FOUNDING DIRECTOR AND DISTINGUISHED RESEARCH FELLOW

Dr. François-Marc Gagnon

Dr. François-Marc Gagnon is the Founding Director and Distinguished Research Fellow of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. Dr. Gagnon is internationally recognized as an outstanding senior scholar in Canadian visual culture. In 1999, he received the Order of Canada. He is a teacher, researcher, writer, and lecturer, and a tireless promoter of Canada’s visual heritage. A dynamic and inspiring teacher, he taught at the Université de Montréal for thirty-five years. He was also a lecturer in Concordia’s graduate art history program. Dr. Gagnon is a prolific researcher and has received the Governor General's Award for his 1978 critical biography of Paul-Émile Borduas. His other books include La Conversion par l’image (1975), Paul-Émile Borduas: Ecrits/Writings 1942-1958 (1978), Paul-Émile Borduas (1988) for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Chronique du mouvement automatiste québécoise1941-1954 (1998). Other numerous monograph studies span the history of Quebec art, including such publications as Premiers peintres de la Nouvelle-France (1976) to recent writings on Riopelle. Dr. Gagnon also has written a substantial number of essays for exhibition catalogues and has curated a number of these exhibitions. In addition he has regularly contributed chapters to a lengthy list of books on Quebec visual culture. He has also been a regular contributor to The Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales de l’histoire de l’art canadien and is a member of its editorial board, among others. Many of his publications have received awards and all of his writings take pride of place in the history of Canadian and Quebec art.  In addition, Dr. Gagnon has been an honoured speaker at numerous scholarly conferences across Canada and also reached the wider community through his television series entitled Introduction à la peinture moderne au Québec for Canal Savoir. More recently he has presented a series of annual lectures on aspects of Canadian art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in conjunction with the Jarislowsky Institute. He has served on various boards of museums and is constantly called upon as a consultant to art and academic institutions.

FIRST DISTINGUISHED FELLOW

Sandra Paikowsky

Sandra Paikowsky is First Distinguished Fellow of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.  One of her early projects for the Institute was the presentation of the conference, Untold Histories, on art in the Maritime Provinces and held at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. More recently she produced the first history of the Maritime Art Association. Professor Paikowsky co-founded the Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d'histoire de l'art canadien in 1974 and was its Managing Editor until 2010, when she also retired from Concordia’s Art History Department. She remains the Journal’s publisher and a member of its editorial board. From 1981 to 1992 she was the Director/Curator of the Concordia Art Gallery. Since then, she has guest-curated various exhibitions, including the Goodridge Roberts 1904-1974 traveling retrospective (1998) and was a co-curator of Achieving the Modern. Canadian Abstract Painting and Design in the 1950s  (1992). In 2010, she curated the exhibition John Fox: Refiguration. Her wide-ranging publications and writings on Canadian art include for example, “Constructing an Identity. The 1952 XXVI Biennale di Venezia and "The Projection of Canada Abroad," JCAH/AHAC, 1999 and "From Away: The Carnegie Corporation, Walter Abell and American Strategies for Art in the Maritimes from the 1920s to the 1940s,” JCAH/AHAC, 2006. Prof. Paikowsky was also a co-editor of The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century (2010) and the author of the chapter “Modernist Representational Painting before 1950.” She is also a series co-editor for the McGill-Queen's Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History. Her current research centers on James Wilson Morrice, publishing “James Wilson Morrice in Venice. The Campiello delle Ancore,” JCAH/AHAC (2005) as well as “James Wilson Morrice’s Return from School: A Modernist Image of Quebec Children,” in Depicting Canada’s Children (2009). She is preparing a publication on Morrice’s Venetian drawings and paintings. Most relevant to the Institute, she currently editing two issues of the JCAH/AHAC with articles in honour of François-Marc Gagnon.

ART HISTORY DEPARTMENT RESEARCH FELLOWS

The Institute is pleased to include the following Faculty members of Concordia’s Art History Department among its research fellows. Please consult the Art History website for more extensive biographical information.

