60 Over Sixty
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1. Micah Lexier
Micah Lexier is a Toronto-based artist whose activities include making, collecting and organizing. He has a deep interest in measurement, increment, found imagery and display structures. He has presented over 100 solo exhibitions, participated in more than 200 group exhibitions and has produced a dozen permanent public commissions. In 2015 Lexier was honoured with a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Lexier’s work is in numerous public and corporate collections including The British Museum (London, England), the Contemporary Art Gallery (Sydney, Australia), The Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa). Micah Lexier is represented by Birch Contemporary, Toronto.
2. Michael Gerry
Michael Gerry is a Toronto painter and printmaker and has been exhibiting since 1975. He began his studies at the Three Schools of Art in 1970 and continued at Central Technical School in the Special Art Program. He then painted with the guidance of Gerald Scott (portrait painter). Gerry has been teaching drawing and painting since 1984 where he taught at the Toronto School of Art and today teaches out of his studio and plein air workshops. His paintings and prints are in private, public and corporate collections in Canada, U.S.A. and Europe.
3. Isobel Harry
Isobel Harry is a writer and photographer who landed in Toronto in a bubbling cauldron of creative innovation in art, performance, music and style in the 70s, led by A Space, General Idea, Memo from Turner, Videocabaret, to the sounds of Rough Trade, the Viletones and Truths and Rights. The prolific photographic work inspired by those times, including ‘Fashion Burn’ in this “60 Over Sixty” anniversary exhibition of the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, has been published and exhibited widely, including by FILE, Toronto Life, Image Nation and at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Art Gallery of York University, among others. She lives and works on Manitoulin Island.
4. Harold Klunder
Harold Klunder is widely considered to be one of Canada’s most important painters. He was born in Deventer, The Netherlands in 1943 and immigrated to Canada in 1952. At 17 he left the family farm outside of Hamilton, Ontario to study art at Central Technical School in Toronto from 1960-1964 (most notably under the landscape painter Doris McCarthy who died in 2010 at 100). Upon graduating the young Klunder immersed himself in the Toronto art world as it moved from post-war abstraction into 60s Pop Art and beyond. He had his first solo show at Sable-Castelli in 1976. In the three decades since then Klunder has forged a unique vocabulary of forms to express his commitment to the self-portrait in particular and to the evocative possibilites of paint to evoke states of being. Keenly aware of art history and of the titans of Dutch painters who have come before him, from Rembrandt’s relentless self-scrutiny through to Vermeer’s quality of light to Van Gogh’s fevered impasto and Willem de Kooning’s early series of voracious women, Klunder embeds his influences into his own paintings, often monumental in scale and years in the making. To take in a Klunder painting is to become privy to the narrative – the excavation – of one painter’s lifelong engagement with this most storied of mediums, its profound history and its unmistakable immediacy, always unfolding now, standing outside of time, receptive to the present viewer’s gaze.
5. Pitaloosie Saila
Pitaloosie was born in 1942 on the southwest coast of Baffin Island near what is now the community of Cape Dorset. She spent her childhood years in various hospitals in Quebec and Ontario for treatment of tuberculosis. She learned English during this time, and recalls the difficulty she experienced in relearning her native language upon her return to Baffin Island in 1957. She is now one of the few of her generation who speak both English and Inuktitut fluently. Pitaloosie began drawing in the early 1960’s, and quickly established herself as a versatile and intelligent graphic artist. Over the years, she has become a familiar presence in the Kinngait Studios, and her work has been included in annual print collections since 1968. Since the late 1960’s, Pitaloosie has made frequent trips to southern Canada to attend exhibitions and conferences. In 1967, she spent several weeks in Toronto while her husband, the well-known sculptor Pauta Saila, participated in an International Sculpture Symposium. Subsequently, she has visited Halifax, Toronto, Ottawa, Kansas City and Vermont. Her work has been featured in solo drawing exhibitions, and in 1977, Canada Post issued a stamp depicting her print, Fisherman’s Dream. Her 1985 lithograph entitled In the Hills represented the Northwest Territories in the centennial celebration of the National Parks of Canada. Amnesty International, the international human rights organization, selected a drawing by Pitaloosie entitled Mother and Child to use for their 1990 Christmas card. She was also one of nine featured artists in the acclaimed exhibition Isumavut: The Artistic Expression of Nine Cape Dorset Women, which opened at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in the fall of 1994 and continues to travel to other venues. Pitaloosie’s husband, Pauta, passed away in Cape Dorset in June of 2009 at the age of 93. In 2004, both she and Pauta were appointed members of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts, in recognition of their life’s work and contributions to Canadian art.
