together, she lived there for about 20 years, only leaving to move to Vancouver in 1992. British Columbia is her favorite place.
Her work is in many private collections in Canada, Europe and the United States, as well as in the public collections of the Vancouver Public Library and the Britannia Community Centre. When “Avenue for/des Arts” became the first Resident Visual Artists at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, she was Project Director for two seasons of residency.
Empty Sky also organizes large exhibitions involving Public Art. One such exhibition, “The Art of Juxtaposition” was for the Vancouver Public Library. It included a series of free public workshops, 50 finished and exhibited works of art, an opening for 300 and her own 7 foot long collage on the theme of the history of art, which is on permanent display at Library Square.
Another was “The Party of the Century”. It engaged 36 art makers and produced 146 caricatures of 20th century notables. Empty Sky used the collage portraits to create a 24 foot mural, in six panels. The finished mural was exhibited at the Hong Kong Bank and many other venues. For the 2001 Artropolis, she and Ed Varney were co-curators of “The Self-Portrait Exhibition” of 500 pieces.