Jean Bélisle

Jean Bélisle received his doctorate in 1983 from the Université de Paris IV; his thesis dealt with the ship-carving phenomenon in Quebec. He has been involved with several major research projects such as L'architecture vernaculaire de l'archipel Saint-Pierre et Miquelon with the French CNRS, the Molson project - an underwater archaeological excavation of an early steamboat. He is also involved in a major study of industrial architecture along the banks of the Lachine Canal for the federal government. He has published La sculpture traditionelle au Quebec (ed. Di L'omme 1996) with John Porter. In 1994 he wrote a children's book À propos d'un bateau à vapeur which received an award from the Quebec Science Teachers Association as well as another for the best French-language Canadian children’s book (1995).  He has also received the Prix Robert-Lionel-Séguin for his work on Quebec architectural history (1998). He has also curated such exhibitions as Cast Iron Architecture in Montreal (1979), Bienvenue à Bord (1989), and Regard sur un paysage industriel (1992). Dr. Bélisle is a regular consultant to various federal and provincial departments as well as museums and historical societies for his extensive knowledge of Quebec’s architectural heritage. His participation at numerous conferences and his lengthy list of publications demonstrate his enormous contribution to the field. To view some of his graduate seminar projects on Canadian architecture visit http://archeo.concordia.ca/.

Kristina Huneault

Kristina Huneault holds a Concordia University Research Chair in art history.  She has an M.A. in Canadian art history from Concordia (1994) and a Ph.D. in British visual culture 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.  Dr. Huneault's approach to art combines detailed historical research with theoretical questions informed by feminism, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis.  She is the author of Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880-1914 (2002), a founder of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, and the 2010 recipient of the Marion Dewar Prize in Canadian Women’s History.

Dr. Huneault’s current research seeks to build an interface between theories of subjectivity and art made by women in Canada during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  How does art partake in the creation of a sense of selfhood, and how is it related to our understanding of others?  Her answers to these questions are both historically situated and theoretically informed.

Dr. Huneault is also a founder of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative (CWAHI).  This is a collaborative Concordia-based project which offers a forum for discussion and research on historical women’s art in Canada. Its mandate is to promote research on a wide range of historical Canadian women artists through conferences, workshops and publications, and to support this research through a Documentation Centre and the development of historical research tools. CWAHI welcomes student involvement.

Cynthia Imogen Hammond

Cynthia Imogen Hammond teaches architectural history in the Department of Art History, Concordia University. She completed her Ph.D. in 2002 through Concordia’s interdisciplinary Humanities Doctoral Program.

After teaching in several Canadian universities, she held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Architecture, McGill University (2004-2006). Hammond has received awards for her research, including the Governor General’s Gold Medal for Doctoral Dissertation (2002) and the Nineteenth Century Studies Association Emerging Scholar Award (2007) for her essay on hospital reformer, Florence Nightingale.

Her FQRSC Emerging Scholar grant (2008-2011) supports her current research on the rise of modernism in Montreal, 1945-1965. Since her appointment at Concordia, Hammond has published on a range of subjects related to architectural history and contemporary urban issues. She has presented this work at professional conferences in Helsinki, Berkeley, New York, Washington, Dublin, Leipzig and Pécs, Hungary. Her book on women’s contributions to the built environment and cultivated landscapes of Bath, England will be published by Ashgate in 2011. This publication will coincide with the one-hundred year anniversary of suffragette activity in that city, which is one of the key subjects of the book. In addition to research and publishing on architecture, cities and landscapes, Hammond maintains an interdisciplinary studio practice that includes public art, painting and drawing, sound and most recently, digital video. Her last group exhibition, feminist practices, traveled to nine locations, concluding its tour at the University of Melbourne in 2009. More details about her publications, research and art can be found at www.cynthiahammond.com and at www.pouf.ca.

