Brackendale Art Gallery owner Thor Froslev has won a 2016 Community Achievement award.
Premier Christy Clark and Keith Mitchell, chair of the British Columbia Achievement Foundation, named this year’s 30 award recipients on April 27.
“All British Columbians are inspired by those who lead by example, lending their time and talents in their community,” Clark said in making the announcement.
Froslev is, among many other things, founder and owner of the Brackendale Art Gallery and the Brackendale Eagle Festival and Eagle Count.
“I feel good,” Froslev, 83, said with a hearty laugh. “I never thought that is going to happen…. It sounds very highfalutin.”
At a ceremony at Government House in Victoria on May 25, Froslev and other recipients will be formally presented their awards, a certificate and a medallion designed by B.C. artist Robert Davidson.
Mayor Patricia Heintzman said she met Froslev about 23 years ago on one of her first days in Squamish when she volunteered for the eagle count.
“He has a way of bringing people into his vision and having people feel part of it and then contributing to it,” she said. “What he has contributed to this community is so diverse and so fundamentally important to who we are and where we are going to go.”
Froslev said he will be attending with his wife, Dorte, as well as Heintzman and Brackendale costume designer and volunteer Glenne Campbell, who nominated him for the award.
“I love this community,” Froslev said. “I was just so lucky that I got myself situated in Brackendale.”
Campbell said she moved to Brackendale because of Froslev and his passion for the arts. She was a high school student in Calgary in 1972 when she read about an art gallery being built by a fellow in a place called Brackendale, she said. The fellow was Froslev, and the gallery was the Brackendale Art Gallery.
“One of the things in the story said that a lot of artists lived in Brackendale, in the community, and I said to myself, ‘That is where I should live,’” Campbell said.
In her submission to the award selection committee, Campbell stressed how Froslev “has extensively championed and elevated arts and culture in his community.”
The selection committee was made up of Abbotsford Mayor Henry Braun, Terrace Mayor Carol Leclerc and past recipients Victoria Dobbyn of Roberts Creek, Daphne Goode of Victoria and Christopher Seguin of Kamloops.
