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Create AccountThis article was originally published in Maclean’s magazine on June 24, 1996. Partner content is not updated.
In his blue smoking jacket, white sneakers and sandy-grey muttonchop whiskers, Clive Smith bears an eerie resemblance to one of his company's own creations.Ulrich “Fred” Herzog, photographer, teacher (born 21 September 1930 in Bad Friedrichshall, Germany; died 9 September 2019 in Vancouver, BC). Fred Herzog was a professional medical photographer and a photography instructor at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. He is best known for his colour photographs of Vancouver street scenes, which documented working-class neighbourhoods and the downtown before they were transformed. His use of colour film was unusual for a fine arts photographer, and his work was largely overlooked for years. His first solo show — at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007, when he was 76 — received widespread acclaim.
Zacharie Vincent, known as Telariolin, was an Aboriginal artist (born 28 January 1815 in the village of Jeune-Lorette, Québec — formerly Village-Huron, today the Wendake Reserve; died 9 October 1886 in Québec City).
Arthur Goss documented the poor living conditions of immigrant families and the impact of poverty on the health and welfare of children in impoverished areas of Toronto like St. John’s Ward for the Department of Public Health.
Akeeaktashuk, sea hunter, sculptor, storyteller (b at Hudson Bay, near Inukjuak River, Qué 1898; d at Craig Harbour, NWT 1954). Akeeaktashuk was a jolly, robust and outgoing man with an astonishing talent for observing and keenly portraying humans, animals and birds in stone and ivory.
William Ronald Reid, sculptor (born 12 January 1920 in Victoria, BC; died 13 March 1998 in Vancouver, BC). An internationally recognized Haida artist, Bill Reid is frequently credited with the revival and innovative resurgence of Northwest Coast Indigenous arts in the contemporary world. (See also Contemporary Indigenous Art in Canada.)
Vivine Scarlett, dancer, choreographer, administrator (born in London, United Kingdom). Vivine Scarlett is the founder, executive director and curator of dance Immersion, a Toronto-based organization that produces, presents and supports dancing of the African diaspora. She is also an award-winning choreographer and a renowned instructor. Scarlett has received a K.M. Hunter Artist Award for dance from the Ontario Arts Foundation, the Muriel Sherrin Award from the Toronto Arts Foundation and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Dance Ontario.
Arthur Lismer, painter, educator (born 27 June 1885 in Sheffield, England; died 23 March 1969 in Montréal, QC).
Guido Nincheri, stained glass artist (b at Prato, Italy on 29 Sept 1885; d at Providence, Rhode Island on 1 Mar 1973), was possibly the most prolific religious artist in Canada during the 20th century. His stained glass and decorative work graces innumerable churches across the country as well as many New England states.
Armenian-Canadian photographer Malak Karsh was best known for his photographs of Canada, and of the Ottawa region in particular. His 1963 photograph of a tugboat bringing logs up the Ottawa River, with the Library of Parliament in the background, was featured on the reverse of the $1 banknote first issued in 1974. Karsh amassed perhaps the most comprehensive visual record of Canada in existence. He also founded the Ottawa Tulip Festival and was the younger brother of famed photographer Yousuf Karsh.
Lynne Cohen, photographer, artist, sculptor, printmaker, filmmaker, teacher (born 3 July 1944 in Racine, Wisconsin; died 12 May 2014 in Montreal, QC). Award-winning photographer Lynne Cohen was perhaps best known for winning the inaugural $50,000 Scotiabank Photography Award in 2011. She also won the Canada Council for the Arts’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award in 1991 and a Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts in 2005. Her work focuses on everyday interior spaces and how changes in lighting and framing alter how the viewer perceives these environments. She was also a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa from 1974 to 2005.
Anik Bissonnette, OC, CQ, ballerina, arts administrator (born at Montréal 9 Feb 1962). Québec's best-known ballerina, Anik Bissonnette is renowned for her exceptional musicality, purity of line and extraordinary balances, and for using her technical assurance to plumb exciting emotional depths. After garnering wide acclaim in many performances with Louis Robitaille, she was a principal dancer at Les Grands Ballets Canadiens (LGBC) from 1989 to 2007 and made annual appearances at Montréal's Gala des Étoiles from 1983 until 2006. She was artistic director of the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur from 2004 to 2014, and has been artistic director of the École supérière de ballet contemporain de Montréal since 2010. An Officer of the Order of Canada and a Chevalière of the National Order of Québec, she has received the Prix Denis Pelletier and the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Whether the subject is the nativity scene or Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Nincheri's works are evocative portrayals of well-known biblical stories. Although he received his art education in Italy, his talents flourished in Canada, where he arrived in 1914.
Andrea Nann, dancer, choreographer, dance educator, artistic director (b at Vancouver 20 Sep 1966). Andrea Nann's interest in using dance to explore and express human experience stems from her youth, growing up as the youngest child of social workers.
The following article is part of an exhibit. Past exhibits are not updated.
Driven to overcome histories of prejudice and marginalization, as women and as people of African descent, Black women are among Canada’s most innovative artists. With their fingers on the pulse of this multi-tasking, multi-disciplinary, 21st-century culture, the 15 dynamic artists featured in this exhibit — a mix of poets, playwrights, filmmakers, musicians and visual artists — refuse to be limited to one medium or style.
Award-winning poet Dionne Brand is also a novelist, filmmaker and influential professor, while Lillian Allen thrives as a dub poet, declaiming her verses to reggae accompaniment. trey anthony is a comedian as well as a ground-breaking playwright and screenwriter. All of these women and the many others below are also, in one way or another, passionate activists and committed advocates who are deeply involved in their communities.
Peter Jennings was nervous. Inside the rehearsal hall of Ottawa's National Arts Centre, the famed newsman was pacing as he waited to run through his lines as narrator of a special Feb. 21 benefit performance of the opera The Merry Widow.
Prior to the advent of distinctively Canadian modernists like Tom Thomson, members of the Group of Seven, Emily Carr and David Milne in the 20th century, Canadian painting closely followed conventional, academic European models and tastes.
Norval Morrisseau (called Miskwaabik Animiiki in Anishinaabemowin, meaning “Copper Thunderbird”), CM, artist (born 14 March 1931 or 1932 in Northern Ontario; died 4 December 2007 in Toronto, ON). Morrisseau was a self-taught artist of Ojibwe ancestry. He is best known for originating the Woodland School style in contemporary Indigenous art. His deep spirituality and cultural connections guided his career, which spanned five decades. Morrisseau is considered a trailblazer for contemporary Indigenous artists across Canada.
Alex Cameron, visual artist (born 1947 in Toronto, ON). Alex Cameron is broadly recognized as one of the most distinguished contemporary heirs of the Group of Seven, Jack Bush, and the Painters Eleven.
Winner of the Sobey Art Award in 2006 and included in prestigious international exhibitions such as Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and in collections like that of the National Gallery of Canada, Annie Pootoogook was born into a family of accomplished Inuit artists. She is the daughter of graphic artist Napachie Pootoogook and printmaker and carver Eegyvudluk Pootoogook, and is the granddaughter of Pitseolak Ashoona. Her uncle was Kananginak Pootoogook.
