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.
June 2026
Marlene Lowden
Marlene Lowden is an abstract oil painter whose work explores the quiet intelligence and resilient beauty of the natural world. Rather than represent specific scenes, Lowden seeks to evoke the felt experience of being immersed in nature: the hush of a mycelial network, and the rhythm of waves against the shore. Each painting is a reverent gesture, shaped by emotion, intuition, and ecology.
Originally trained in broadcast television, Lowden brings a strong sense of composition and visual storytelling to her large-scale oil paintings. A dedicated studio artist and teacher, she has exhibited widely across British Columbia and is a proud member of the Rise and Repaint network. Her “Blind Contour Homage” series, celebrating Canadian women artists, toured seven public galleries in BC. In 2021, she was named one of “28 Contemporary Canadian Artists to Know” by Create! Magazine. Her work has also been featured in Women United Art Magazine and Art Seen Magazine (UK). She lives and paints in Gibsons, BC, inspired by the coastal forests and ocean surrounding her.
Marlene is also a facilitator. Along with painter Marleen Vermeulen, she co-hosted several art and yoga retreats in Spain. She worked in partnership with Place des Arts in British Columbia and Art Girl Rising to produce videos to encourage people to create art at home during the early months of the pandemic. She recently taught an Exhibition course at the Vancouver Film School and also offers in person and online courses and retreats. She hosted a creative adventure in Morocco in the fall of 2023 and taught at the Federation of Canadian Artists in Peace River Chapter, the Vernon Community Arts Centre and the Gibsons School of Arts in the summer of 2025.
Cher Mark
Cher Mark is one of our long-term studio artists who makes dolls, silverware jewelry, ornaments, embroidery and more.
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…