Canadian Art Research Articles

Including the Inclusive: An Online Conversation with Col Cseke, Hope McIntyre, Majdi Bou-Matar, and Kate Rubin

The landscape of Canadian arts funding is rapidly evolving to embrace new criteria that values greater diversity, equity, and community impact. These elements are often found to be at odds with long-held standards of professionalism and artistic excellence. Representatives from four Canadian companies convened for an online forum to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of running companies that often lie apart from conventional professional theatre practices.

Fed by Spirits: Mamâhtâwisiwin in René Highway’s New Song . . . New Dance

Fed by Spirits: Mamâhtâwisiwin in René Highway’s New Song . . . New Dance June Scudeler (bio) GAY WOODS CREE PLAYWRIGHT Tomson Highway’s much-analysed semiautobiographical novel Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998) chronicles his and his younger brother René Highway’s1 experiences as children in northern Manitoba, in residential school, and as artists in Winnipeg and Toronto. However, scholars have written little about Highway’s own artistic practices as a modern dancer and choreographer before his AIDS-related death in 1990 at age thirty-five. Highway is a crucial figure in Indigenous performing arts in Canada who brought together a still-active community of Indigenous performers. I explore how Highway used his mamâhtâwisiwin2 or spiritual power, talent, or magic,3 particularly his experiences with “intense animal [caribou] energy when [he] was very young,”4 throughout his artistic and personal life to create new traditions. Although Highway was forced to attend Guy Hill residential school, three hundred miles south of his home in northern Manitoba, he became a talented dancer despite aggressive assimilation and colonisation to “develop [his] potential in . . . dance from within the colonial violence that [was] inflicted sexually on [his] bod[y].”5 The relative obscurity of Highway’s papers and videos of his performances means that his work is largely unknown. He receives only brief mention in dance scholar Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories, although he was one of the first Indigenous choreographers in Canada to reflect a nation-specific, in this case, Woods Cree, sensibility in his work. Tomson Highway refers to his younger brother as the “Che Guevara of the native community. The odds against him would have crushed many men. He made an impossible leap”6 for Indigenous arts in Canada. He also inspired the early career in theater and in music of Tomson Highway, who wrote the role of the gender-bending Nanabush in the canonical play The Rez Sisters specifically for Highway. Dance is a way of resisting colonisation, but more important, a way of centring Indigenous language, stories, and traditions for contemporary Indigenous people. Two-Spirited7 scholar Qwo-Li Driskill affirms that “if we can find ways to kinaesthetically know historical trauma, power and oppression, [End Page 1] we can more deeply understand the nature of our oppression and the impact of colonization on our lives and our communities.”8 However, Driskill doesn’t want to frame Indigenous peoples as only reacting to trauma and to the history of colonisation as they stress that the “body is also a central site of healing and resistance.”9 Highway’s insistence on embodiment of both colonial violence and Woods Cree ways of knowing—encompassing epistemologies, histories, stories, language, spirituality, legal systems, and artistic practices—in the 1970s and 1980s Canadian performing arts scene made him a path clearer for other Indigenous artists. His choreography, particularly in New Song . . . New Dance (1988), reminds us that bodies are not merely physical entities but are “sites of both colonized conflict and passionate decolonization.”10 He admitted that he became upset when people think of his work as “native dancing with modern dance stuff thrown in,” which he found too predictable.11 He wanted to Indigenise modern dance because “of our background and what we’ve been through,”12 including residential school. While Highway excelled at his chosen art form, he appeared to have an uneasy relationship with Western dance. Like many Indigenous dancers, he believed that connection to other Indigenous peoples was of the utmost importance. He describes his experience performing at the 1976 Association for Native Development in Performing and Visual Arts conference as a sharing of spirit: “While I was dancing I felt as though I was touching each one of them individually yet all of them together.”13 Indigenous performance counteracts official histories by “looking at [how] performance as a retainer of social memory engages history without necessarily being a supporter of history.”14 Plains Cree new media artist Archer Pechawis concurs: “The performance space becomes part of the moccasin telegraph: a gathering place, a communal council fire. Grievances are aired. Relations are shown.”15 Highway’s...

Disability Arts and Equity in Canada

A national survey of Deaf, mad, and disability arts in Canada reveals a clear relationship between the politics of disability theatre and higher levels of equity. However, while gender equity and diversity are extremely high in the disability arts domain, disability equity remains far too low.

