Canadian Women Artists History Initiative

Dr. Sherry Farrell-Racette

Sherry Farrell Racette, Assistant Professor of Art History at Concordia University, is an interdisciplinary scholar  with an active arts practice.  She has an MED in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Regina and an Interdisciplinary PhD (Native Studies, Anthropology, History) from the University of Manitoba (2004).  Her broad research focus is Métis and First Nations women's history, particularly reconstructing indigenous art histories that recontextualize museum collections and reclaim women's voices and lives. Some of her publications include: Sewing for a Living: the Commodification of Métis Women's Artistic Production in Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada's Colonial Past (2005), “Métis Man or Canadian Icon: Who Owns Louis Riel” in Rielisms (2001), “Beads, Silk and Quills:  the Clothing and Decorative Arts of the Métis” in Metis Legacy (2001) and “Sex, Fear, Women, Travel and Work: Five Persistent Triggers of Eurocentric Negativity” in Pushing the Margins (2001). In addition, she has illustrated children's books written by Maria Campbell, Freda Ahnenakew and Ruby Slipperjack.  Most recently she illustrated Fiddle Dancer by Wilfred Burton and Anne Patton for the Gabriel Dumont Institute.  Her arts practice includes painting and multi-media works combining textiles, beadwork and embroidery with images and text.  Recent exhibitions include Dolls for Big Girls (2000), Regina Art Gallery, Illustrative Images: Sherry Farrell Racette (2002), Mackenzie Art Gallery, and group exhibitions: Rielisms (2001), Winnipeg Art Gallery, Animate Objects:  the Grammar of Craft in First Nations Contemporary Art (2002), Sakewewak Artists' Collective, and Connective Tissue (Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec, Montreal, Quebec (2007).  Her works are in a number of public collections including the Saskatchewan Arts Board, MacKenzie Art Gallery and the Canada Council's Art Bank.  In 2005, she co-curated an exhibition of contemporary traditional artists, Clearing a Path, for the Saskatchewan centennial, an exhibition that continues to tour the province.  Most recently she was invited to the University of Aberdeen to work with Scottish museum curators who have collections from northern Algonkian territory.  In Fall 2007 she will be a keynote speaker at the Canadian Conservation Institute's 2007 Symposium, Preserving Aboriginal Heritage:  Technical and Traditional Approaches.  She will also be giving a Shannon Lecture at Carleton University, which will serve as the plenary address for the Women and Work in Public History Conference, organized by the Canadian Association for Women's Public History.

Dr. Brian Foss

Dr Brian Foss is Professor of Art History and Associate Dean of Fine Arts at Concordia University. He holds an M.A. in Canadian Art History from Concordia University and a Ph.D. from the University of London, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar.  The recipient of the 2003 Distinguished Teaching Award in the Faculty of Fine Arts, he specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian art, twentieth-century British art, war and art, and issues of nationhood and identity in visual culture.  He is also the author of numerous catalogues and essays, and has curated or co-curated exhibitions on the art of Edwin Holgate (1892-1977), Mary Hiester Reid (1854-1921) and Robert Harris (1849-1919), as well as on images of the modern city (1998), work by emerging artists (1993), art collecting by the Université de Montréal (1993), military views from Lower Canada (1992), and the visual representation of rural Quebec over two centuries (1991). In 2007 his book War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain 1939-1945 was published by Yale University Press. He is currently co-editing a history of twentieth-century Canadian art for Oxford University Press, is co-curating an exhibition on Montreal's Beaver Hall artists' group (1920-22) for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (2011), and is a member of the comité scientifique organising the exhibition Expanding Horizons: Confederation, Reconstruction and the Final Frontier for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2009).  He is also the associate editor of the Journal of Canadian Art History, and an editor of RACAR: Revue d'art canadien / Canadian Art Review.

Dr. Kristina Huneault, Concordia University

Kristina Huneault is Concordia University's Research Chair in Art History and her current scholarship focuses on historical Canadian women artists.  She holds an M.A. in Canadian Art History from Concordia (1994) and a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester (1998), where she was a Commonwealth Scholar. She has taught at Concordia since 1999, and was the University's emerging research fellow in 2004.  She teaches in both the MA and PhD programs, and has offered courses on feminism and Canadian women artists, semiotic reading practices, the philosophy of subjectivity, and the writing of art history. Dr. Huneault's approach to art -- which bridges feminism and poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and social history -- considers how pictorial images participate in the construction of subjectivity. How do images help us understand the self in relation to others?  In her first book Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880-1914 (Ashgate, 2002) this theme was considered in relation to images of labouring women, while in her current research she is exploring the visible traces of gendered subjectivity in paintings by Canadian women. Recent work on Helen McNicoll (Art History 27,2), Frances Anne Hopkins (Ashgate, 2006), and miniature painting (RACAR 30, 1-2; Manchester University Press, 2007) has been funded by SSHRC and FQRSC, and relates to her next monograph: Presence Through Absence: Gender in the Art of 19th c. Canadian Women. Other published writings include articles on the public display of working women in sweated industries exhibitions (2000); images of flower sellers in Victorian culture (1998); women in British trade union imagery (1996), and the war sculptures of Canadian artists Frances Loring and Florence Wyle (1994).

