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Behind the scenes at the world's major art museums, the life of a curator can be thrilling, amusing, disappointing--but never boring. In these fifteen essays we encounter artists falling in and out of love, family tragedies, the creation of the Stanley Cup, the secrets of Tiffany, Antiques Roadshow, a rootless baroness, the design craze for aluminum, small Japanese boxes called kogos, watercolour sketchbooks of the Canadian north, a beautiful prayer room in Montreal, gondolas flying through windows in Venice, and Moscovites who love Goldfinger. Pepall's stories sparkle with clarity and leave one with a sense that art is an amazing, worthwhile, occasionally mysterious human activity. Archival black and white photographs and colour plates--including Edwin Holgate's Ludivine, one of the most beloved and recognizable Canadian portraits ever painted--make this book a must-have for art lovers, students, academics, museum-goers and readers interested in the role art plays in the creation of our lives.
The Canadian Handicrafts Guild broadened the definition of art and the artist in Canada. Linking decorative arts with home arts and handicrafts, the Guild consistently showed them together at annual exhibitions at the art gallery in Montreal and formed a permanent collection documenting old and contemporary crafts. The Guild women combined creativity and philanthropy, voluntarism and an entrepreneurial spirit, education and concern with quality, in a movement that provided income and recognition to craftspeople and a craft legacy to Canada. In Good Hands is alive with the interplay between art and social history, and the issues this dialogue raised at the time and those we bring to it now constantly overlap. It deals with noblesse oblige and the era's patronizing attitude to cultural difference, but shows how the Guild consciously fostered an inclusive national feeling by exhibiting and selling crafts of all Canadians on an equal footing. It also draws a much broader perspective of women's roles in shaping our culture than has been the norm in Canadian art history.
Integration of designing and making are presented here as the common ground between contemporary craft, architecture, and the decorative arts. This perspective offers a nuanced understanding of craft. A photo essay documenting the integration of craft and architecture at the Fuji Pavilion in the Montreal Botanical Garden is also included.
Hallelujah Time, Virgina Konchan's third full-length poetry collection--and the first to appear in Canada--delivers up poetry that is unlike anything being written today. Specializing in fast-moving monologues that track the vagaries and divagations of a mind in action, Konchan cuts our most hallowed cultural institutions and constructions down to size with surprising turns of language both theatrical and sincere. Hallelujah Time embraces a dazzling mix of idioms, registers, and tones in poems that compress everything they know into aphoristic, hard-boiled insights as arresting as they are witty. "My human desire," Konchan writes, "is simple: / to live on the perpetual cusp / of extremity." Hallelujah Time is a revelation.
Florence Carlyle (1864-1923), born in Galt, Ontario, emerged as one of the most successful Canadian artists of her time. Trained in Paris, she lived and worked in New York City and in Canada, cultivating a career as a popular portrait and genre painter. Known for her masterful use of colour, Carlyle's paintings are nuanced and perceptive portrayals of feminine spaces, the female figure, and women's domestic work.
At the turn of the twentieth century numerous Canadian architects, artisans and artists set out to modify the aesthetic and social environment through the integration of the arts. Painters produced murals; architects designed furniture; clubs formed to bring together writers, artists and architects; collectors and governments commissioned paintings, furnishings and sculpture for public and private buildings; photography rivaled painting; and crafts became applied design. Building on both the Beaux-Arts movement in France and the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain and the United States, Canadian art practitioners met the challenge of obtaining patronage - which had until then looked abroad -...
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This book presents the first overview of craft activity, as an integral part of Canadian culture between 1900 and 1950, and reviews the tone and focus of contemporaneous writing about craft. It explores the diversity of all aspects of craft, including makers, production, organization, education, and government involvement.
Depicting Canada’s Children is a critical analysis of the visual representation of Canadian children from the seventeenth century to the present. Recognizing the importance of methodological diversity, these essays discuss understandings of children and childhood derived from depictions across a wide range of media and contexts. But rather than simply examine images in formal settings, the authors take into account the components of the images and the role of image-making in everyday life. The contributors provide a close study of the evolution of the figure of the child and shed light on the defining role children have played in the history of Canada and our assumptions about them. Rather than offer comprehensive historical coverage, this collection is a catalyst for further study through case studies that endorse innovative scholarship. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, Canadian history, visual culture, Canadian studies, and the history of children.