Remembering Aganetha Dyck

Posted by Border Crossings on July 29, 2025

Aganetha Dyck was a Winnipeg-based artist born in a rural community in Manitoba in 1937, who lived the greatest part of her life in this prairie city but whose ideas, remarkable work and dedication to a particular kind of scholarship and art production soared world-wide — like the beings who were her primary subject and collaborators — the honey bee.

Aganetha Dyck died in July 2025 in Winnipeg, having contributed a vast and unique body of work which was exhibited internationally. With her humility and grace she identified the bees as collaborators and never claimed more authorship than they. To honour her reticence we can concede, but first gestures, the impetus and ideas are most certainly hers.

Since 1984, when Border Crossings was still called Arts Manitoba, this magazine has followed Aganetha Dyck’s generative path, with her photograph gracing that early cover. As her work moved from wool felted figures to preserved and canned buttons in jars stacked on larder shelves, to the first investigations with her insect collaborators, we have remained attentive, fascinated. We have not been alone in this and Aganetha Dyck’s work is in numerous major public collections including the National Gallery of Canada. the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Guelph and Confederation Centre in Charlottetown PEI.

What follows, in chronological order, are some of the pieces on Aganetha Dyck’s work published in Border Crossings.

Women’s Work: The Radical Domestications of Aganetha Dyck (1985)

Aganetha Dyck’s Mad Hatting (1987)

Bee-Work:// Aganetha Dyck’s Project-In-Progress (1991)

The Incredible Lightness of Bee-ing: An Interview with Aganetha Dyck (2000)

Hives of Productivity: Aganetha Dyck (2007)

Felt Feelings (2013)