The Caetani Centre strives to cultivate a vibrant, inclusive and diverse cultural centre by providing opportunities and programming that celebrate contemporary artistic expressions across all arts mediums and genres.
Our Mission
Caetani Centre cultivates a thriving centre for arts and culture by providing opportunities and programming for contemporary experiences in visual, literary, musical, performing, multimedia, and interdisciplinary art forms.
We provide artists with studio, exhibition and living spaces through our Artist- and Writer-in-Residence Programs (AIR, WIR) for regional, national and international artists and creative individuals.
We present and preserve the inspirational influence of Sveva Caetani through curating and exhibiting her artwork and telling her story of strength and resilience through heritage displays, programs and events.
We maintain a physical facility and grounds for the benefit of North Okanagan citizens and visitors from across Canada and around the world.
May 2026
Sveva Caetani: Her Life and Art
Sveva Caetani: Her Life and Art exhibition was co-curated by historian and fine and decorative arts specialist Adriana A. Davies, and artist and former Caetani Cultural Centre Chair aj jaeger. It draws on the former’s biography and catalogue raisonné titled Sveva Caetani’s Recapitulation Series: From Medieval Mysticism to the Space Age, published by Guernica Editions in 2026.
The exhibition features a group of paintings in the Recapitulation Series deal with the family trauma and how Sveva came to terms with it through a Jungian journey into her subconscious that allowed her to process the pain. The result is a number of compelling paintings featuring a range of symbolism that Sveva described as follows: “Most people are used to images… the surrealism of Salvador Dali… limp watches… pianoforte with breasts, or something like that… and they laugh at it, they don’t really take the symbolism very seriously. My symbolism has always been serious, and therefore, people find it frightening.”
…The paintings in this exhibition focus on the invented “personal mythology” of a forever-happy family that survived all of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The exhibit focuses on 12 of the 47 paintings in the series that most closely reflect the ways in which she transformed personal pain into compelling art…