She's one of the most important artists Canada has ever produced — the AGO pays tribute to Toronto's Joyce Wieland
'Heart On' celebrates Joyce Wieland, who was born in Toronto in 1930, and worked and lived in the city for much of her life. She received her solo exhibition at the AGO in 1987 and died in 1998, just shy of her 68th birthday.
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Toronto Sun
3 days ago
- Toronto Sun
WARMINGTON: New statue is turning heads while reminding that cancelling history cancels freedom
New nine-foot 'Moments Contained' bronze sculpture on display at the AGO in line with new trend of making statues cool again including ones of banished Sir John A. Macdonald Get the latest from Joe Warmington straight to your inbox Thomas J Price. Moments Contained, 2022. Bronze, height: 9' (274.4 cm). Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo by Handout / Art Gallery of Ontario It's a head turner! You are certainly not going to miss seeing this. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account Called Moments Contained, this nine-foot-high (2.7 metre) bronze sculpture on Dundas St. West at McCaul St. outside of the Art Gallery of Ontario, is Toronto's newest statue. 'A celebration of shared humanity, Moments Contained is one of popular British artist Thomas J Price's public sculptures that challenges assumptions about the purpose and expectations of monuments,' says the AGO, who unveiled it Thursday evening, adding it's 'an object of great beauty' that the artist hopes 'is a gesture he hopes can lead to greater empathy and connection.' The AGO describes this fictional woman with 'a serene expression' and 'her feet firmly planted on the sidewalk, she appears outwardly confident, but the hands she hides in her pockets are visibly clenched, suggesting a tension between her inner thoughts and outward expression.' Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Said Price: 'I want people to recognize themselves and feel valued.' Following years of tearing them down, statues are back in favour in Canada again. In June, the boarding around the Sir John A. Macdonald statue at Queen's Park were finally removed after five years, and just this wee,k Wilmot Township voted to restore its Prime Minister's Path, including putting back up its Macdonald statue in Baden. Security at the Sir John A. Macdonald statue at Queen's Park in Toronto. (JOE WARMINGTON/TORONTO SUN) But with a caveat. 'Relocating the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald to a more discreet area of the park, accessible by personal choice rather than public prominence,' is how they decided to do it. It won't be front and centre at city hall as it once was. They will put him back up, but he will be hidden. Toronto did the same thing with the British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill statue at city hall – moving him from Queen St. to the far corner of Nathan Phillips Square, where few would ever go. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Statue of Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald in Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Saturday July 26, 2025. (Joe Warmington/Toronto Sun) Photo by Joe Warmington / Joe Warmington/Toronto Sun/Postm It's the same approach they take at Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The monarchs and Macdonald statues are tucked away, way in the back of the property where few people ever walk, while imperfect Liberal prime ministers William Lyon Mackenzie King, Sir Wilfred Laurier and Lester B. Pearson are prominently displayed. But it's certainly better than having these historic figures in storage or even destroyed and disappeared like the statue of Egerton Ryerson, whose head was taken out of town and displayed on First Nation's land, but is now unaccounted for. A man stands on the defaced statue of Egerton Ryerson, considered an architect of Canada's residential indigenous school system, as it lies on the pavement after being toppled following a protest at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada June 6, 2021. Photo by CHRIS HELGREN / REUTERS None of these statues should ever have been removed or vandalized. They represent our history. This new one on Dundas St. West is up front and on display for all to see and comment on, and in a free society, this is a positive thing, which is what Price was going for. His works have created a stir in both Rotterdam and New York, and this is expected to be a talker in Toronto. The AGO said it's 'the first public artwork to be acquired by the museum's Department of Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora' that was 'made possible by the generous contributions of a group of donors, the majority of whom are from Toronto's Black and Caribbean communities.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Said Curator of Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora, Julie Crooks: 'With his monumental gestures, In Price creates space for discussion and for beauty.' Statue of Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier in Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Saturday July 26, 2025. (Joe Warmington/Toronto Sun) Photo by Joe Warmington / Joe Warmington/Toronto Sun/Postm Meanwhile, at noon on this Friday, Toronto is kicking off its celebration of 'Emancipation Month with Black Liberation Flag-raising' at city hall lead by Deputy Mayor Amber Morley, Chair of the Confronting Anti-Black Racism Advisory Committee who 'will raise the Black Liberation Flag tomorrow at Toronto City Hall as August is proclaimed as Emancipation Month in Toronto.' The city in a news release said 'the Black Liberation Flag will fly on August 1 at all Toronto Civic Centres, and the Toronto Sign (at city hall) will be lit daily through the month of August in red, black and green.