6. Jane Buyers
Jane Buyers is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Waterloo and a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Her work includes sculpture, drawing, printmaking and commissioned public works. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally.
Jane has received a number of grants and awards and her work can be found in numerous public collections. She is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto.
7. Doug Guildford
Doug Guildford is a largely self-taught Canadian visual artist, born in 1948, in Shelburne County, Nova Scotia. Until recently he divided his time between his studios in downtown Toronto, and in Voglers Cove Nova Scotia, where he now lives full-time with his partner, writer Don Hannah. His practice is rooted in drawing. His work encompasses printmaking, painting, sculptural/installation projects and allows for obsessive crochet projects that spill from ongoing reflection and contemplation of the expiring offshore fisheries. He believes in the essential value and the ultimate futility of work.
8. Thaddeus Holownia
Thaddeus Holownia is a visual artist, teacher, letterpress printer and publisher. After a forty-one year teaching and administrative career in the Department of Fine Arts at Mount Allison University in Sackville New Brunswick, Holownia recently retired and now spends his time at his studio in Jolicure, New Brunswick. Holownia’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including The Nature of Nature, The Photographs of Thaddeus Holownia 1976–2016, at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; The Terra Nova Suite, a twenty-five year survey of his work in Newfoundland & Labrador at the Provincial Gallery (The Rooms) in St. John’s Newfoundland; 24 Tree Studies for Henry David Thoreau at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York.
9. Frances Patella
Born in Italy, Toronto based, Frances Patella’s work explores time, transience and transformation in the landscape. Patella incorporates paint and analog photography to suggest a temporal aspect to the representation of changing landscapes. During her childhood in Italy and during repeated visits, prescribed fires and ruins sparked her interest and she continues to use the ephemeral images of burning fields and forests. Patella’s work has been exhibited in solo, juried, group exhibitions and art fairs, including Art Toronto. Frances has received mid-career grants from the Ontario and Toronto Arts Councils, Best In Show and Purchase awards. She holds a BFA from York University and a B.ED. from the University of Toronto. Frances is a former Director of TOAF and former Chair of Propeller Gallery. Frances has taught Visual Arts and analog photography and coordinated numerous art exhibitions. She remains very active in the Toronto Arts community.
10. Andrew Cheddie Sookrah
Andrew Cheddie Sookrah is a Canadian artist living and working in Toronto, and member of Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour, Society of Canadian Artists (Lifetime, Mentor), Ontario Society of Artists, Portrait Society Of Canada. Sookrah is a raw colourist whose free brushwork is confident and powerful. His strengths can be seen in his strong sense of design, exquisite use of effective composition and confident presentation of bold colours. His is a masterful expression of the unity of nature. He was a contestant in the finals of Landscape Artists Of The Year Canada Competition; episodes can streamed on CBC tv GEM Documentaries.
11. Joanne Tod
Joanne Tod is an artist with an exhibition career spanning more than thirty years. Often engaging with social politics, Tod’s work, although in the tradition of realist painting, resonates with metaphor, allusion and alternate readings. Tod’s work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Ontario, the musée d’art contemporain and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her paintings are included in many corporate and private collections, and she has been commissioned to paint numerous official and unofficial portraits.
12. Dario Zini
Dario Zini, born and raised in Italy, has lived in various countries in Europe and United States. Has moved to Toronto in the late nineties and has been living in the GTA since. Dario has studied architecture in Venice, Italy and Newark, NJ. He holds a B. of Architecture and a MS from NJIT. Dario concentrates his photographic research on the human-made environment, particularly buildings and structures of the contemporary city. Among his topics of exploration are the issues of objective documentation versus personal vision, the physical aspects of the urban environment and the way it influences our perception of the world.
13. Gloria C. Swain
Gloria C. Swain has been in Toronto for over 30 years. She grew up in the South, where she experienced the unique trauma of being a Black person in a space so heavily structured within the caste system of Race. Swain has crafted her work around her unique experiences within the U.S. and Toronto alike. Swain’s work addresses Black mental health, notably how Black persons endure and grow from trauma along the lines of police violence, especially police violence against Black women, and other forms of anti-black oppression. Swain further advocates for the rights of seniors and elders as ageism is especially prevalent in a youth-obsessed society.
15. Arnold Machtinger
A self-confessed “creative soul” Arnold Machtinger’s photographic career has been a journey of discovery as he pursued the artistic exploration of new techniques. His familiarity with conventional photography quickly developed into a fondness for innovative techniques, such as Polaroid Image Transfers and digital capture and printing, that would allow him to broaden his horizons and allow him to capture images beyond the frame through a variety of mediums. As one of the early pioneers, since 1990, of digital printing, he is able to adopt technologies that marry photographic and digital to produce high quality fine art prints.
