Publication of your comments requires a response Barbara.
 

Deanna Bowen has produced a major work about racism in Canada and has raised major issues that do need to be made known. However, I believe there are major problems with Deanna Bowen's "research" and statements and accusations about the "other", the Anglo-Canadian elite she sees as the source of this racism.

In the National Gallery video she says "they" (the artist members of the Group of Seven) were all "rich guys." Only Harris had independent income. Lismer had to leave Toronto for Halifax in 1916 since he couldn't support his family in Toronto. Johnston moved to Winnipeg in 1921 after his house was seized by a financial institution. Varley also had his house seized in 1923. All save Harris earned their living by commercial art or teaching. 

However in her presentation on the launching of the mural at the Gallery Tuesday evening, Bowen said Harris was a commercial artist working at Grip. He never was.

On CBC radio (Q) Bowen stated that Harris and Britton Cooke were good friends. Possibly she once again derives intimate or causal connections from their joint membership in the Arts and Letters Club. Cooke was only known to me previous to Bowen's work as the author of an article "The Spirit of Travel" in Canadian Magazine (Oct.-Nov. 1913) illustrated by J.E.H. MacDonald. I don't remember seeing Cooke's name when I went through the Arts & Letters Club archives and never in connection with my research on Harris. As far as I can figure out  Cooke was a very minor figure in the club's membership and possibly known to, but not a friend of Harris.

You describe Harris as one "who held truly uncommon social power, wealth and privilege in this country." In October 1911 he was only just 26 or 27 years old (he was born 23 October 1885) and had only become a member of the Ontario Society of Artists. You ask if he objected. I have no idea nor do you. Nor do either of us know if "members of the Group and their supporters ever make place at the table for a person of colour or an Indigenous artist." I do know that Jackson purchased a work by the Tsimshian artist Frederick Alexcee in 1926 which he donated to the Art Gallery of Toronto.

Fairley arrived in Edmonton from Manchester in the fall of 1910 and signed the petition against black immigration in (spring?) 1911. I don't know what pressure was brought for him to sign (if any) but he was not the driving force for the Order in Council that was repealed in October 1911. I do not know Fairley's biography well but I do know he was a co-founder of the socially progressive Canadian Forum and became a vocal critic of the lack of human presence in Canadian landscape paintings, contrary to what Deanna Bowen emphasized in her Canadian Art article in April 2020.

People do evolve. None of us are without sin. Not you, not me.

Don't you think that the crimes of the KKK and Nazis are diminished by equation with  Fairley and Brown and artists of the Group of Seven?

It is interesting that Harris has erroneously become the target of this misinformation. His drawings (as reproduced in MacLean's in November and December 1911) depict the poorer areas of Toronto as he did in his paintings. They talk of social change, immigration and poverty as do his paintings of Elevator and Black Courts in Halifax (Black Court not being in Africville as Bowen discussed in a lecture at Carleton a few years ago but near Barrington and Gerrish streets). In 1925 he protested the suppression of strikers and resultant poverty in Glace Bay in his painting "Miners' Houses, Glace Bay" (AGO) and in 1933 in an article in the Canadian Theosophist denounced the persecution of Jews in Germany. He was vocal about his idealism.

I did not know of the 1911 immigration petition before Bowen's work and thank her for making me aware of it. Immigration into Canada has been fraught with contention between most groups, French, English, (and their relationships with indigenous peoples), Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Doukhobor, Hindu, West Indian, etc. It is a very interesting history and one to be further explored.

As you know my work has been principally in historic Canadian art, specifically prior to World War II. I would very much like to know of Black artists from this time period you feel should be included in the collection of the National Gallery.

Since the early 1990s the National Gallery made it a policy to acquire further works by artists of Black and Asian heritage. In 2005 the Gallery initiated the project Art of This Land to provide narratives of the work of artists of varying backgrounds, most specifically Indigenous artists of the past. In 2017 this was reworked incorporating contemporary works by Indigenous artists in the historic Canadian galleries.

Deanna Bowen is right. History is important. But history based on facts.

All the best,
Charlie