Rhéal Olivier Lanthier
François-St-Jacques
Co-directors
Rhéal Olivier Lanthier and François St-Jacques are a duo of independent curators as well as co-directors and co-founders of Art Mûr gallery and Éditions Art Mûr Publications. Lanthier served as president of AGAC (the Association of Contemporary Art Galleries) for five years between 2008 and 2013. Through their function as directors of Art Mûr, Lanthier and St-Jacques have carried numerous major exhibition projects that were warmly applauded by critics, including Art Fiction (1996), Memento Mori (2011 with 18 artists from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany), Mens-Moi / Please Lie to Me (2011 with 20 artists from Canada, the United States, France, Mexico and China) and Mapping the territory / A Stake in the Ground – Demonstration of Contemporary Aboriginal Art (2012 with 25 native artists from Canada and the United States). More recently, they independently curated Qui suis-je: L’identité autochtone au 21ième siècle at the Maison des Jésuites in Québec City (2013).
Michael Patten
Operations Manager
Michael Patten is a contemporary visual artist based in Montreal and a member of the Zagime Anishinabek First Nation in Saskatchewan. He holds a B.F.A. in painting and a B.F.A. in drawing with a minor in art history from the University of Regina and he has participated in solo and group exhibitions internationally and nationally in museums, artist run centers, commercial spaces, and university galleries. In 2017, he was one of the Laureates for the Hnatyshyn Foundation‘s REVEAL- Indigenous Art Awards. And he is presently the Director of the Contemporary Native Art Biennial in Montreal – a nonprofit organization with a mandate to recognize and support contemporary Indigenous art and artists.
Valeria Márquez Reynoso
Exhibitions and Communications Coordinator
Valeria Márquez Reynoso is a graduate student in art history at Université de Montréal. Originally from Mexico, her research focuses on the evolution of Chicano aesthetics from the 1960s to the present day. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in art history from Université de Montréal in 2022 and is also project manager for artist Eddy Firmin’s Lawond exhibition project. In the past, she has worked at the Galerie de l’Université de Montréal as a mediation and indigenous arts residency assistant, as well as at the Fondation Guido Molinari as a volunteer and administrative coordinator and completed an internship at the artist-run centre OBORO in 2022. Cultural mediation is also one of her specialties, having held the position of mediation manager for Maison MONA. She is trilingual in both spoken and written French, Spanish and English.