You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet: An Analysis of Depictions of Canadian National Identity in the Juno Awards 2014 Broadcast

With changing dynamics of political communication merging education and information and giving rise to celebrity politics, entertainment media is now playing an integral role in creating a cultural context for individuals, especially young people, to become politically active. The Juno Awards 2014 broadcast presents an excellent opportunity for analysis of changing forms of political communication and celebrity politics in the Canadian context. This becomes especially true when recognizing the origins of the Juno Awards, with the creation of the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS) was designed to celebrate Canadian arts and culture on a national scale, but has evolved over the decades to become more focused on music promotion and commercial profitability than fair and equal artistic representation. For this study, both qualitative and quantitative methods were combined to measure the most prominent features of Canadian national identity: multiculturalism, gender egalitarianism, the diffident and unpatriotic citizen, and Canada as a peacekeeping nation.

A Comparison of Canadian and American ART Law

A Comparison of Canadian and American ART Law

Toronto Museums Span Gamut From Head to Toe

Whether you are of a mind to visit an exhibit that documents a Jewish photographer’s view of a World War II Polish ghetto or one that shows how shoes reflect culture and history, Toronto’s museums are bound to enlighten.

Crossing the Cobequid: Meeting Places/Lieux de rencontre

Canadian studies has long served as meeting for disciplinary approaches. As this theme issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies demonstrates, Canadian studies continues to offer tremendous potential for interdisciplinary connection and co-operation. The essays assembled here were originally presented as papers at conference jointly organized by the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University and the Gorsebrook Research Institute at Saint Mary's University in September 2013. Places: An International Canadian Studies Conference/Lieux de rencontre: Colloque international en etudes canadiennes brought together academics, artists, and authors interested in placebased cultures and in creative and scholarly collaboration and production; they came from across Canada and around the world. As special feature of the conference, participants travelled from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Sackville, New Brunswick, crossing the Cobequid Pass and tracing the movements of Indigenous peoples through the millennia. In recognition, we broke the journey at the Glooscap Heritage Centre (now known as the Millbrook Cultural and Heritage Centre) in Millbrook, Nova Scotia, the authors of The Language of This Land, Trudy Sable and Bernie Francis, introduced Mi'kma'ki as a fluid and living landscape filled with networks of reciprocal relationships and moral obligations (2012, 25). Crossing the Cobequid little later that day became the occasion for reflecting on how the land is deeply embedded in Indigenous knowledge and society. As participants travelled from one place to another, from Halifax to Sackville, across the Cobequid Pass and the provincial border between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, sharing their knowledge and learning from each other, ideas took shape and the interdisciplinary essays published here are the result.In addition to academic sessions and to keynotes by Andrea Bear Nicholas, Cole Harris, Tania Martin, and Graeme Wynn, the Meeting Places Exhibition featured work and performances by artists Alison Creba, Ray Fenwick, Eryn Foster, Frank Shebageget, Tom Sherman, Aaron Weldon, and Mitchell Wiebe, curated by Gemey Kelley at the Owens Art Gallery. The creative writers who gave public readings at the conference are similarly engaged in reimagining place. Poems and films by Hermenegilde Chiasson and stories by Alexander MacLeod are embedded in real and imagined places. Aritha van Herk's Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (2002) and Michael Crummey's pictorial elegy Newfoundland: Journey into Lost Nation (2004), written in collaboration with Greg Locke, meditate on the authors' relationship to the places they live. Each of their readings, like the artworks on display, enacted the generative role of in Canadian arts and culture.This theme issue shares some of the highlights of the gathering with readers everywhere. Since the emergence of Canadian Studies in the 1960s, has served as both marker of identity and an object of study. Understanding Canada as and understanding place(s) within Canada have been integral to the development of Canadian Studies, from Northrop Frye's inquiry where is here? in the Literary History of Canada (1965, 826), to the situatedness Smaro Kamboureli considers formative in Canadian literary culture (2014, 7), and to the critical readings of displacement, movement, and belonging produced from various inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives. Studies of region and regionalism in literature, from Laurie Ricou's influential Vertical Man, Horizontal World (1973) and Frank Davey's cultural critique in From There to Here (1974) to Patrick O'Flaherty's The Rock Observed (1979), proliferated in the 1970s.Although early studies of region may seem dated in an era when, under the pressure of globalization, national identities seem to dissolve with their borders, these readings of local and regional cultures in Canada shaped the emerging field of Canadian Studies, often creating their own object of study as well as new cultural expressions and products. …

Constructing New Horizons: the art of Winnipeg modernist Tony Tascona

There is a popular perception that Canadian art is largely reactionary and without real innovation, however the Winnipeg-based artist Tony Tascona is a demonstrable example of a Canadian artist as primary innovator. Because of his technical training in the aerospace industry, Tascona was able to introduce a whole body of knowledge unfamiliar to the fine art world. Artistic experimentation with non-traditional industrial materials had been explored for several decades prior to the appearance of his mature work, however Tascona possessed an intimate knowledge and sensitivity to his materials that lead to a style uniquely appropriate to his content; his content being the materials themselves and the forms of the mechanised world. Through archival research at the University of Manitoba and an interview with the artist’s nephew, this paper explores Tascona’s artistic genealogy, working milieu and unique situation within modern art history. Its ultimate purpose is to make a case for why his work deserves critical attention and why he should be remembered as a great artist with a contribution unique not just to Canada, but to the world.

