Art in Profile: Art and Architecture in Canada – Serie

Magic Off Main chronicles the life and art of Esther Warkov, a visual artist of Jewish heritage who lives in Winnipeg and paints in a surrealistic and postmodern style. It considers Warkov's art through an understanding of her life and the palpable effect her life as a Jewish woman growing up on the Canadian prairies has had on her art.By tracing the development of Warkov's art over forty years, Rasporich addresses aspects of biography, social and cultural history, and art history in a cohesive volume. This biography is not limited to the narrow discipline of art and art history. Rather, it is a contribution to the larger field of Canadian studies, including cultural studies, and social history.Prepared and written with careful consideration, Magic Off Main provides a rare glimpse into the personal insights and explanations of Warkov and is richly illustrated with forty illustrations and photographs.

Reta Cowley came to maturity as an artist in the late 1950s and early 1960s at a time when abstraction was on the ascendant and the Regina Five and the Painters Eleven were stars of the Canadian art scene. However, Cowley explored other directions, becoming a major contributor to the development of Canadian landscape painting after World War II. Reta Summers Cowley is devoted to the life and work of this often overlooked prairie painter.Terry Fenton has drawn from both his personal acquaintance with the artist and his own long career in the arts to provide an in-depth look at Cowley's contributions to Canadian art history. Known primarily as a watercolourist, Cowley is sometimes dismissed as a ""hobby painter"", but she was a vital and influential part of the thriving arts community on the prairies for over three decades. Her inspiration came from the landscape around Saskatoon, and she painted primarily on location for her entire career.Reta Summers Cowley provides a critical analysis of Cowley's work from the 1940s through the early 1990s, placing it in the context of the popular influences of the time and of modernist painting in general. Also included is a section titled ""Cowley on Cowley"", which offers an uncensored glimpse of Cowley's own thoughts on her work and practice through interviews, personal diary entries, and study notes.

In the past decade, Jane Ash Poitras, a First Nations woman from northern Alberta, has emerged as one of the most important Canadian artists of her generation. Raised by a German widow who powdered her dark skin and tried to make her straight hair curl, Poitras did not begin to fully explore her indigenous roots until adulthood. Seeking out her extended family and participating in profound cultural experiences, she began to discover the side of herself that she was denied as a child. At the same time, she made a commitment to her art.With the opportunity to pursue a masters degree at Columbia University in New York, Poitras was at the centre of the North American contemporary art scene. Together, these dual influences shaped Poitras unique style, one that combines representational strategies of postmodern art - collage, layering, overpainting, incorporation of found objects - with a deep commitment to the politics and issues common to indigenous peoples.Cultural Memories and Imagined Futures situates Poitrass work in the national context of Canadian First Nations art during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the period when she began to receive wide recognition. It is the first book-length study to examine Poitrass career as a whole, recounting her development as an artist, participation in major exhibitions, and recognition as a significant Canadian and international artist. Along with detailed analyses of specific artworks, Pamela McCallum has also compiled the most extensive bibliography of writings on Poitras to date.

This unique look at Calgary architect Jeremy Sturgess's creative career is presented as a boxed set of nine portfolios in a print run of only 750 copies.Governor-General award winning architect Jeremy Sturgess recently celebrated thirty years in practice in Calgary, where he has been based his whole career. During that time, Sturgess has made a major contribution to transforming the architectural face of the city, from individual houses to large-scale public projects such as the Calgary Water Centre, the Grand Theatre, and Calgary's most recent downtown LRT stations. Full Spectrum provides a comprehensive and multifaceted examination of Sturgess's architecture and urban design and assesses his contribution to Canadian architecture generally and Calgary architecture in particular. Editor Geoffrey Simmins has gathered perspectives from a number of individuals with whom Sturgess has enjoyed long-term professional relationships - an artist, an urban designer, an architect colleague, an architectural critic, and a journalist. Along with reflections on Sturgess's personality, philosophy, and creative growth, these contributors provide in-depth discussions of a number of Sturgess's most celebrated projects. Simmins himself has drawn on Sturgess's papers and several personal interviews to craft an insightful introduction to the volume.Strikingly illustrated with architectural line drawings and with photos by award-winning photographer Robert Lemermeyer and featuring an innovative design that facilitates panoramic, multi-paged visual perspectives, Full Spectrum lives up to its title, both in reflecting Sturgess's well-known affinity for vivid colours and in expressing the full range of his remarkable creative odyssey.

