I read about this, and was sad for both the artist and the museum's lack of spine, but then I read the comments from the womens' group that protested it, and felt their points were valid, too. The concern was that it was such a painful thing for so many people who lost daughters, sisters, friends, lovers, and that it was glorifying the womens' deaths, and one person said, if that had been your daughter, would you want her up on the wall as part of an art show? I disagree that the artist was doing it simply to forward her career, she sounds genuinely empathetic to the murdered women, but does it go too far, is it too hard for family members? Is it really that different from something like the Vietnam memorial? I guess I have more questions than answers.

Don't forget that a majority of those women were natives so there is a lot of cultural sensitivity involved. Is Pamela Masik even native?

I really wish all these people who 'care' so much about these women after the fact cared enough to do something before they fell into a life of prostitution and drugs. Everyone likes to dump on the cops for not investigating these cases like they were 'suburban white girls' but the reality is people like that disappear every day for a 100 different reasons. There is a reason that Pickton (and Gary Ridgeway for example) went so long before they were apprehended.

Personally it is difficult for me to understand this decision because I think if it was my missing mother/sister/lover it would be incredibly important for this show to go on. I feel strongly that grief, although very necessary and in many cases almost unbearable, is selfish. And using grief as a basis for making decisions that hold others back- in this case the audience, possibly the missing women, even society in general- is inappropriate.

From what I've read, most of the families of the missing women were very much in favor of the show. Apparently, the artist spent a ton of her own money and told the families that she would not sell the pieces individually and that any money raised by them would go back into the community to help poor women.

It is sad that the museum is cowering. In doing so, they are examples of why Masik is doing this project to begin with --because society wants to ignore these women and pretend they never existed.

http://www.masik.ca/forgottenGallery-01.…

This post (from the comments section of the CBC article) poignantly sums up this issue:

IHaveASay wrote:Posted 2011/01/13
at 1:38 PM ET

I knew some of the missing women. I've seen Masik's paintings firsthand.

She handled these paintings with grace and compassion. She welcomed family and friends of the missing women into her studio while she worked. Any who wanted to come, could come and see them in private during the past 5 years. Any who did come were moved to tears, and all that I know who did also appreciated what she was doing.

These paintings are not individually for sale. They cost Masik several hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete due to the size (cost of materials, storing the canvasses, etc.) and she is committed to not receiving any profit from them. Any money's raised will go back into the community to help marginalized women. We (family and friends) were told the only way they will ever be sold is as an entire collection of 69 enormous paintings which basically means only a major museum, gallery or trust could ever afford to buy, store and exhibit them.

She was a successful artist before ever taking on this project. Her paintings sold for up to $30,000 each before this project. Masik may not have been well known in her hometown of Vancouver, but her work was already known and collected around the world.

I can't judge if she was right or wrong to do this project. But speaking as one who knows some of the faces on those canvasses, I'm grateful for what she has done and ashamed of MOA for giving in to a vocal minority who doesn't understand why Masik did this project and refuses to even learn about how or why it came into being. The people who oppose her project have claimed it's wrong because she is a "privileged white woman" - well she may be successful now, but she wasn't always. She lived in the DTES, she struggled to support herself and her child. She was/is one of us.