Complicated histories, multiple voices. Many of this year’s notable books are tied to exhibitions. Thanks goes to curators in public museums and galleries across the country for their work in the creation of remarkable exhibitions, both large and small, and the publishers who have produced the companion catalogues and books.
The Kelowna Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, Takao Tanabe: Printmaker accompanied the first comprehensive survey dedicated to the printmaking facet of Vancouver Island-based Tanabe’s distinguished career. Examples from each edition of prints are reproduced. Ian Thom, author and curator, gives special attention to the exquisite prairie and seascape woodblock prints produced in collaboration with master moku hanga printer, Masato Arikushi. For a complete biography, see Takao Tanabe: Life & Work, also by Ian Thom, one of this year’s additions to the Art Canada Institute’s remarkable growing digital library. A print version is forthcoming in 2024.
For those who love woodblock prints and letterpress books, An Avian Alphabet is a fine, limited-edition featuring woodcuts by Langley printmaker and ecologist, Edith Krause, and poetry by 15 Canadian poets selected by Susan McCaslin. A co-publication of Barbarian Press and Sperling Printshop, the beautiful, traditionally crafted book was printed, bound and boxed at Barbarian’s letterpress shop near Mission, BC.
Leaning Out of Windows: An Art and Physics Collaboration, published by Figure 1 Publishing, caps a cross-disciplinary six-year project between artists and physicists with a medley of artworks, diagrams and essays. Authors Ingrid Koenig (the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at TRIUMF, Canada's particle physics accelerator) and Randy Lee Cutler, both professors at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, led the lively exploration based on concepts of antimatter, emergence, and in/visible forces through four phases including symposia and exhibitions.
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Making History: Visual Arts & Blackness in Canada, published by the Royal Ontario Museum in partnership with On Point Press, positions Black history and art within the Canadian cultural landscape at a historical moment. Julie Crooks, Dominique Fontaine and Sylvia Forni curated the 2018 ROM exhibition, Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art, and with this publication, they present creative profiles of the artists and extend the dialogue with a compilation of essays that assess the art historical, social and political context from various perspectives.
Moving the Museum: Indigenous + Canadian Art at the AGO, edited by Wanda Nanibush and Georgiana Uhlyarik, published for the Art Gallery of Ontario by Goose Lane, just won the 2023 Toronto Book Award. The City of Toronto quoted the jury describing the book as “revelatory,” saying the book “kicks the colonial gaze to the curb, insisting instead that museums and galleries radically shift what they’ve been doing and offers page after page enacting the potential of Indigenous art to empower, inspire, and create community.”
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Reversing the gaze is a key tenet in Gerald McMaster’s foreword to Richard Harrington: Arctic Photography 1948-53, published by Firefly Books. It invites a timely reassessment of the Canadian documentary photographer’s work in the Arctic, illustrated with 100 black and white photographs from the Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Photography in Canada, 1839-1989: An Illustrated History was published online by the Art Canada Institute this year, with a print version coming in 2024. It is a valuable historic overview of photography in Canada, from the invention of the camera to the rise of digital photography, and it includes sections on individual photographers, institutions, technologies and critical issues. The cameo on Richard Harrington is a good example of the contemporary lens and careful research that authors Sarah Bassnett and Sarah Parsons brought to the task, addressing the reception of his mid-century photographs first as tools of Cold War diplomacy and then as the focus of Library and Archives Canada’s, Project Naming, initiated in 2001 to identify Harrington’s subjects with the help of Inuit youth and elders.
Hali Heavy Shield wrote and illustrated Naaahsa Aisinaki!/ Naaahsa Is An Artist!, told from the point of view of a little girl who spends time with her grandmother, an artist. Published by Second Story Press in both English and bilingual, Blackfoot (Kainaa)/English, editions, this children’s book is gently inspirational. Hali Heavy Shield helped establish the first public library on a reserve in Alberta; her insider narration, modelled on the relationship between her own mother, the esteemed contemporary artist, Faye Heavy Shield, and her granddaughter is yet another quietly powerful act.
The debut of the touring exhibition, Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms, and the Expanded Frame, 1960-2000, was one of the most surprising art events in Calgary last year. The MacKenzie Gallery of Regina worked in collaboration with the Nickle Arts Museum at the University of Calgary to shine a spotlight on an undersung yet flourishing fibre art activity on the prairies. The University of Calgary Press has launched the corresponding book, Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms, and the Expanded Frame, 1960-2000 as part of its Art in Profile Series. Edited by curators Michele Hardy, Timothy Long, and Julia Krueger, the informative essays and sumptuous photographs do justice to the remarkable show.