16. Tony Urquhart
Tony Urquhart certainly has had a long successful history as a Toronto artist. Tony’s work has been exhibited in Toronto galleries since 1959 up until recently. Some of the notable commercial galleries his work has been exhibited in over the last six decades include the Isaac’s Gallery, Moore Gallery, Bau-Xi Gallery, and James Rottman Fine Art in Toronto. The artist’s work has been included in museum exhibitions (including the AGO and the National Gallery of Canada) across the country and internationally with several public art institutions mounting solo exhibitions of his work.
17. David Thauberger
David Thauberger was born in Holdfast. He studied ceramics at the University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus, where ceramic sculptor David Gilhooly served as an early mentor, inspiring Thauberger and others to create art that was rooted in their own life experience and their own geographical region. He earned his BFA in 1971 and his MA in 1972 from California State University (Sacramento). He then studied with Rudy Autio at the University of Montana in Missoula, earning his MFA in 1973. Thauberger has become internationally known for his paintings of the vernacular architecture and cultural icons of Saskatchewan. His achievements were recognized recently when he was awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit. He was invested as a Member of the Order of Canada in 2008, is a recipient of the Queen’s Diamond Medal in 2012, the Lieutenant Governor’s Saskatchewan Artist Award in 2009 and is member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
18. Hugh Mackenzie
Hugh Mackenzie has been an important presence in the Canadian art scene for decades. He began his career as a technical artist (working on the Avro Arrow), and spent his professional career as an art educator (working at Ontario College of Art from 1968 until 1991). Mackenzie began as a high realist painter before turning more to abstraction. He switches easily between the figure and industrial landscape, from the representational to almost pure abstraction and from painting to his other great passion, etching.
19. Marco Sassone
Marco Sassone lives and works in Toronto. He has embraced international acclaim as a painter for over fifty years. His most poignant and enduring influences can be traced back to his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in the 1960s with painter Silvio Loffredo, himself a student of the expressionist master Oskar Kokoschka. The agitated brushstrokes and vibrant colours appealed to Sassone, offering the artist a foundation that has remained throughout his career. Sassone’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions, including those at National Academy of Design, New York (1977); Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California (1979); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (1988); Bernheim Jeune, Paris (1988); Museo Italo Americano, San Francisco (1994); Cloisters of Santa Croce, Florence (1997); Pietrasana Museum, Pietrasana, Italy (2003); San Angelo Museum of Fine Art, San Angelo, Texas (2014); Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto (2016); Columbus Centre, Toronto (2019). Many books and catalogues have been published about his work, including the volume “Sassone” (1979), written by art historian Donelson Hoopes. The artist was knighted into “The Order of the Merit of the Italian Republic” in 1982.
20. Jane Ash Poitras
Over her long, productive and acclaimed career, Jane Ash Poitras has taken viewers of her work down many different paths of discovery reflecting her own journeys in search of knowledge, inspiration and spiritual revelation. In the process her works have explored a wide range of topics ranging from Aboriginal history, culture and politics; the influence of plants on Indigenous cultures; the impact and influence of significant historical and contemporary high profile individuals. In all of her works she has been the storyteller, combining disparate idea and images to create works that express new ways of looking at the world.
She continues that storytelling in this exciting body of new work, focussing on, but not limited to, some of the most iconic and influential people in both the historical and modern worlds. Each work tells a story, sometimes obvious, sometimes obscure, expressing her unique perception of her world and the issues, elements and people that define it. What she is doing visually is to honour and continue the storytelling tradition of her ancestors. Born in the isolated Indian community of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, Jane Ash Poitras’ abundant talent and solid academic achievement have provided a solid foundation for her ongoing examination of the issues surrounding acculturation.
21. Carol Wainio
Carol Wainio is a painter living in Ottawa, Ontario; she was born in Sarnia in 1955. Her work combines the visceral and painterly with the discursive to create structures for discussion and contemplation. Wainio has exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Stedelijk Museum, the Venice Biennale, and the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna Bologna, to name a few. A seminal survey of work titled Carol Wainio: The Book, toured Canada between 2009 and 2014. In 2014, she was the recipient of a Governor General’s Award for Media and Visual Arts.
22. Jacques Descoteaux
My background is accounting, but I’ve been doing art for years, first in watercolour and pastel, now in oil & acrylic. I studied with artists in their studios and at TSA, OCAD and AGO. Career highs include a master class with Wolf Kahn in NYC, and art residencies in Ireland, & being at TOAF 5 times, and TAP twice. My work is inspired by the landscape of the North. But it goes beyond the landscape. It’s about memory, the impression left by a sunrise or a night sky, a brief glance at the clouds.
