Partners in Art is proud to support the Agnes Etherington Art Centre’s project LIMESTONE LEGACIES: A New Coat of Tradition taking place in 2025 – 2026. This project features artist Sheldon Traviss as curated by Emelie Chhangur.

Limestone Legacies: A New Coat of Tradition engages with the history and legacies of limestone in the City of Kingston by transforming it into lime-wash paint using Haudenosaunee pit firing processes. This semi-permanent commissioned artwork will cover the interior walls of the Etherington House, which will be transformed into a live-in artist residency, café, and community hub in Agnes Reimagined. While lime-wash paint is a historically accurate form of paint for Agnes Etherington’s own time (late 1800s), this project foregrounds Indigenous knowledge and methods to create a paint that is in dialogue with this colonial Georgian House—and its legacy—in ways that entangle Indigenous and settler histories. As we build Agnes Reimagined, we are actively transforming the traditions of this place by celebrating diverse forms of practice and acknowledging submerged cultural histories, literally (re)building our new facility by critically engaging our own history. Not only is this a transformation—or “re-storying”— of tradition, but this is also a project that values sustainability: we are using the salvaged materials from our old limestone facades to make something new, re-signifying them. This iterative and process-based way of working acknowledges historical continuums and entangles various world views toward possible new futures, where Indigenous and Western traditions live side-by-side as equals.

This commission is part of an ongoing transformation of Etherington House back into a “home” for Agnes Reimagined. LIMESTONE LEGACIES: A New Coat of Tradition will launch with our facility’s re-opening.