Then there's Western Voices in Canadian Art (University of Manitoba Press) by Patricia Bovey. She is a former director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery and a retired senator. Strong on Manitoba and British Columbia, the 453-page book provides career information on scores of artists going back to the early 19th century. It comes to life through this distinguished writer’s experience of Western Canada’s cultural life. Through text and images of artwork, the book explores various themes including landscapes, portraits, urbanization, and abstraction.
Some Magnetic Force: Lionel Lemoine Fitzgerald Writings is the fourth publication in Concordia University Press’s series, Text/Context: Writings by Canadian Artists. Author and curator Michael Parke-Taylor has uncovered, organized, and contextualized a treasury of primary source material. Letters, diary entries, lectures and reports elucidate the life and work of Lionel Lemoine Fitzgerald, the only member of the Group of Seven based in the prairies.
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Tom Thomson: North Star, by Sarah Milroy and Ian A.C. Dejardin, published by Goose Lane Editions with McMichael Canadian Art Collection, is the first book to focus on his small oil sketches. It’s a particular treat that the height and width of the book are similar in size to the boards that Thomson carried in his plein air sketch box to make these small masterpieces. More than 150 juicy reproductions accompany essays that shed new light on Thomson’s enduring influence.
The artistic legacy of Jean Paul Riopelle, one of Canada’s most celebrated artists, and the first of his generation to receive international acclaim, is in the limelight this year as the Jean Paul Riopelle Foundation proclaimed Riopelle 100, a year of national and international festivities in honour of the centenary of his birth in Quebec. An exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the issue of a two-dollar coin by the Royal Canadian Mint, and, in Alberta, a temporary outdoor installation at Calgary’s Kiyooka Ohe Arts Centre (KOAC) are just some of the events. The National Gallery of Canada takes a fresh look at the full range of his work in the major retrospective of its own, Riopelle: Crossroads in Time, curated by Sylvie Lacerte that will travel to the Winnipeg Art Gallery in June 2024. The companion book, also entitled Riopelle: Crossroads in Time, is richly illustrated with essays by a variety of writers and artists.
Jin-Me Yoon, co-published by the Scotiabank Photography Award and Steidl, brings the work of this remarkable Korean-born, Vancouver-based artist, to a wider international audience. Celebrating her as the 2022 winner of this prestigious photography award, this elegant volume presents 230 images from more than 30 years of her practice with essays by Andrea Kunard and Ming Tiampo. The spotlight is on Jin-Me Yoon this year, and deservedly so. The Art Canada Institute has published online and in print versions of Jin-Me Yoon, Life and Work by Ming Tiampo. Throughout her career, Jin-Me Yoon counters the entangled histories of colonialism, tourism and the military with photography, video and performance that are by turn witty, fearless, affirmative, and often ahead of her time.
Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch is published by Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and is distributed by Goose Lane Editions. It's a companion book to a travelling exhibition of the same name organized by the gallery with support from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the National Gallery of Canada. This 312-page book, like the exhibition, delves into Niro’s long career as an Indigenous artist working in photography, film, painting, and multi-media. Throughout her four-decades-long career, the Brantford, Ont., artist has explored the many ways Indigenous people have been short-changed. Never grim, nor boring, Niro combines the profound messages in her work with loads of mischief and splashes of pizzazz.
Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe 1400-1800, published by Goose Lane Editions with the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Baltimore Museum of Art accompanies the touring exhibition of the same title that has been touted as a “must-see” by Vogue and “sure-to-be-historic” by the New York Times. Co-curated by Andaleeb Badiee Banta, Senior Curator and Department Head, Prints, Drawings & Photographs at the BMA, and Alexa Greist, Curator and R. Fraser Elliott Chair, Prints & Drawings at the AGO, the book and exhibition debunk the long-held tropes that women artists were rare and considered less talented than their male counterparts in Europe with more than 200 works varying in media and scale: portraits, sculpture, tapestry, embroidery, graphic arts, furniture and more.
For something outside-the-box, consider the 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, Powerful Women created by Lisa den Teulig based in Ghent, Belgium and published by BIS Publishers. Subtitled Herstory in pieces: Celebrating Women in Art, the puzzle weaves images related to generations of extraordinary women — including the Guerrilla Girls — and comes with an educational poster.
And you might have encountered The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, A True and Exact Accounting of the History of North America Turtle Island Volumes 1 and 2 by Kent Monkman and Gisele Gordon published by Penguin Random House Canada. They’re out there.
And a look ahead to some promising titles to be released in 2024:
- Jack Bush: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1920-1977, to be published by DM Books and Coach House Press
- Tracings: Writing Art, 1975-2020, by Ian Carr-Harris, to be published by Concordia University Press
- Tattoo You: A New Generation of Artists by Phaidon Editors, with an introduction by Alice Snape
- J.E.H. MacDonald, Up Close: The Artist’s Materials and Techniques, by Kate Helwig and Alison Douglas, Goose Lane Editions.
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