Loren Lerner

Loren Lerner holds a cross-disciplinary formation in art history (M.A., University of Michigan), library science (M.L.S, McGill University), and communication studies (Ph.D., Université de Montréal). Her major earlier publications include Art and Architecture in Canada: A Bibliography and Guide to the Literature (with Mary Williamson, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991) and Canadian Film and Video: A Bibliography and Guide to the Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). Lerner was curator and editor of Afterimage: Evocations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Canadian Arts and Literature/Rémanences: Evocations de l'Holocauste dans les arts et littérature canadiens contemporains (Montreal: Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies, 2002) and curator and author of Memories and Testimonies/Memoires et Témoignages (Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 2002) and the Sam Borenstein Retrospective Exhibition (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2005). Lerner’s current research focuses on the social and cultural meanings of images of children and youth in Canadian art. in In 2005, Lerner was curator of Picturing Her: Images of Girlhood / Salut les filles! La jeune fille en images at the McCord Museum. This exhibition project led to Lerner’s editorship of Depicting Canada's Children published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2009. Other recent writings from 2008 to 2010 on the images of Canada’s young people appear in Canadian Children’s Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse, Journal of Canadian Art History, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Girlhood Studies, Historical Studies in Education, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada/Cahiers de la Société bibliographique du Canada, and Healing the World’s Children: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Child Health in the Twentieth Century. Lerner is also interested in the intersections of contemporary art and religion and is currently editing a book on this subject with a strong emphasis on Canadian art.

Catherine MacKenzie

Catherine MacKenzie received her doctorate from the University of Toronto in 1984, specializing in eighteenth-century French architectural theory. Since coming to Concordia University, she has held a large number of senior administrative posts in the Faculty and University (most recently, Chair of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, 2001-2004). Her recent academic interests are concerned with issues of race and representation in American art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a specific concern for the dynamics of ex-patriate production by women living in China and its reception in the United States. Her research has also led her to develop a teaching stream that considers the work of artists born in mainland China who have, since the end of the nineteenth century, permanently or temporarily emigrated to North America and Europe. Dr. MacKenzie has presented papers on these topics at scholarly conferences and published “Florence Wheelock Ayscough's Niger Reef Tea House” in The Journal of Canadian Art History History/Annales de l’histoire de l’art canadien (2002).

Alice Ming Wai Jim

Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim teaches courses on contemporary art, media art, ethnocultural art histories, international art exhibitions and curatorial studies in the Department of Art History. She received her MA (1996) from Concordia University and her PhD (2004) from McGill University. Prior to joining Concordia University, Dr. Jim was Curator of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A) from 2003 to 2006. Her main fields of research are in contemporary Asian art and Asian Canadian art with a particular interest in recent media art, theories of representation, and the relationship between remix culture and place identity. Dr. Jim has been studying the pedagogical direction of global art histories in Canada since 2008 as part of her ongoing research project to assess curriculum development of ethnocultural art histories in the Canadian and Quebec context. She holds SSHRC and FQRSC grants for the period 2008-2012 and is currently writing a book on representations of China and Hong Kong in urban-themed international art exhibitions.

Elaine Cheasley Paterson

Elaine Cheasley Paterson 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 May 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 Cahiers metiers d’art – Craft Journal (Montreal), a member of the Centre for the Study of Canadian Women Artists and the Quebec Quilt Registry Project at Concordia. Her curatorial work has focussed on contemporary Quebec craft.

Johanne Sloan

Johanne Sloan is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Art History.  She has a BFA from Concordia University, an MA from the Université de Montréal, and a  PhD in the History and Theory of Art from the University of Kent, England (1998).  She was also awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at Columbia University.  Her teaching and research encompass modern and contemporary Canadian art, the interdisciplinary study of landscape, and methodological questions about visual and material culture.  Her most recent SSHRC grant concerned the multiple intersections of visual art and pop culture in Canada, from the sixties to the present day. She contributed the overview essay “The New Figuration: From Pop to Postmodernism,” to Canadian Art in the Twentieth Century, 2010.  She has published extensively on the artist and filmmaker Joyce Wieland, most recently Joyce Wieland’s The Far Shore, 2010, a monograph on this feature film.  Other texts on Wieland are:  “Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow: Conceptual Landscape Art,” in Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art, 2007, and “Joyce Wieland at the border: nationalism, the New Left, and the question of political art in Canada, circa 1971,” in  Journal of Canadian Art History, 2005.  Dr. Sloan is the co-editor (with Rhona Richman Kenneally) of a book on Montreal’s 1967 world’s fair, Expo 67: Not just a souvenir, 2010, which also includes her essay “Postcards and the chromophilic visual culture of Expo 67.”  She is currently doing research on the history and meaning of the picture postcard.

