Project websites by the department
The following websites and electronic publications document faculty and student research projects.
Anne (Annie) Douglas Savage was a Canadian artist and teacher who made a significant impact on Canadian art and education. She was one of the first women to participate actively in the creation of a Canadian school of painting, and an early exponent of child art and creative teaching. Trained as a painter, and a self taught teacher, her success as an educator and her development as a painter were concurrent.
Guido Nincheri (1885-1973), one of Canada's most important stained glass masters also introduced the technique of true fresco to North America. This bilingual website results from the collaboration between the Atelier d'histoire Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and the Research Collections of the Digital Image and Slide Library at Concordia University. It documents some of Nincheri's religious and secular works of ornamentation, stained glass, fresco and other mural painting in Montreal.
Professor Catherine MacKenzie and the following graduate students from the MA program are responsible for the writing of a catalogue entitled Auktion 392: Reclaiming the Galerie Stern, Düsseldorf, that accompanies an exhibition of the same title:
- Alexandra Anber
- Katie Apsey
- Andria Hickey
- Sharon Murray
- Kimberlie Robert.
The catalogue entries relied heavily on the provenance research of Philip Dombowsky, a graduate of the MA in Art History program and now Project Archivist, Dominion Gallery fonds, National Gallery of Canada and independent researcher for the Max Stern Estate. Other MA and undergraduate students who helped with the project are Anja Borck, Sheena Ellison and Marsha Taichman. Auktion 392 ran from October 20 to November 10, 2006 at the Concordia University FOFA Gallery. As guest curator, Professor MacKenzie extends her profound gratitude to Lynn Beavis, the highly creative former coordinator of the FOFA Gallery, and Andrew Elvish, independent designer and Director of Communications for local high-tech company Engenuity, who produced a remarkable installation that brought to life the story of the Galerie Stern from its formation in 1913 to its forced closure under Nazi duress in 1937. Both are graduates of the MA program in Art History. A PDF of the catalogue is available from the website designed by Art History MA student, Erandy Vergara Vargas, under the supervision of Sandra Margolian, Assistant to the Director of Special Projects, Office of the President, Concordia University. Thanks to Dr. Clarence Epstein, Director of Special Projects, for inviting the Department to become involved in this project, and to the Max Stern Estate, Concordia University, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, McGill University, Christie's, Sotheby's, and Apple for their support.
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Presented by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, the Canadian Art News website is a comprehensive guide to Canadian art events. This website promotes Canadian art and artists by announcing a wide variety of events such as conferences, public lectures, exhibitions, calls for papers, forums, publications and exhibitions within Canada and around the world. Updated regularly, the site includes a monthly calendar and previews of upcoming months, as well as an archives section that over time will become a valuable source of recent and historical information.
This website/project aims to provide information in the form of a biographical dictionary of over seventy selected living artists in Canada, of mainly eastern European origin. Spanning the period from the 1930s to the present, its focus encompasses both artists who came to Canada in the last seventy years, and first and second generation artists reconnecting with their eastern European heritage.
Canada has no national portrait gallery. A program rather than a building, an idea rather than a landmark, the Library and Archives Canada Portrait Portal brings together works amassed since the 1880s. Graduate students of Art History, the curators of this website have worked under the guidance of professor Loren Lerner of Concordia University to produce virtual exhibitions of these Canadian portraits. Intersecting social history, artistic practices, cultural aspects of representation, the resulting selections interrogate the role of portraiture, a concrete representation, for the nation, an especially abstract entity. In addition to producing two distinct virtual exhibitions, each curator wrote in turn an extended essay on a single picture presenting a particular curatorial, historical or theoretical problem, informed by major thinkers within and outside the field of Art History. Finally, collaboration with the students of Concordia Studio Arts professor Marisa Portolese led to the production of short, pointed curatorial texts on photographic portraits by the students, exploring the portrait archive of the times to come.
The database is intended to provide a research tool that brings together the growing body of literature about women artists who worked in Canada and who were born before 1925. It covers women who worked in diverse mediums, ranging from painting and sculpture to photography and textiles. In addition to a brief biographical sketch, each entry comprises a bibliography of writings about the artist and, in cases where women artists have authored works, a separate bibliography of their writings. Locations of artists' files are indicated, as well as their association memberships. The database is not comprehensive; new artists and citations are continuously being added.
Diving for a Sunken Canadian Treasure: Rediscovering the P.S. Lady Sherbrooke
The P.S. Lady Sherbrooke, a vessel used to navigate the waters of a newly discovered land, is an essential element in Canadian history. The two basic purposes to this website are to describe the P.S. Lady Sherbrooke and then to outline the complexities involved in what was the largest, privately supported, underwater archeological dive in Canadian history.