Dr. Elaine C. Paterson, Concordia University

Elaine Cheasley Paterson is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Concordia University. She holds an MA in Canadian Art History from Concordia University (1999) and a PhD from Queen's University (2003), where she was a SSHRC and FCAR scholar and recipient of the Bader Fellowship in Art History. Her current SSHRC and FQRSC funded research concerns women's cultural philanthropy in early twentieth-century British, Irish and Canadian craft guilds of the home arts movement. She is particularly interested in the Dun Emer Guild, Dublin (founded in 1902 by Evelyn Gleeson and the Yeats sisters), the Compton Potters' Arts Guild (founded in 1895 by Mary Seton Watts), and the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, Montreal (founded in 1905 by Alice Peck and Mary Phillips). She has presented this research at many international conferences, including in Britain, in Ireland and in the United States. Her writing and teaching are focused on the relationships between material culture and feminist theory, with an emphasis on the decorative arts and craft history. Some of her publications include 'Crafting a National Identity' in The Irish Revival Reappraised (2004); 'Decoration and Desire in the Watts Chapel' Gender and History 17:3 (2005); 'Gender and Canadian Ceramics: Women's Networks' in On the Table: 100 Years of Functional Ceramics in Canada (Gardiner Museum catalogue, 2006); as well as review articles for RACAR, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, and The Journal of Stained Glass (London). She is on the editorial board of the newly-formed Cahiers metiers d'art – Craft Journal (Montreal). Her curatorial work has focused on contemporary Quebec craft.

Dr. Didier Prioul

Didier Prioul is Associate Professor of Art History at Laval University, where he specializes in Canadian and Quebec art from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Formerly the chief curator and director of education at the Musée du Québec (1993-2000), and the curator of European Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (1991-1993), Dr. Prioul's major exhibitions in Canada and Europe include: Tous ces livres sont à toi!, the inaugural exhibition of the Grande Bibliotheagrave;que in Montreal (2005); Are You Talking To Me? Conversation(s) (Galerie de l'UQAM, 2003); Félicien Rops (Musée du Québec and the Musée Félicien Rops, Belgium, 1998) Abraham-Louis-Rodolphe Ducros (Musée du Québec and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, 1998), Québec plein la vue (Musée du Québec, 1994) and La peinture au Québec 1820-1850 (Musée du Québec, 1991). In addition to numerous exhibition catalogues, he has published on Canadian Art in RACAR (2007), and the Journal of Canadian Art History (24, 2003). Dr. Prioul's current scholarship on the history of museum exhibition practices in Québec is funded by the FQRSC and SSHRC.

Dr. Annmarie Adams

Annmarie Adams is William C. Macdonald Professor at the School of Architecture, McGill University. She was educated as an architect (M.Arch. 1986) and architectural historian (Ph.D. 1992) at the University of California at Berkeley. An expert on the history of gendered space, domestic architecture, and hospital design, Dr. Adams is the author of Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900 and co-author of Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession with sociologist Peta Tancred. She currently serves as a Mentor in the CIHR-funded training program, Health Care Technology and Place at the University of Toronto. With Robert Mellin, she co-directs the post-professional option, Domestic Environments / Cultural Landscapes at McGill University's School of Architecture. In January 2008 she will be the first Arcus Scholar-in-Residence at the College of Environmental Design, University of California at Berkeley, where she will teach a graduate seminar entitled "Sex and the Single Building." Adams' new book Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943, will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2007. She currently holds two grants from CIHR: to explore The Atrium at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto (with Patricia McKeever, University of Toronto and Karen Spalding, Ryerson University) and the development of the high-rise medical clinic in the 1920s (with Stacie Burke, University of Manitoba and David Theodore, McGill University). A new grant from the Australian Research Council, with University of Melbourne professors Julie Willis and Philip Goad, supports a comparative study of American, Canadian, and Australian hospitals.