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Statue of William Lyon Mackenzie King in Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Saturday, July 26, 2025. J(oe Warmington/Toronto Sun) Photo by Joe Warmington / Joe Warmington/Toronto Sun/Postm Mayor Olivia Chow has 'proclaimed August 1st Emancipation Day since 1998 and Emancipation Month in August since 2019' and also 'proclaimed the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015 to 2024).' Remembering and savouring our history is as important as trying to discourage those who want to cancel or rewrite history. Macdonald, Laurier, Ryerson, McGill, Dundas or whoever should not be judged for words or actions from their time by today's standards, but should be remembered for their contributions, while their legacies can be debated. Things seem to be on a better footing in this regard as more statues are going up and more are being reinstalled. Statue of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson in Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Saturday July 26, 2025. (Joe Warmington/Toronto Sun) Photo by Joe Warmington / Joe Warmington/Toronto Sun/Postm Special thanks need to go to Toronto lawyer Mark Johnson and his Save Our History group, the Canadian Institute for Historical Education, historian and author JDM Stewart and Wilmot Township Mayor Natasha Salonen who have all been working hard to not only restore Macdonald's name and historic place but restore the importance of history itself — good, bad, celebratory or not so pretty. The point is that statues across the country are better at getting conversations going than statues in storage sheds. The Sir John A. Macdonald statue at Queen's Park and the decision made in Baden are hopefully the beginning of a domino effect that will see Kingston, Picton, Montreal, Hamilton, Charlottetown and Victoria follow suit and put their statues back up as loud and proud as the AGO has done with this new towering one at the AGO. Read More World Sunshine Girls Canada Toronto & GTA Tennis
Toronto Star
15-06-2025
- Toronto Star
She's one of the most important artists Canada has ever produced — the AGO pays tribute to Toronto's Joyce Wieland
Starting next week, the Art Gallery of Ontario will pay tribute to one of Canada's great visionaries, an artist who not only became the first living woman to receive a solo exhibition at the AGO but whose ashes are buried just steps from the museum in Grange Park. 'Heart On' celebrates Joyce Wieland, who was born in Toronto in 1930, and worked and lived in the city for much of her life. She received her solo exhibition at the AGO in 1987 and died in 1998, just shy of her 68th birthday.
Globe and Mail
11-06-2025
- Globe and Mail
Unusual Lawren Harris painting showing in Nova Scotia to mark William Davis centenary
An unusual Canadian painting has made a sentimental journey to Cape Breton this spring, 100 years after the dramatic events that inspired it. Miners' Houses, Glace Bay, painted by Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris during the bitter 1925 miners' strike, is showing at the Eltuek Arts Centre, an artist-run cultural centre and gallery in Sydney, N.S., down the road from the mines. The painting is important to both Nova Scotia labour history and Canadian art history. It represents the last time Harris, renowned for his northern landscapes, painted an urban industrial scene. The Sydney exhibition is timed to the centenary of Davis Day, Nova Scotia's commemoration of miners who have died on the job. The day, marked annually on June 11 since 1925, is named for William Davis, a Cape Breton miner shot by company police during the strike. Miners' Houses has never before been shown in Cape Breton, but was exhibited in Halifax in 2004. It is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, which has lent it to the Eltuek for the occasion. Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond explores Indigenous masks that inspired Paris Surrealists When Harris visited Nova Scotia that spring, as part of relief efforts for the strikers organized as far away as Toronto, the miners had dug in, 'standing the gaff,' after the management of the British Imperial Steel Corporation threatened them with starvation. The artist had visited Nova Scotia in 1921 and been appalled by the poverty he saw in Halifax, where he had painted two views of wood-frame tenements. In 1925, he was equally shocked by the miners' working and living conditions in Glace Bay, and published an uncharacteristically illustrative drawing of an emaciated miner's wife and her children in Canadian Forum that summer. Strikes were rampant in the 1920s in the Cape Breton coalfields. Poorly paid for dangerous work, the unionized miners were captives of an employer who owned their houses and the local store. Davis's death occurred during a riot at Waterford Lake, where the striking workers had at one point seized the power plant that controlled the pumps that kept the mines from flooding. When the company retook the plant on June 11, it cut off the miners' electricity and water in retaliation. The miners marched to the power plant demanding the restoration of the utilities, and were met by company police on horseback who shot into the crowd, killing Davis. Unsung art dealer Berthe Weill, the first to sell a Picasso, finally gets her due His death became a rallying cry for better working conditions in Nova Scotia, and miners traditionally never worked on June 11 ever after. The last underground mine closed in 2001, and the province recognized the commemoration day officially in 2008. Harris had left Nova Scotia by the time of the riot, and though it would be tempting to say his painting is returning home, it is unclear whether he started the work in Glace Bay or, more likely, just sketched there and completed the painting in his Toronto studio. Warsaw's new museum of contemporary art offers a stark white contrast to the city's troubled history More abstracted than the Halifax tenements of 1921, the work comes from a period when Harris had all but ceased painting urban scenes. It presents a dour, rugged and geometricized view of the miners' housing. No people are in sight, but the houses stand in a row like a line of oppressed workers. They have also been compared to coffins. Only a ray of sunshine appearing in a small gap in moody clouds gives any sense of hope. Earlier in his career, Harris had often painted pleasant Ontario street scenes and also the slums of The Ward in Toronto, but by this point he had already travelled to Lake Superior and was increasingly only interested in the drama of landscapes. Miners' Houses, his final industrial scene, was also one of the last times he painted houses of any kind as he moved west and concentrated on views of the Rockies and the Arctic. The painting is being shown at the Eltuek Arts Centre until June 28 – alongside a billy club found in the woods after the 1925 strike.