Framing Kurelek

In the 1960s and 1970s William Kurelek was a widely recognized Canadian artist whose paintings were purchased for public and private collections in Canada and abroad. Kurelek was a celebrity when he died of cancer at fifty years of age in Toronto on November 3, 1977. This paper describes Kurelek’s career—focusing on his exhibition history, his illustrated books, and the role played by his art dealer, Avrom Isaacs. His exhibition history showed him to be an incredibly prolific artist, one whose art was inspired by his religious and moral passions, by the prosaic stories of ordinary Canadians, by the Canadian landscape, and by his fascination with history. His illustrated books typically consisted of paintings and drawings organized into a series designed to tell a story—a device also used for many of his exhibitions. Kurelek’s own life story, told in his own words, provided the story line for his best loved books such as A Prairie Boy’s Winter and Lumberjack . Isaacs and Kurelek formed a comfortable and useful business relationship whereby Isaacs encouraged Kurelek to paint what he wanted and made Kurelek known to the press, the public, and the Canadian art establishment. Finally, the paper reviews William Kurelek: The Messenger , the 2011 catalogue for Kurelek’s latest major retrospective exhibition. Dans les années 1960 et 1970, William Kurelek était un artiste canadien généralement reconnu, dont les tableaux ont été achetés pour les collections publiques et privées au Canada et partout dans le monde. Kurelek était une célébrité quand il est mort d’un cancer à cinquante ans à Toronto—le 3 Novembre, 1977. Ce papier décrit la carrière de Kurelek—en mettant en exergue l’histoire de ses expositions, ses livres illustrés, et le rôle qu’a joué son marchand d’art, Avrom Isaacs. L’histoire de ses expositions l’a présenté comme un artiste incroyablement prolifique, celui dont l’art a été inspiré par ses passions religieuses et morales, par les histoires prosaïques de Canadiens ordinaires, par le paysage canadien, et par sa fascination pour l’histoire. Ses livres illustrés sont constitués typiquement de peintures et de dessins organisés dans une collection destinée à raconter une histoire—un emblème a été également utilisé pour beaucoup de ses expositions. Véritable autobiographie de Kurelek dite dans ses propres mots, elle fournit une ligne historique de ses meilleurs livres les plus aimés tels que A Prairie Boy’s Winter et Lumberjack . Isaacs et Kurelek entretenaient une relation d’affaires confortable et utile au moyen de laquelle Isaacs encourageait Kurelek à peindre ce qu’il voulait et le faisait connaître par la presse, le public, et la création de l’art canadien. Enfin, le papier passe en revue William Kurelek: The Messenger , le catalogue 2011 pour la dernière grande exposition rétrospective de Kurelek.

‘A Century of Canadian Art’: the Tate Gallery exhibition of 1938

An exhibition of 263 works of Canadian art opened at London's Tate Gallery in October 1938. These showed how European traditions of portraiture, landscape and religious carving had interacted with Canada's geography and First Nations to create a distinct national aesthetic epitomised by the Group of Seven and Emily Carr. The exhibition had been envisioned by Vincent Massey, Canada's foremost arts patron and collector, who had lent many works to the show. He was an ardent Anglophile who, as High Commissioner in London, believed in fostering Anglo-Canadian understanding as war loomed. He had also seen the impact of cultural propaganda launched by European governments in the mid-1930s. While Canada lacked a similar programme, Massey believed that ‘the force of culture’ could promote Canada's unique identity within an imperial heritage. Modern Canadian art had been exhibited in London and Paris in the mid-1920s and critics had greatly admired works they did not completely understand. By providing a century of...

