Armand Vaillancourt

Armand Vaillancourt
Armand Vaillancourt
Born	September 3, 1929 Black Lake, Quebec, Canada.
Nationality	Québécois Canadian
Known for	sculptor, painter and performance artist

Armand Vaillancourt is a Québécois sculptor, painter and performance artist born on September 3, 1929, in the city of Black Lake, Quebec, Canada.

In 1971, a publicly commissioned fountain entitled Québec libre! was installed (San Francisco, United States). One of his best known sculptures, Québec libre! is representative of the relationship between Vaillancourt's art and his political convictions. It is a huge concrete fountain, 200 feet long, 140 feet wide and 36 feet high sitting in the city's financial district at the Embarcadero Center. The night before its inauguration, Vaillancourt inscribed Québec libre! in red letters, to note his undying support for the Quebec sovereignty movement and more largely, his support for the freedom of all people. The following day, seeing that the city's employees erased the inscription, he jumped on the sculpture to reinscribe the sentence many times.

Some years later, the fountain became the object of a polemic involving U2's singer Bono. During a free concert, Bono climbed the sculpture to write Rock & Roll stops the traffic, referring to the power of rock. 20,000 people were in fact in attendance and blocked some of the neighbouring streets. Reacting to the act, the city's mayor declared that she deplored the sculpture's vandalism and that this kind of act could be punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment. Vaillancourt was then contacted to learn if he supported the gesture, which he answered by going to U2's concert in Oakland the following day, where he wrote "Stop the madness" on the stage, in front of 70,000 people. He defended Bono's gesture, after a speech on injustice, declaring that graffiti is a necessary evil as young people do not generally have the same access to newspapers, and media in general, as politicians do to express themselves.

El clamor is a 1985 work in (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic). Described by Vaillancourt as a "symbol of vital energy of every oppressed population, of real freedom, the freedom that is inside and that we cannot imprison", this monumental sculpture, 23 feet long, 7 feet wide and 10 feet high, surrounded by barbed wire surmounted by 92 steel hands, symbolizes the struggle of people against repression and imprisonment. A 5 foot dove sits on top of the sculpture. It was constructed in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic for the 500th anniversary of the coming of Christopher Columbus.

Selective list of sculptures

• 1953: L'arbre de la rue Durocher (Montreal, Quebec)
• 1967: Écran d'acier (Ottawa, Ontario)
• 1967: Je me souviens (esquisse in Toronto, Ontario) (commissioned)
• 1971: Québec libre ! (San Francisco, United States) (commissioned)
• 1980: Intemporel (Chicoutimi, Quebec)
• 1983: Justice (commissioned)
• 1985: El clamor (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) (political)

Honours

• 1993 - Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas.
• Member of l'Ordre national du Québec.

• 
  Armand Vaillancourt's Cenotaph in Chicoutimi, Quebec
• 
  Armand Vaillancourt's sculpture Québec libre ! (1971), Embarcadero Center, Justin Herman Plaza, in San Francisco, California

References

Jouer avec le feu Armand Vaillancourt sculpteur engage, Lanctot, 2001 auteur John K. Grande

Balance: Art and Nature, Black Rose Books, 1994 author John K. Grande

Quebec Underground Vol. 3

External links

• L’Amitié Québec-Euskadi Euskonews
• Fondation Armand Vaillancourt Official website
• Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec: Armand Vaillancourt