Enticing new Canadian art books are on store shelves this year, but it’s wise to shop early as supply-chain issues are affecting availability. Once they sell out, you may be out of luck.
For instance, one of this year’s most beautiful books, Christi Belcourt, features eye-popping flower beadwork paintings by the Métis artist, who traces her ancestry to Mânitou Sâkhigan / Lac Ste. Anne, west of Edmonton.
“It’s such a fabulous book,” says Susanne Alexander, of Fredericton’s Goose Lane Editions, which published the book in collaboration with the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina and Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa. “And the fact it has foldouts really gives you a much better sense of her work than would otherwise be possible.”
Goose Lane has distributed several thousand copies to booksellers across Canada. The book expands an earlier edition, which quickly sold out its 1,000-copy print run. And Alexander says orders for more copies of this second edition are already coming in from booksellers, so supplies may not last for long.
Normally, it’s easy to print more books to meet consumer demand. Not so this year, with “snowballing” problems throughout the supply chain, says Kate Edwards, executive director of the Association of Canadian Publishers, which speaks for independent book publishers.
Problems include paper shortages and long waits for press time due to business consolidations and competition from American publishers. Delays with offshore shipping, as well as flooding and landslides in British Columbia are other complications.
“There have been disruptions at every point of the supply chain,” says Edwards. “It’s been a perfect storm.”
Her advice: Check local bookstores first, instead of gambling with online deliveries. And if you find what you want, grab it, because it may not be there in a week.
Certain art books are selling well, agrees Chris Labonté, the president of Figure 1 Publishing in Vancouver. He cites Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment, which looks at art by female contemporaries of the Group of Seven. It was published in collaboration with the Toronto-area McMichael Canadian Art Collection, whose exhibition of the same name is on view until Jan. 16. The show then heads to Calgary and Winnipeg.
Uninvited has already been reprinted twice. “It’s been a challenge to get the printing done fast enough,” says Labonté. “The season is very busy. We have to get into the queue, but also, then they have to scramble to find paper.” Once books are printed, it’s easy enough to distribute locally in Vancouver, Victoria and south of the border. “But with washed-out highways, how to we get re-orders to Toronto, Montreal and everywhere else?”
One of Labonté’s favourite books – and mine – is Where the Power Is: Indigenous Perspectives on Northwest Coast Art, a collaboration with the UBC Museum of Anthropology. It’s a hefty book with ample photos that brings contemporary Indigenous knowledge holders together with historical works from the Northwest Coast – stone tools, woven baskets, carved masks and the like. It’s fascinating to read the thoughts of artists like Dempsey Bob, Skeena Reece and θəliχwəlwət – Debra Sparrow. The ambitious book moves the bar forward on inclusivity. “We’re hearing from various artists and elders involved with the book and one of them described it as a game-changer,” says Labonté. “It’s absolutely humbling when you hear that.”
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Canadian artists got some love from international publishers this year. New York’s David Zwirner Books chose Marcel Dzama, a member of the famed but now-disbanded Royal Art Lodge in Winnipeg, to illustrate William Shakespeare x Marcel Dzama: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the second title in its Seeing Shakespeare series. (His fellow Lodgers, Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, also have a new book out, Library.) A book about Vancouver-based Hunkpapa Lakota artist Dana Claxton was published by Germany’s vaunted Steidl, as part of her Scotiabank Photography Award. Aperture, a non-profit foundation in New York, published Sara Cwynar: Glass Life, which brings together portraits and stills from three recent films by the Vancouver-born artist. And Germany’s Hirmer Publishers brought out Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds, which documents a major exhibition by the Inuit artist. Organized by the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, the show toured to the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Glenbow in Calgary.
It’s rare for a year to go by without a new book about the Group of Seven, and 2021 was no exception. Magnetic North: Imagining Canada in Painting 1910-1940 (Prestel) is the companion book to an international touring exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Canada, in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario and Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle. The exhibition includes work by some of the Group’s contemporaries, as well as two Indigenous artists, Caroline Monnet and Lisa Jackson.