23. Robert Houle
Robert Houle is a Toronto artist and a member of Sandy Bay First Nation, Manitoba. Houle has been exhibiting internationally for over 40 years and taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design University for close to 20 years. He has written numerous important essays and monographs on contemporary First Nations and Native American artists and has curated ground breaking exhibitions including “Land Spirit Power: First National at the National Gallery of Canada”. The Art Gallery of Ontario is planning a touring, major retrospective of Houle’s work in 2021. Houle’s considerable influence as an artist, curator, writer, and educator has led to his being awarded the Founder’s Achievement Award from the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts (2020), two honourary doctorates, the 2015 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship (2003), the Toronto Arts Award (2001) and the Janet Braide Memorial Award for Excellence in Canadian Art History (1993).
24. Susan Card
Susan Card opened DISH GALLERY + Studio (2006-Toronto Distillery District) to make and exhibit her ceramics, plus works by others. She has participated in, curated or acted as a juror for over 150 exhibitions and published articles about ceramics in local/international publications. After university (University of Manitoba – B. H. Ec. – textiles, B.F.A. – painting, Sheridan College- ceramics) Card was part-time faculty at Sheridan College, Oakville, ON. and taught pottery classes for the City of Toronto. She is a past board member for TOAF, FUSION: The Ontario Clay and Glass Association, currently volunteers on the Collections Committee, Art Gallery of Burlington, and coordinates programmes for two pottery guilds.
25. Robert Bateman
“I can’t conceive of anything being more varied, rich and handsome than planet earth; its crowning beauty is the natural world. I want to soak it up, understand it … then express it in my painting.” Robert Bateman’s realistic paintings, featuring wildlife in its habitat, encourage the viewer to examine the natural world. His art reflects his commitment to ecology. Besides being one of Canada’s best known artists, he is spokesman for many environmental issues. His awards include 14 honorary doctorates and Officer of the Order of Canada. His artistic legacy is displayed at the Bateman Centre in Victoria, BC.
26. Alex Janvier
Alex Janvier, Denesuline, from the Cold Lake First Nations, Treaty 6 Territory, has been a professional artist for several decades. Janvier is renowned for his distinct curved lines and use of bright color combinations. His unique abstract style and his artistic ideas have blazed the trail for many First Nations and Canadian Artists.
27. Irene Frolic
Irene Frolic has been exploring glass for about 40 years. She has been one of the leaders in the international studio glass movement, helping to develop the art of kiln cast glass as a material for artistic expression by teaching workshops, lecturing and exhibiting all over the world. Irene Frolic, a graduate of the Ontario College of Art, past President of the Glass Art Association of Canada, maintains a studio in Toronto, Canada. She is a member of RCA, Royal Canadian Academy of Art. Her work is exhibited internationally and is to be found in many public and private collections.
28. Ben Mark Holzberg
Toronto photographer Ben Mark Holzberg has created an incisive body of work with a strong graphic sense prevailing in distinctive black & white and dazzling colour imagery. Collected widely, he has exhibited here and abroad and has received assistance from both The Canada and Ontario Arts Councils. Ben Mark is perhaps best known for the Rolling Landscape photo exhibit in Toronto Subway Car 5780, and for his masthead photos in NOW Magazine His editorial work has been described by critic John Bentley Mays as being particularly inventive. Often to be found at his day job freelancing publicity and advertising art for film and television, Holzberg is affiliated with The Shooting Star Photo Agency Los Angeles and The Canvas Gallery Toronto.
29. Chris Cran
Chris Cran is a painter living and working in Calgary, Alberta. He was born in Ocean Falls, British Columbia in 1949. Cran’s paintings exhibit a long-standing interest in the relationship between representation and abstraction, as well as photography and painting. Chris Cran’s work has been the subject of several major solo exhibitions in Canada and the United States within the past twenty-five years; of note was the survey exhibition titled Sincerely Yours from 2015 shown at the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Alberta.
30. June Clark
Best known for her photo etchings and sculptural assemblages, Clark’s practice excavates her personal experiences to investigate themes of black diasporic identity, exile and memory work. She began developing her early photography work through the Baldwin Street Gallery of Photography, co-founding The Women’s Photography Co-op there in the early 1970s. Since then, her work has been exhibited in Toronto, Oakville, Burlington, Guelph, Montréal, New York City, Paris, Kiev and Quito, Ecuador. Clark began making her large photo etchings in the 1980s, with Formative Triptych (1989) being amongst her most well known images from this period. In these works, Clark repurposes family photographs, snapshots and negatives from her own documentary work, juxtaposing them with texts recalled from her childhood or appropriated from literature. Commenting on this pairing, Clark has said: “I know I have violated the photos by adding text and by editing out parts of the images when I wipe the etching plates, but they aren’t about photography or printmaking. The images have become symbols of the people who have said these things to me.”