Dr. Sandra Alfoldy

Dr Sandra Alfoldy is Assistant Professor of Craft History at NSCAD University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she was recipient of the graduating class's Best Faculty Award in 2004. She is the author of Crafting Identity: The development of professional fine craft in Canada (MQUP, 2005), co-editor of Craft in Space: Architecture, Interiors and Decoration (Ashgate 2007) and co-curator of the travelling exhibition On the Table: 100 Years of Functional Ceramics in Canada (Royal Ontario Museum, 2006). Other exhibition catalogues include Regina Clay: Worlds in the Making (MacKenzie Art Gallery 2005) and Shifting ground : woven works by Suzanne Swannie (Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, 2004). Dr. Alfoldy completed her graduate studies at Concordia University (MA 1999, PhD 2001). She is on the editorial board of the Cahiers métiers d'art/ Craft Journal.

Dr. Laurier Lacroix

Laurier Lacroix is Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at l'Université du Québec à Montréal, having previously taught at Concordia University (1976-1988).  He studied art history at l'Université de Montréal (M.A.) and at l'Université Laval (Ph.D.), Museum Studies at the l'école du Louvre as well as French literature at McGill University (M.A.). He has published extensively on historical and contemporary art in Quebec and Canada. Recent publications include L'Espace-couleur de Robert Wolfe (Presses de l'Université Laval, 2006); Guy Pellerin. La couleur d'Ozias Leduc (Musée d'art de Joliette, 2004), and Ulysse Comtois. Entre l'exploration et l'enracinement (Les éditions du passage, 2003). He has also served as guest curator for numerous exhibitions dedicated to Ozias Leduc, Paul Lacroix, Marc-Aureagrave;le de Foy Suzor-Côté and Irene F. Whittome, among others. Laurier Lacroix is a member of the Société des Dix for Québec history; and is the recipient of a career award from the Quebec Museum Society (1997), the Canadian Museums Association Prize (1993) for the catalogue La Peinture au Québec 1820-1859, Nouveaux regards, Nouvelles Perspectives (Musée du Québec, 1991) and the Prix-France-Québec for the Image de la Révolution francaise au Québec, 1789-1989 (HMH Hurtubise, 1989). His current research projects, on painting in New France, and painting in Québec from the late 19th century to the second world war, are funded by SSHRC.

Dr. Ruth Phillips

Dr. Ruth Phillips researches visual and material culture as aspects of larger processes of culture contact and colonization in order to contribute to the development of new approaches to museological and academic representations of First Nations art, much of which was made by women. As the Canada Research Chair in Modern Culture, at Carleton University, Dr. Phillips is working with a group of colleagues in museums, universities, and Aboriginal communities to form the Great Lakes Alliance for Research in Aboriginal Art and Culture (GRASAC). The group will collaborate to develop an innovative database of historic visual and textual sources for the study of Great Lakes visual culture and communicative practices which will incorporate both Western and indigenous knowledge and perspectives. Dr Phillips has a PhD from the School of African and Oriental Studies at the University of London, and has been the recipient of major awards and fellowships from the Clark Art Institute, the Getty Research Institute, the National Gallery of Canada, the British Academy, and the Canadian Museums Association. From 1997 to 2003 she was director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where she was also Professor of Anthropology and Art History. She has curated exhibitions for McMichael Canadian Collection, the Glenbow Museum, the McCord Museum of Canadian History, and several other institutions. Dr. Phillips' major publications include: Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900 (Seattle, 1998); Native North American Art with Janet Catherine Berlo (New York, 1998); Unpacking Culture: Arts and Commodities in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, co-edited with Christopher B. Steiner (Berkeley, 1999); "Morrisseau's Entrance: Negotiating Primitivism, Modernism, and Anishnaabe Tradition," in Greg Hill ed., Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist (Ottawa, 2006). She is currently working on two book projects whose working titles are "Transmission and Translation: Visuality and Art in the Great Lakes," and "Museum Pieces: Exhibiting Native Art in Canadian Museums."

Dr. Colleen Skidmore, University of Alberta

Dr. Colleen Skidmore is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Alberta, where she teaches the history of photography and the history of art in Canada. An expert in women, race and photography in Canada, she is currently conducting SSHRC-funded research on female photographers in the Rocky Mountains, and is the editor of a recent collection of essays entitled This Wild Spirit: Women in the Rocky Mountains of Canada (Edmonton, 2006). Dr. Skidmore holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of British Columbia (1989) and a PhD in Sociology and Cultural Studies from the University of Alberta (1999). She has published essays on Canadian photography in Ethnologies (26; 2004), History of Photography (2003) Histoire Sociale/Social History (35; 2002), the Journal of Canadian Art History (19, 1998), and History of Photography (1996). Dr. Skidmore has been recognized by the University of Alberta Student Union for outstanding undergraduate teaching; she was Associate Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts from 2004 to 2007.