John Snow was a farm boy who played the violin, a navigator for the Royal Air Force in enemy skies, a student of Henry Moore and British modernism, a loans officer at the Royal Bank of Canada, a lithographer . . . and an animateur of the arts in Calgary.So begins Elizabeth Herbert's intriguing study of a vital and influential figure in the cultural development of Calgary and a pioneer in the art of printmaking in Canada.Although virtually everyone in Calgary's art community is familiar with the work of John Snow (1911-2004), there has never been a full-scale exhibition of Snow's art in his hometown, nor a monograph on the subject of his work. Yet there is evidence in plain sight that he was an artist of great power and individuality, whose work was shaped by the local and international literary avant-garde in ways that challenge conventional views of Alberta's art history.Interested in art and music from an early age, Snow was already established in a banking career when, after his service in the Second World War, he decided to become a serious artist. From 1947 to 1949 he studied life drawing under Maxwell Bates, sparking a rich creative and personal relationship that would continue until Bates's death in 1980. In 1953, Snow and Bates salvaged two lithographic presses from the scrapyard, and Snow began to cultivate the art of printmaking. Motivated by his desire to make art more affordable and accessible, Snow become Alberta's premiere printmaker, producing over 400 lithographs of his own work and for artists such as Bates and Illingworth Kerr, while also excelling in a variety of other media, including oils, watercolour, and sculpture.Deftly integrating the artist's archived papers, interviews with surviving contemporaries, and publications of the period, Herbert gives us access to Snow's rich-hued, varied, and venturesome artistic vocabulary and reveals the uniqueness of his approach to Modernism. He was esteemed as a mentor to many, and acknowledged as a pioneer printmaker. In our time, the significance of his art has just begun to be measured.

Eric Cameron is a major contemporary Canadian artist. Born in 1935 in Leicester, England, he arrived in Canada in the 1970s and has taught at the University of Guelph, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and at the University of Calgary. Over the years Cameron has also continued to work in his primary medium, painting, but moved from traditional figuration to a highly conceptual practice with both his process paintings and his ""thick"" paintings. He has also expanded into video and has written a great deal about his work. His inspired teaching and unusual art have been recognized with major awards, including the Victor Lynch-Staunton Award (1993), the Gershorn Iskowitz Prize (1994), and the Governor General's Award (2004).Despite Cameron's prominence, much of the writing about him to date, primarily essays in exhibition catalogues, is by the artist himself. Cover and Uncover thus makes a major contribution to the field as it explores in depth Eric Cameron's art and philosophy. The book is composed of four essays, each covering a different aspect of Cameron's art, starting with Peggy Gale's analysis of his writing, then turning to Ann Davis's consideration of his process paintings and his philosophy, moving to Diana Nemiroff's review of his videos, and concluding with Thierry de Duve's observations on his Thick Paintings and his blind rejection of chance. The essays, though written independently, resonate with each other so that the reader comes away with a full picture of a complex artist, his life, his thought, his art production, and how these elements inform each other and have evolved through time. The expert commentary here, richly illustrated with Cameron's works in multiple media, provides a vital and long overdue critical lens through which to view this important artist.

J. B. (Jack) Taylor (1917-1970) was an important figure in the history of Banff and western Canada's artistic community. Inspired by the locale, Taylor spent his career striving to depict the idea of the mountain, moving over time from traditional representations of nature to an intuitive perception of the essential elements of landscape: rock, water, and sky. Always, he sought to capture his ideas through the development of a new visual language. He applied this new vernacular to a range of studies encompassing portraiture through to other landscapes.Filled with images of his work and photographs of his life as an artist and teacher in western Canada, this book is the first to focus completely on J.B. Taylor, his importance to the western Canadian and Banff artistic communities, and his role in the transition from traditional, eastern, North American and European landscape ideals and technique to a more abstract representation and the formation of a new aesthetic of the wilderness based on the mountains of the West.