31. Ric Evans
Ric Evans is one of Canada’s preeminent abstract painters, having worked in the genre of geometric abstraction for the last forty years. Evans describes his practice as “orbital”, continuously referencing a central idea while bringing new observations and considerations to his work. Form and colour are combined in unique and playful combinations that highlight his approach of “informed intuition” inspired by his experiences and the natural world.
32. Owen V. Gordon
Owen Gordon is a Jamaican-born, Canadian artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture and collage. Gordon emigrated to Toronto in 1983 and has amassed a remarkably diverse body of work including figurative, abstract and environmental subjects. While nods to specific movements in art history demonstrate Gordon’s depth of knowledge and curiosity, the consistency throughout his work has been his passion and innate ability for storytelling. Gordon engages with both collective and personal histories, current events as well as people he has encountered or learned about. He then combines figurative and abstract elements to retell these stories with a striking use of colour, pattern and texture.
33. Johanna Householder
Johanna Householder’s interest in how ideas move through bodies has led her often collaborative practice, making performance art, audio, video, film and choreography at the intersection of popular and unpopular culture. As a member of the feminist performance ensemble, The Clichettes (with Louise Garfield and Janice Hladki), throughout the 1980s she helped establish lip sync as a viable medium for political critique. Her video collaborations with b. h. Yael, Frances Leeming, Geoff Pugen, and Judith Price have screened internationally. One of the founders of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, she has co-edited two books with Tanya Mars: Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian women (2004), and More Caught in the Act (2016). Her current work concerns the vexations of the anthropocene.
34. Tony Luciani
Tony Luciani has been a full-time painter for over 44 years, graduating from the Ontario College of Art in 1977 with honours, and continued his post-graduate study in Florence, Italy in 1978. Tony’s work has been exhibited worldwide. In 2014, Tony Luciani began to include photography as a means of his creative expression. His ongoing series depicting his aging mother with dementia, has garnered the artist many accolades and a multitude of prestigious awards. His painting, ‘The Dressmaker’ recently won the Figurativas 2019 International First Prize Award at the Museu Europeu d’Art Modern in Barcelona, Spain. The MEAM museum presently houses three of Luciani’s paintings in their permanent collection.
35. Colette Whiten
Colette Whiten’s work is intricately bound up with notions of the feminine in both content and medium. Using meticulous techniques like cross-stitch, beading and casting, she recreates images culled from media sources – and, more recently, her own documentation – to discuss power and political relationships.
36. Melanie Chikofsky
Melanie Chikofsky’s first artistic forays were in ceramics until she attended a specialized art program at the secondary school level, followed by studies at Sheridan College School of Design. Since 2000, she has been the Director and Lead Instructor at the Al Green Sculpture Studio and School. Chikofsky has been exhibiting since 1983, in group and solo exhibitions. In 2020 she was awarded the Established Fibre Artist award from The Mississippi Valley Textile Museum, in 2019, she was awarded a sponsored award for ”Relic I” by The Japanese Paper Place, and in 2008, Melanie was awarded “Best in Show Award” for “Threadbare” both from juried Ontario Society of Artists exhibitions. A short documentary about Melanie and her exhibition “Remains To Be Seen” was produced in 2019 by CBC the Exhibitionist. Her art practice is personally reflective, themed based and materially driven.
37. Otis Tamasauskas
Otis Tamasauskas, BFA, RCA is an artist printmaker and educator, who is recognized as an international printmaker. Otis was born in Terschenreuth Germany 1947, immigrated to Toronto Canada 1954. Graduated from the University of Windsor, Ontario, 1974, afterwards Otis worked at the Open Studio, Toronto, as a print artist, benefiting from the tutorage of Don Holman and Richard Sewell, eventually becoming a Director of Intaglio and Co-director of Lithography. Otis seeks out challenging print techniques, with a deft use of engraving, intaglio, lithography, photo, and woodcut distinguish his works. Otis has taught Printmaking as a sessional at McMaster University, University of Toronto, Scarborough College and for the past 33 years full time at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Otis has retired from teaching and is continuing to make printed works of art. Otis’s work is in many corporative and private collections, notably The National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Vancouver Art Gallery and the Room’s The Art Gallery of Labrador, Newfoundland. Otis has participated in many numerous workshops, and is recently back from Quito, Ecuador, demonstrating greener and safer methods of printing stone lithography.