Noteworthy books about individual Canadian artists this year include The Way Between Things: The Art of Sandra Meigs (ECW Press), an engaging look at the winner of a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts who taught for years at the University of Victoria. Two interesting books are tied to shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Matthew Wong: Blue View (DelMonico) looks at the moody paintings of the late Edmonton-based artist, who was better known internationally than he was at home. And Red is Beautiful, published for Robert Houle’s retrospective, on view until April 18, offers a detailed look at an important artist from the Sandy Bay Ojibway First Nation in southern Manitoba. Houle’s show will tour to Calgary and Winnipeg.
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Several biographical books were published this year. One Man in His Time ... (Douglas & McIntyre) is an interesting memoir by Michael Audain, a Vancouver developer and art collector who opened a gallery in Whistler. He’s a complex figure – a lonely child who became a left-wing political activist in his youth before discovering his talent for business. His ancestry traces back to Robert Dunsmuir, an early industrialist on Vancouver Island. Other books in the biographical realm include Anything But a Still Life: The Art and Lives of Molly Lamb and Bruno Bobak by Nathan Greenfield (Goose Lane) and Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance (Allen Lane), a memoir by Jesse Wente, the chair of the Canada Council for the Arts.
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Regional publishing included Future Possible: An Art History of Newfoundland and Labrador by Mireille Eagan, a curator at the The Rooms, in St. John’s, along with other writers. It’s the first major account of the province’s art history and is based on survey shows in 2018 and 2019. It’s published by Goose Lane, as are Good Earth: The Pots and Passion of Walter Ostrom, a Nova Scotia ceramic artist, and Autism Arts, which considers the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s art program for children, youth and young adults on the spectrum.
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Art-loving adventurers may want to check out Into the Arctic: Painting Canada’s Changing Arctic (Figure 1) by Cory Trépanier, who died from cancer this year. Several photography books from Rocky Mountain Books also offer a taste of adventure: Aloft: Canadian Rockies Aerial Photography by Paul Zizka and Southern Light: Photography of Antarctica, South Georgia, and the Falkland Islands by Dave Brosha. And for photographs of people who look as weathered as the Canadian Shield, check out Resilient: The Portraiture of Wayne Simpson. Nova Scotia publisher MacIntyre Purcell Publishing has released several photography books, including Grain Elevators: Beacons of the Prairies by Chris Attrell and George Webber’s latest book, Borrowed Time: Calgary 1976-2019.
Meanwhile, the Art Canada Institute continues to publish online books, this year adding biographies of Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis, Toronto-based Suzy Lake and Vancouver-born Kazuo Nakamura to its roster.
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Academic publishers also published art-related books this year. Lianne McTavish, author of Voluntary Detours: Small-Town and Rural Museums in Alberta (McGill-Queen’s University Press), visited places like the Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, population 200. If you’re patient with academic tropes and enjoy road trips and eccentric taxidermy, it may be for you. Another book from McGill-Queen’s is Women at the Helm: How Jean Sutherland Boggs, Hsio-yen Shih and Shirley L. Thomson Changed the National Gallery of Canada, a scholarly book by Diana Nemiroff, a senior curator at the gallery from 1990 to 2005.
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Meanwhile, UBC Press released Mischief Making: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Art, and the Seriousness of Play by Nicola Levell, who looks at the prolific creator of Haida manga, and Uplift: Visual Culture at the Banff School of Fine Arts, by PearlAnn Reichwein and Karen Wall, which traces the institution’s role in art education. Situating Design in Alberta, edited by Isabel Prochner and Tim Antoniuk, was expected this month from the University of Alberta Press. Released earlier this year from Wilfrid Laurier University Press is Coalesce, about Anishinaabe artist Barry Ace. ■
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