Universal coverage of IVF pays off

What was the clinical and economic impact of universal coverage of IVF in Quebec, Canada, during the first calendar year of implementation of the public IVF programme? Universal coverage of IVF increased access to IVF treatment, decreased the multiple pregnancy rate and decreased the cost per live birth, despite increased costs per cycle. Public funding of IVF assures equality of access to IVF and decreases multiple pregnancies resulting from this treatment. Public IVF programmes usually mandate a predominant SET policy, the most effective approach for reducing the incidence of multiple pregnancies. This prospective comparative cohort study involved 7364 IVF cycles performed in Quebec during 2009 and 2011 and included an economic analysis. IVF cycles performed in the five centres offering IVF treatment in Quebec during 2009, before implementation of the public IVF programme, were compared with cycles performed at the same centres during 2011, the first full calendar year following implementation of the programme. Data were obtained from the Canadian Assisted Reproductive Technologies Register (CARTR). Comparisons were made between the two periods in terms of utilization, pregnancy rates, multiple pregnancy rates and costs. The number of IVF cycles performed in Quebec increased by 192% after the new policy was implemented. Elective single-embryo transfer was performed in 1.6% of the cycles during Period I (2009), and increased to 31.6% during Period II (2011) (P < 0.001). Although the clinical pregnancy rate per embryo transfer was lower in 2011 than in 2009 (24.9 versus 39.9%, P < 0.001), the multiple pregnancy rate was greatly reduced (6.4 versus 29.4%, P < 0.001). The public IVF programme increased government costs per IVF treatment cycle from CAD$3730 to CAD$4759. Despite increased costs per cycle, the efficiency defined by the cost per live birth, which factored in downstream health costs up to 1 year post delivery, decreased from CAD$49 517 to CAD$43 362 per baby conceived by either fresh and frozen cycles. The costs described in the economic model are likely an underestimate as they do not factor in many of the long-term costs that can occur after 1 year of age. The information collected in the Canadian ART register precludes the calculation of cumulative pregnancy rates. Our study confirms that the implementation of a public IVF programme favouring eSET not only sharply decreases the incidence of multiple pregnancy, but also reduces the cost per live birth. M.P.V. holds a fellowship award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). The economic analysis performed by M.P.C. was supported by an unrestricted grant from Ferring Pharmaceutical.

Gender and Career Choice in Art Therapy: A Survey (Le Genre et le Choix d’une Carrière en Art-Thérapie: Un Sondage)

:A survey of art therapy association members was paired with a public opinion survey to explore the impact of western socialized gender roles on the choice of a career in art therapy. The first survey was sent to national and provincial art therapy associations including l’Association des Art-Thérapeutes du Québec, British Colombia Art Therapy Association, Canadian Art Therapy Association and the Ontario Art Therapy Association. The public opinion survey was sent using popular media such as Facebook, email and word of mouth. Responses to both surveys were submitted anonymously. A total of 47 responses were received for the professional survey with a response rate of 14.7%. The public survey generated 43 responses, response rate is unknown. Responses to the professional survey indicated that men do not pursue art therapy because of lower salaries relative to other psychology-related professions and lack of opportunity for advancement. Comments received in the public survey suggest that minority status, the need to use what could be considered female gender role qualities and the general identity of art therapists as a female profession may be indicative factors for the choice of art therapy as a career.

The e-artexte digital repository: Promoting open access in the Canadian contemporary arts research and publishing community

How can an open access publishing and distribution model benefit research in contemporary art? In 2013 Artexte, a non-profit organization dedicated to documenting contemporary art in Canada, launched the e-artexte open access digital repository to offer self-archiving services to publishers, authors and artists in Canadian contemporary art. Although the fine arts community has generally been slow to adopt open access, Canadian contemporary arts publishers, many of whom have small budgets and limited resources, are finding the open access e-artexte repository an effective means of increasing distribution of and access to their publications.

“To Create Krieghoff”: The Cultural Politics of Canonization

The increased importance of Cornelius Krieghoff’s art in interwar Canada illustrates the diverse processes and effects of canonization. This article demonstrates how the changing institutional dynamics of Canadian art served to rewrite Canadian art history in the interwar period and also describes the effects of this rewriting. The reconstruction of a Canadian art historical canon in the case of Krieghoff is important not simply because it changed the way Canadians thought about art but also for how it affected art markets, systems of cultural authority, and conceptions of Canada’s cultural past. This article uses the interwar Krieghoff revival to illustrate these processes.

In the Mosaic: Jewish Identities in Canadian Performance and Installation Art

Carol Zemel explores contemporary Jewish performance and installation art in Canada through the work of Vera Frenkel, Melissa Shiff, and Tobaron Waxman.