38. Temma Gentles
Collaboration with Dorothy Ross, Photos: Thomas Nowack (left), Paul Kay (right), Winner of the Spertus Judaica Prize; Collection of the Spertus Museum (Chicago IL).
“A Torah scroll is usually dressed to suggest the male high priest, but the words “torah”, “wisdom” and “understanding” are all feminine nouns in Hebrew. And so Dorothy and I set out to dress the scroll as a Baroque Italian bride.”
The essence of all I do is bringing stories to life. Much of my practice is creating commissioned works for religious environments and uses. Increasingly I enjoy working with mixed media and collaborating with other artists and craftspeople. A moment of “inspired lunacy” led to Torah Stitch By Stitch, a project of profound engagement and education involving over 1500 people of all faiths in 28 countries. Half of this tapestry (which is the length of a football field) was exhibited at the Textile Museum of Canada in 2019.
39. Richard Mongiat
Richard Mongiat has been exhibiting his paintings/artworks in public galleries, commercial spaces, collective exhibitions and community based art initiatives for the last 30 years. The C Word – a look at the role of craft in contemporary art was curated by Mongiat for the Doris McCarthy Gallery (University of Toronto) in February 2012. Mongiat is also working with David Sylvestre on a history documenting Toronto’s artist collective’s movement called Collective City (http://collectivecity.ca/). In 2000 Mongiat started Loop Gallery (with Catherine Beaudette) in the Queen West Gallery District.
40. Nina Keogh
Nina Keogh Is a third-generation Puppetbuilder and puppeteer, whose career in television and film spans 50 years. She is known for shows Friendly Giant, Mr. Dressup and Today’s Special. She became a full-time visual artist in 2000 and has owned two galleries- one in Twillingate Newfoundland. She continues to consult, lecture at universities colleges and in her own workshops.
41. Alex Liros
I have returned to painting—watercolour painting—in 2016, at first with plein air landscapes, and then settled on painting flowers, found or bought. Back in the early 1990s I had a short but productive period of painting flowers in acrylic. Still life painting is a kind of return to my artistic beginnings at the Ottawa Municipal Art Centre (later the Ottawa School of Art) with its emphasis on life drawing and painting, and later drawing bones at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine. And looking, drawing, continued during my many long visits to Princess Margaret Hospital.
42. David Hlynsky
David Hlynsky is a noted photographer art professor. He has worked as an editor, publisher, designer and illustrator on a wide range of projects including musical theatre and public art. He was a co-founder of one of the first holography studios in Canada. He has recently published a photo album of 170 Communist era shop windows entitled, Window-shopping through the Iron Curtain published in London by Thames&Hudson. He is currently working on a new book entitled, The Focusing Appliance: fifty illustrated thought experiments on the nature of the photograph. He has been twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award.
43. Michael Snow
Michael Snow (b. Toronto, 1928) Live and works in Toronto, Canada Michael Snow’s internationally active practice includes work in sculpture, painting, photography, holography, installation, bookworks, video, film, music, sound and several public art commissions. Snow’s work is in many collections including Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Musée des Beaux-Arts (Montréal), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), Ludwig Museum (Cologne & Vienna), Tate (London), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
44. Ron Moppett
Ron Moppett is a painter living and working in Calgary, Alberta. Born in England in 1945, he emigrated to Canada in 1957. A brilliant colourist, Moppett stencils and distills shapes with oil, acrylic and Alkyd paint, creating complex “picture puzzles” that hold multiple layers of meaning. In 2015 his sculpture and installation work were the subject of a large survey at the Nickle Arts Museum, Calgary, titled Ron Moppett: Sculptur(al); and in 2020, he was featured in One New Work – Ron Moppett: Do You Remember/Snow & Stars, at Glenbow Museum.
45. Germinio Pio Politi
Germinio Pio Politi (born in 1953, Brindisi, Italy) lives in Toronto since 1980. An affirmed non-conformist, he is a painter, sculptor, performance and artistic installation artist who has always strived to be an artistic innovator. After his early classical studies in fine arts, he became involved in the European revolutionary art movements of the seventies, experimenting with various techniques. In the last three decades, Politi has focused on developing a new language of collage by recycling and deconstructing printed urban advertising posters, and reconfiguring them into works of art. He is a member and past President of the Ontario Society of Artists.