Artist. Activist. Curator. Joane Cardinal-Schubert was a phenomenal talent. Her work recognizes the social and political ramifications of lived Indigenous experience, exposing truths about history, culture, and the contemporary world. She was a teacher and mentor, supporting those who struggle against the legacies of colonial history. She was an activist for Indigenous sovereignty, advocating for voices that go unheard.Despite significant personal and professional successes and monumental contributions to the Calgary artistic community, Cardinal-Shubert remains under-recognized by a broad audience. This richly illustrated, intensely personal book celebrates her story with intimacy and insight.Combining personal recollection with art history, academic reading with anecdote and story, The Writing on the Wall is a crucial contribution to Indigenous and Canadian art history. Cardinal-Shubert's work leads the conversation, embracing the places where the personal, the political, and the artistic meet.

Innovative textile-based artwork exploded across the Canadian Prairies in the second half of the twentieth century. Melding craft traditions with modern and modernist movements in art and theory a diverse body of creators opened a beautiful new chapter in textile art.Prairie Interlace brings together some of the most important scholars of craft in Canada to examine the work of forty-eight artists working with textiles from the 1960s to the 2000s. Recapturing and recording lost histories, this book explores both artists working with textiles and centres of textile study and production, paying special attention to the contexts in which artworks were produced. Indigenous scholars, experts in textile techniques, and experts on the Canadian Prairies provide fascinating insight into an artistic movement which, until now, has been nearly undocumented.Featuring beautiful full-colour images of textile works, many of which have never before been photographed for print, Prairie Interlace provides an opportunity to discover a fascinating movement which has not received the attention it deserves and invites further investigation of this rich period in Canadian art history.Developing from the travelling exhibition of the same name, Prairie Interlace is a collaboration between Nickle Galleries, University of Calgary in Calgary, AB and the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, SK.

Innovative textile-based artwork exploded across the Canadian Prairies in the second half of the twentieth century. Melding craft traditions with modern and modernist movements in art and theory a diverse body of creators opened a beautiful new chapter in textile art.Prairie Interlace brings together some of the most important scholars of craft in Canada to examine the work of forty-eight artists working with textiles from the 1960s to the 2000s. Recapturing and recording lost histories, this book explores both artists working with textiles and centres of textile study and production, paying special attention to the contexts in which artworks were produced. Indigenous scholars, experts in textile techniques, and experts on the Canadian Prairies provide fascinating insight into an artistic movement which, until now, has been nearly undocumented.Featuring beautiful full-colour images of textile works, many of which have never before been photographed for print, Prairie Interlace provides an opportunity to discover a fascinating movement which has not received the attention it deserves and invites further investigation of this rich period in Canadian art history.Developing from the travelling exhibition of the same name, Prairie Interlace is a collaboration between Nickle Galleries, University of Calgary in Calgary, AB and the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, SK.

Au cours de la deuxième moitié du vingtième siècle, un foisonnement remarquable d'œuvres textiles novatrices s'est produit dans les Prairies canadiennes. Mêlant traditions artisanales, mouvements de l'art moderne et moderniste et approches théoriques, un groupe de créateurs d'origines diverses ouvrent alors un magnifique chapitre de l'art du textile. Prairies entrelacées, qui réunit certains des chercheurs les plus importants dans le domaine de l'artisanat au Canada, étudie les œuvres créées par quarante-huit artistes entre les années 1960 et 2000. Ayant retrouvé et catalogué cette histoire oubliée, cet ouvrage s'intéresse tant aux artistes de la fibre qu'aux divers centres d'études et de production textiles, s'attardant en particulier aux contextes de création de ces œuvres. Chercheurs autochtones, experts des techniques textiles et des Prairies canadiennes proposent une plongée fascinante dans un mouvement artistique qui n'a pratiquement pas été documenté jusqu'à présent. Avec plus de soixante magnifiques illustrations couleurs d'œuvres textiles, dont un grand nombre n'a jamais été photographié, Prairies entrelacées ouvre une fenêtre sur un mouvement fascinant qui, n'ayant jamais reçu l'attention qu'il mérite, encourage la recherche dans cette riche période de l'histoire de l'art au Canada. Poursuivant le succès de l'exposition itinérante du même nom, l'ouvrage Prairies entrelacées est une collaboration entre les Nickle Galleries de l'Université de Calgary (Alberta) et la MacKenzie Art Gallery de Regina (Saskatchewan).