Dance Archives in an Online Environment: The Impact of Digital Media on the Preservation of Dance History

The archival strategies offered through the Dance Collections Danse (DCD) online database (based in Toronto) illuminate the emerging impulse to educate practitioners about archiving systems for the purpose of facilitating a more immediate organization of materials and information by the companies, choreographers, and dancers themselves. These strategies emphasize the importance of immediacy to the preservation of projects in theatrical dance, not only to avoid historical backtracking but also to generate a “living” history and a sustainable method for presenting contemporary movements in theatrical dance as they arise. While the move to digital archiving evokes the desire to preserve dance as a fundamental part of Canadian arts and cultural heritage, it also presents challenges vis-à-vis negotiating the most effective way to document this ephemeral art form in both development and production. This paper sets out to interrogate the relationship between dance archiving, the preservation of dance history, and digital media.

‘Beauty which we had not previously known’: Walter Abell and the dynamics of modern art in Canada

A re-reading of the writings of Walter Abell, a well known art critic and theorist in Canada in the 1930s and 1940s, suggests a different way of thinking about the development of Canadian art and culture. Instead of viewing Abell's treatments of art - as have other cultural historians - as a stable discourse, this essay suggests that they are better viewed as a series of often incongruous treatments that do not constitute a cohesive whole. It is the very disjunctures and aporias in Abell's discourse, however, that make it most meaningful. Instead of treating Abell's contradictions and shifting perspectives as problems, this essay argues that they signify the diverse, and at times incompatible, ways that artists, intellectuals, and Canadians responded to the the development of modernist art and the conditions of artistic modernity in twentieth century Canada. In this sense, they present an image of Canadian artistic culture as a fractures field within which different subject positions, conceptions of cultu...

Increased risk of preterm birth in singleton pregnancies after blastocyst versus Day 3 embryo transfer: Canadian ART Register (CARTR) analysis

Are the fetal outcomes of singleton pregnancies that result from cleavage stage embryo transfer (ET) different from the outcomes from Day 5/6 blastocyst stage ET? There was a significantly higher risk of preterm birth (<37 weeks) in singletons after extended embryo culture (Day 5/6) compared with cleavage stage (Day 3) transfer. Two recent studies, from Sweden and the USA, reported an increased risk of preterm birth in singleton pregnancies after Day 5/6 ET compared with Day 3 ET. The US study also showed increased early preterm births and the Swedish study showed increased fetal malformations in this group. A retrospective cohort study was performed. Data were collected from the Canadian ART Register database for all singleton births after fresh IVF/ICSI ET cycles (2001-2009). A total of 12 712 singleton births were included. Of these, 9506 resulted from a Day 3 ET and 3206 resulted from a blastocyst (Day 5/6) ET. Preterm birth rate <37 weeks (unadjusted by potential confounding factors) was higher with Day 5/6 versus Day 3 transfers (17.2 versus 14.1%, P < 0.001). Using logistic regression analysis to adjust for confounding factors, preterm birth rate <37 weeks was the only outcome significantly increased after Day 5/6 compared with Day 3 transfer (odds ratio 1.32, 95% confidence interval 1.17-1.49). The following confounding factors were adjusted for: year of treatment (2001-2009), maternal age (continuous), parity (0 versus ≥1 birth), diagnosis category, number of oocytes retrieved [≤20 versus >20 (high responder group)], insemination method (IVF versus ICSI), number of embryos transferred (1, 2 or ≥3) and the presence of a vanishing twin (≥1 fetal heart on the initial ultrasonographic examination). Post-natal follow-up studies will be required to determine if this difference we observed translates into adverse long-term effects on these offspring. The rate of early preterm births (<32 weeks) was higher in Day 5/6 versus Day 3, but the low number of cases in this category did not have the power to show a difference (3.0 versus 2.7%, P = 0.34). We found a significantly higher risk of preterm birth (<37 weeks) in singletons after extended embryo culture (Day 5/6) compared with cleavage stage (Day 3) transfer, even when adjusting for confounding factors. Our findings are in agreement with the previous two studies; however, we did not show a difference in the very preterm deliveries (unlike the US study) or in fetal malformations (as in the Swedish study). We hypothesize that there may be a deleterious effect of prolonged in vitro embryo culture on subsequent placentation. Longer term follow-up studies will be required to determine if prolonged in vitro culture to the blastocyst stage has an adverse effect on the long-term health of offspring when compared with shorter cleavage stage culture. None.

Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson

Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson

In the Mosaic: Jewish Identities in Canadian Performance and Installation Art

This essay considers contemporary Jewish installation and performance art in Canada. With an emphasis on diasporic and identity issues in Canada’s multicultural mosaic, the article focuses on works by Vera Frenkel, Melissa Shiff, and Tobaron Waxman, and explores their treatment of place and home, gender, and ritual.