46. George Whiteside
George Whiteside’s post secondary education includes Sheridan College and OCAD. After graduating in1979 he was a founding member of YYZ gallery, an artist run center that still thrives today. This was followed by solo shows at Jane Corkin Gallery, Spin Gallery and most recently Fred Torres Gallery in N.Y. as well as group shows at the MOCCA, the AGO, the Power Plant, Stephen Bulger Gallery and recently at the Waterfall Mansion in N.Y. to name a few. He is in the permanent collection of the AGO, Hamilton Art Gallery and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography.
47. Anna Torma
Anna Torma has been producing large-scale hand embroidered wall hangings and collages since graduating from the Hungarian University of Applied Arts, Budapest, in 1979. Her latest exhibition: Permanent Danger is a touring show, mounted by the Textile Museum of Canada in 2020. Her works are in private, corporate and public collections. She is the recipient of the 2020 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts Saidye Bronfman Award and is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. She immigrated to Canada in 1988 and now lives in Baie Verte, New Brunswick.
48. Suzy Lake
Suzy Lake came to Canada in 1968 where she was among the early female artists to adopt performance, video, and photography to explore the politics of gender, the body, and identity. Lake’s early work was included in significant historic feminist exhibitions such as: WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution 1965-1980, a touring exhibition by Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2007-08); Identity Theft: Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, Suzy Lake – 1972-1978 (Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2007) and The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970’s: Sammlung Verbund collection (European tour 2014-2020). The Art Gallery of Ontario presented a full retrospective in 2014. In 2016, Lake was the recipient of both a Governor General’s Award for Visual Arts and Media and the Scotiabank Photography Award. Suzy’s work is represented by Georgia Scherman Projects in Toronto.
49. Barbara Astman
Barbara Astman belongs to a visionary group of artists who have continued to radicalize visual culture since the early 1970s by defining new ways of seeing. Over four decades, she has explored a wide range of photo-based media and produced work, which has received national and international recognition. She is represented in important public, corporate and private collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Deutche Bank, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Her artist’s archives are held in the E.P. Taylor Research Library & Archives, AGO.
51. Sandra Meigs
Sandra Meigs is dedicated to painting and to the possibilities of enchantment that painting presents through colour, form and imagination. She believes that the very authenticity of one’s experience offers proof that what is imagined when looking at a painting is as real as anything else that one experiences in the world. She has also inter-woven sculpture, film, sound, and other media in her works. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, where she taught Painting, Drawing and Integrated Media. Recent exhibitions include Room for Mystics, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Glass Ticker, Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto, and Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Painting at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Meigs won the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO in 2015. She resides in Hamilton, Ontario.
52. Toan Klein
I grew up about three miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Lake Ontario is what remains of an ancient sea. I often visit parks around Toronto where the fossilized remains of bygone creatures are easily found. Working with the constant roar of the furnace paradoxically reminds me of the water we come from and the continuum of life that I am part of. For an inner-city dweller, this is a powerful, humbling and cherished experience. Recently, I have been oil painting on canvas; mostly portraits. Selected Permanent Collections: Corning Museum of Glass Cooper-Hewitt Museum (Smithsonian Institute), New York, N.Y. Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Musée des Beaux Arts, Montréal, Quebec Museum of Civilization, Ottawa Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto
53. Gideon Tomaschoff
Gideon Tomaschoff was born in Israel and traveled extensively through Mexico, Cuba and Brazil before settling in Toronto. Educated in Beersheba as a mechanical engineer, he returned to school in Toronto to study painting at the Ontario College of Art in 1993.
In his travels through Central and South America, Gideon saw buildings that had been battered and stained by the elements, and by human use over time. The stone and adobe walls of the colonial town of Oaxana, Mexico, for instance, are painted with different colours layer upon layer. As time wears away the surface of a particular area, bright colours become muted, blue reveals a patch of ochre, or red paint reveals the soft bricky pink beneath its surface. Inadvertant collages bloom on every street.
It is in these rugged surfaces with their unintentional beauty, that Gideon finds the subject matter for his paintings. Rather than depicting a particular ancient facade with the specificity of a portrait, Gideon uses the wall as a metaphor, and one that has a breadth of subtlety and variation. He treats his canvases roughly, as the elements will beat against an old wall. Using unconventional materials, such as a builder’s knife and spatulas, Tomaschoff pushes his surfaces “to express something in every square inch”. He sees the walls he paints as witnesses to their external surroundings, acquiring the marks of time and experience. (excerpts from “Traceless” by Kate Regan)
54. John C. Taylor
John C. Taylor, RCA Contemporary Architectural Photography Raised on Vancouver Island, Taylor majored in photography at Ryerson. While a student, he contributed to The Open Gate – Toronto Union Station with Richard Bebout & Pierre Berton, to preserve Union Station from demolition. In 1975 he established Mount Allison University’s BFA Photography program. His work has been exhibited internationally in Paris, London, Berlin, New York, Rome and Tokyo. Parameters of Space solo exhibit was presented at Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum, following exhibits at Dalhousie University and A Space Gallery, Toronto. Though Canadian, Taylor was one of a dozen photographers selected to represent Texas Photography at Washington Project for the Arts. Awarded the Ingram Merrill Fellowship, Taylor’s Great Domes of Italy was purchased for the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa.
