Registration is now open for a reunion of faculty, students and support staff of Nelson, B.C.’s former David Thompson University Centre and its successor institution, the Kootenay School of the Arts, April 25 to 27 next year.
A form-fillable registration form is now available on the reunion’s website at dtuc-ksa-reunion.ca. Early bird registration of $65 per person closes Jan. 30, 2025, after which registration is $85 per person.
Besides the social dimensions to the reunion, which includes a meet and greet the evening of April 25 at Mary Hall on the former DTUC site (now Selkirk College’s Tenth Street Campus), two art exhibits are planned.
A month-long art sale and show by reunion registrants, dubbed “Continuum,” will occur at Nelson’s Craft Connection artists’ co-op. An opening reception is planned for April 26. And on the same day, a one-day art exhibit of works by faculty and alumni of the two institutions who have passed away, titled “We Wish You Were Here,” will be on display at the former KSA site, now Selkirk College’s Kootenay Studio Arts building on Victoria Street.
April 26 will also feature three daytime panel discussions and a group author reading, all open to the public, at Shambhala Hall at Selkirk’s Tenth Street Campus.
“The ripples of the 75 years of arts education in our city has infiltrated far and wide,” said reunion committee member Robin DuPont, an instructor in the Ceramics program at Selkirk College, located in the Kootenay Studio Arts building. “I look forward to this reunion as a platform to gather and exchange ideas and our experiences once again.”
The 2025 event follows the successful first-ever reunion in May 2023 of former DTUC faculty, support staff and students held at the Prestige Lakeside Resort in Nelson. DTUC, which operated between 1979 and 1984, was a consortium of the University of Victoria and Selkirk College. The novel post-secondary institution was opened in response to the outcry in Nelson over the closure of the province’s second university, Notre Dame University of Nelson, which operated 1950-1977. After DTUC was shuttered, the former DTUC Support Society sparked the creation of KSA, which ran as a municipal initiative from 1991 until it was merged earlier this century into Selkirk College as Kootenay Studio Arts.
More information on the April 2025 reunion is available by contacting the reunion committee at dtuc.ksareunion@gmail.com.
Tom Wayman