Proficient in many media, Eleanor Milne (b.1925) continues to play an active role in the Canadian art world. She was Canada's Dominion Sculptor from 1961 to 1993, contributing many elements to the Centre Block of Parliament. She created stone carvings of the History of Canada, the British North America Act and the Origin of Life in Canada. She also designed stained glass windows for the House of Commons, and oversaw the restoration of the linen ceiling of the House.
Jazz music provides an analogy for explaining modern and contemporary art, by using musical expressions such as distinctive tone colours, energizing and syncopated rhythms, pitch variations, pattern and improvisation. This exhibition and accompanying symposium features Canadian artists Sam Borenstein, Graham Coughtry, Jacques de Tonnancour, Yves Gaucher, Betty Goodwin, John Heward, Harold Klunder, Guido Molinari, Michael Snow, Sylvia Safdie and Joyce Wieland, whose works explicitly evoke associations with jazz. Whether it is through their experiences as jazz musicians, their love for music, or the jazz-like spontaneity communicated in their paintings, this art from the 1960s to the present day can be considered in musical terms. The exhibition is an initiative of Concordia University's art history graduate students, working in partnership with the FOFA Gallery, the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, the Concordia University Archives and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery. Most of the works for this exhibition were selected from the latter's collection. This exhibition and symposium were the results of a M.A. graduate seminar in Museum Practice taught by Loren Lerner in Fall 2007. The students defined the exhibition theme, selected the works, and handled different aspects of the exhibition, including: the design of the exhibition space; the preparation of the panel texts; the writing and presentation of the symposium papers; the development of the website; and the organization of an educational program to accompany the exhibition.
Envisioning Virtual Exhibitions is a collection of texts and videos that emerged from a graduate seminar in curatorial practice, a teaching project designed and led by Dr. Loren Lerner. It is the first of a series of seminars based on the CCCA Canadian Art Database, an open access digital collection of contemporary Canadian art, known as the CCCA Academy. The objective of the seminar was to research and write about contemporary artists and their work, creating engaging texts and video presentations that would be informative and scholarly yet accessible to broad-based, public access audiences. The students were encouraged to think broadly about exhibitions in light of the theory and practice of curatorship. Visiting speakers and weekly readings encouraged the class to consider the function of the curator in developing new relationships among artists and artworks and to conceptualize the exhibition as a way of presenting and analyzing ideas and concepts.
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Family Works is a website produced in partnership with Concordia University and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Students in the undergraduate seminar Here’s Looking at You Kid: Picturing Children, Envisioning Childhood, led by Dr. Loren Lerner, Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, have produced a compelling body of research on eighty-two artworks in the permanent collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts that portray children, childhood and family in different historical and cultural contexts. The student works were conceived by artists in the Studio Arts program at Concordia University led by Raymonde April, Laura Endacott and Tema Stauffer.
This introductory guide is intended to facilitate access to relevant biographical and bibliographic information pertaining to contemporary First Nations artists and includes the artist's full name, date and place of birth, as well as First Nations affiliation, followed by a short biographical description. We have produced a bibliography of the most recent and/or important writings on each artist, which is meant to introduce the reader to that artist's work. A recent exhibition history is provided with an emphasis on Canadian venues. Also listed are selected collections containing the artist's work, to enable the user to see the original art.
Global Engagements in Contemporary Canadian Art: Thirty-Nine Exhibition Essays and Fifty-Five Artists, conducted under the banner of the CCCA Academy, and the first e-publication of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art was a teaching project designed and led by Dr. Loren Lerner. Students in this graduate seminar investigated how globalization and increasing mobility of artists and artworks have impacted Canada's field of contemporary art. They researched the work of Canadian and Canada-based artists who work and exhibit their artworks in multiple locations both inside and outside Canada. Working at the intersection of the local and the global, their objective was to reveal how the global's social, political, cultural, and aesthetic connections are reflected in contemporary Canadian art. Simultaneously, the participants explored how the global's broad cultural, geographical, and temporal perspectives on Canadian art could be translated into virtual exhibitions in order make their findings accessible to diverse audiences outside the physical space of the white cube.