55. John Scott
John Scott is one of Canada’s most prolific and respected artists. For the last 50 years, Scott has been creating his signature, raw-edge drawings that act as social commentary on the dark side of politics, war and human nature. Scott uses childlike motifs in an intelligent and witty manner, often repeating characters such as the Dark Commander and Terrified Bunny, who represent evil and vulnerability in the human condition. In addition to drawing, Scott is renowned for his machine-hybrid sculptures. His Trans-Am Apocalypse, 1993, is a black-painted Pontiac Trans-Am with the Bible’s Book of Revelations etched into its surface.
56. Evan Penny
Evan Penny was born in South Africa in 1953, and immigrated to Canada in 1964. He lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. Penny is interested in the concepts of sculptural realism and how they have been influenced by classicism, romanticism, and by the advent of traditional and digital photography. Recent international exhibitions include: Evan Penny: Ask Your Body at the Chiesa San Samuele, Venice, Italy (2017); an the touring Evan Penny RE FIGURED at: Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany (2011); Museum Der Moderne, Salzburg Austria (2012); MARCA, Cantanzaro, Italy (2012); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2012-2013).
57. Max Streicher
Max Streicher is a sculptor and installation artist residing in Toronto. Since 1989 he has worked extensively with inflatable technology in kinetic sculptures and installation works. He has shown in museums and public galleries across Canada and internationally. He has completed several international site-related projects in such places as Taichung, Taiwan, Aachen, Germany, Madrid, Spain and Mumbai, India. Streicher presented his work at the symposium “Take a Deep Breath” hosted by the Tate Modern, London in 2007. His kinetic inflatable works are in the collections of museums such as the Albertina Museum, Vienna, The Hara Museum, Tokyo, Japan and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton.
58. Bruce Eves
Bruce Eves currently involves himself with conceptually-driven photo-based works. In the past his practice encompassed performance and curation projects in North American and across Eastern and Western Europe. He was assistant-programming director of the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC) in the late 1970s, and throughout the 1980s the co-founder and chief archivist of the International Gay History Archive (now housed in the Rare Book and Manuscript division of the New York Public Library). In 2018 Eves was the recipient of the Governor-General’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual and Media Arts; and in 2019 was ranked 26th on the Alt-Power100 list compiled by ArtLyst (UK). He lives and works in Toronto.
Website Video Potrait Bruce Eves in Polari – A flm by Peter Dudar
59. Charles Pachter
One of Canada’s leading contemporary artists, Charles Pachter is a painter, printmaker, sculptor, designer, historian, and lecturer. His work has been exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the McMichael Gallery. His murals of Hockey Knights in Canada can be seen in the College Subway Station in Toronto. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Chevalier of France’s Order of Arts and Letters, holds honorary doctorates from Brock, OCAD, Toronto, and Lakehead Universities. He is a recipient of the Queen’s Golden and Diamond Jubilee medals.
60. Ruth Abernathy
Ruth Abernethy spent 20 years working and managing prop departments in distinguished theatres across Canada and in the US. Her first bronze commission in 1997 invited distinctive commissions including Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Abraham Lincoln and Queen Elizabeth. She has over 50 installations across Canada and has installed and exhibited work in Ireland, USA, Australia, China, Japan and England. Ruth received an Honorary Doctor of Letters Degree from Wilfrid Laurier University in 2018 and was inducted into the Regional Hall of Fame in 2019.
Flavio Belli is an artist, curator, art consultant and art collector with a broad range of experience in the Canadian cultural community. He is the current Chair of the Al Green Sculpture Studio and School in Toronto. His artworks have been shown in over 50 solo and group exhibitions and form part of public and private collections including the National Gallery of Canada. Flavio served on the Board of the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition for 10 years and during that time was also a member of the Sculpture Selection Committee for the McMurtry Gardens of Justice. He was appointed by the Governor in Council to the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board in Ottawa from 2005 to 2012. Flavio was Director and Curator of the Carrier Gallery in the Italian community’s Columbus Centre from 1990 to 2005 and during that time he volunteered as an on-camera Arts Reporter on “Toronto Living”, for Rogers Television.