The Jerusalem Art History Journal: An Undergraduate eJournal/Histoire de l’art à Jérusalem : cyberrevue étudiante de premier cycle deriving from the “City of Jerusalem: Ideas and Images” course taught by Dr. Loren Lerner considers different attachments to Jerusalem through visual perceptions and artistic representations at the religious, social and political levels. Its focus is on the multifaceted narratives, allegiances, and ideas of the city's history covering ancient times, the Roman and Byzantine periods, the Arab, Crusader and Mamluk periods, and the years under Ottoman, British Mandate, Jordan/Israeli and Israeli rule. Of central importance is the visual imagery of the real and imagined Jerusalem in the art and architecture created by different communities over thousands of years. The journal contains papers about the art, architecture, archaeological sites, and urban spaces of Jerusalem and works of art by student artists, reflecting responses to this ancient city as a site of major world religions, competing histories, and diverse socio-political perspectives.
View Volumes 1, 2 and 3 of the Jerusalem Art History Journal: An Undergraduate eJournal/Histoire de l’art à Jérusalem : cyberrevue étudiante de premier cycle
The Metro Borduas website is an online catalogue of the exhibition "Metro Borduas: The Underground Landscape of Abstract Art in Montreal." Curated by students in Loren Lerner's Museum Studies graduate seminar, the exhibition explores the legacy of revolutionary Quebec painter Paul-Émile Borduas (1905-1960). Originally displayed at Concordia's Faculty of Fine Arts (FOFA) Gallery and including works from the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery collection, the creative exhibition draws on Montreal's ubiquitous transit system to "map" Borduas' and his contemporaries' dynamic artistic contributions to Canadian art. The website consists of a curatorial essay, excerpts from the panel texts, information on the exhibition and photographs of the accompanying events. These events included a graduate student symposium featuring a talk by artist Stephen Schofield, public tours and a lecture by preeminent Borduas scholar François-Marc Gagnon, Chair of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. Most importantly, the website includes eleven very diverse scholarly essays by the student co-curators. The exhibition and the accompanying website were made possible by the contributions of Concordia's Department of Art History, the Fine Arts Alumni Association, the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, the FOFA Gallery and the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.
The city of Montreal is a palimpsest, a series of surfaces upon which various actors, communities and organizations have left their trace in the form of the built environment. Much as the early seigneurial system of land division is still visible in many quarters of the city, so too are subsequent layers of urban and architectural development still alive, if only in the form of memories, in present-day Montreal. What is the nature of the relationship between a city, its memories and communities, and its ongoing transformation? Graduate students in architectural history have chosen distinct sites in Montreal to explore these questions. Drawing from the past, present and even the future of their chosen sites, the presenters of Montreal as Palimpsest explore the significance of architecture within the cultural landscape of Montreal.
Picturing Children and Youth: A Canadian Perspective examines pictures, artefacts, and the spaces and places of the young person. A key focus is the imagery created by artists practicing in all forms of media, ranging from painting and drawing to photography and film. The website is the product of two undergraduate courses in the Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University, offered in the Fall term, 2010: Picturing Children taught by Loren Lerner, professor, Art History, and Boy/Girl Culture, taught by Marisa Portolese, professor, Photography. Our hope is that this website will encourage further critical analyses and creative activity relating to children and youth.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and the Department of Art History.
This website is an ongoing collective and collaborative project. With pk langshaw from the Department of Design and Computations Art as creator of the website, it was made with the assistance of students from Design and Dr. Loren Lerner from the Art History department. The project has realized a series of artistic interventions, symposium, satellite projects, and web site through the main contributions and support of Concordia University.
Students in the undergraduate seminar Rethinking Visual Narration: Myths, Religious Stories, Fairy Tales, Legends and Other Collective Beliefs and Accounts in Contemporary Canadian Art, a teaching project designed and led by Dr. Loren Lerner, wrote original critical essays on selected artworks in the CCCA Canadian Art Database that harness the powerful resonance of collective narratives and address a variety of themes. These include descriptive analyses that examine a single artwork and exhibition essays that present an exhibition concept for three or four artworks. In addition, student artworks were created by artists in fibre arts and photography courses led by Studio Arts professors Laura Endacott, Marisa Portolese and Tema Stauffer that represent the artist’s response to a specific narrative-based artwork in the CCCA Canadian Art Database. The Art History students briefly described these works which were also introduced in video presentations by the artists.
Visual & Textual Documents on Art and Architecture in Canada is a virtual anthology of selected print and archival records that relate to the production and dissemination of Canadian art. It is designed to bring students closer to the primary sources of creative and scholarly history in Canada. The material assembled covers the vast array of art documents generated between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. More than a simple bibliographical database, Visual & Textual Documents on Art and Architecture in Canada makes rare and hard-to-access material available directly on the Internet: each entry in this ever-growing anthology includes the scanned reproduction of a record, along with full bibliographical information and an abstract.