Anne Whitelaw

Prior to joining the Department of Art History at Concordia, Anne Whitelaw was associate professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta where she taught the history of visual culture in Canada, theories of museums and exhibitions and the history of advertising. Her research examines the intersections of art historiography and cultural institutions in Canada, with a particular focus on practices of exhibition and collecting as a means of understanding the formation of nationhood. Dr. Whitelaw has published extensively on the display of Canadian art at the National Gallery of Canada, on the writings of art historian John Russell Harper, and on the integration of Aboriginal art into the permanent displays of national museums. She is co-editor with Brian Foss and Sandra Paikowsky of The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2010). Her current research includes a book on the relationship between federal cultural institutions and art galleries in Western Canada, and an exploration of the work of women’s volunteer committees in North American museums.

VISITING FELLOWS

Barbara Clausen

Barbara Clausen received her PhD in Art History from the University of Vienna Austria on Performance: Documents Between Action and Spectator. Babette Mangolte and the Historization of Performance Art.  She is a curator and art historian working and living in Vienna and Montreal. As a Visiting Research Fellow at The Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art she is investigating the history as well as the national and international significance of performance artists (Francoise Sullivan, Vera Frenkel, Suzy Lake, or Joyce Wieland a.o.), as well as collective artist initiatives and spaces that are committed to critical and performative practices in the arts (La Central Powerhouse in Montreal, Fado Performance Art Center in Toronto, or the Western Front in Vancouver), in Canada since the 1960s. Clausen is specifically interested in researching how political events and social movements of the past, such as the Quiet Revolution in Quebec and the Feminist Movement throughout Canada, have influenced the reception, history, institutionalization and establishment of performance art.

Rebecca Duclos

Rebecca Duclos received her PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from the University of Manchester (United Kingdom). She studied in Canada for her MA in Museum Studies (University of Toronto), B.Ed. in Art Education (York University), and BA in Classical Studies and Near Eastern Archaeology (University of Toronto). Duclos is a past fellow of the American Association of University Women, the Cultural Theory Institute and the Centre for Museology at the University of Manchester (UK), as well as participating in the 2004 dissertation workshop at the Getty Research Institute. She has recently curated Voir/Noir at the Musée d’art de Joliette, As Much as Possible Given the Time and Space Allotted with David K. Ross at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, and Magnify with Lauren Fensterstock at the ICA in the Maine College of Art.

Stephen Horne

Born in Nairobi in 1948, Horne studied philosophy and fine arts at the University of Victoria, SFU in Vancouver and York University in Toronto. Stephen Horne now lives in Montreal, Quebec and France and was a professor in media arts at NSCAD University in Halifax 1979-2005. His reviews and essays are published in journals, anthologies and catalogues in Canada, Europe and Asia. His book, Abandon Building: Selected Writings, was published by Eleven Press in 2006. A recent curatorial project Pourquoi Photogenique? (Emanuel Licha) was presented at the SBC Gallery in Montreal.

Monique Nadeau-Saumier

Monique Nadeau-Saumier has an MA in art history from Concordia University, an MA in museology from the University of Montreal and is currently completing her doctoral thesis on Sherbrooke’s Art Building for UQAM. She has taught at Bishop’s University and was also the Administrative Director of its Eastern Townships Research Centre. She has also worked at many museums including the Musée de la civilisation du Québec and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. She has organized a number of exhibitions including, Louis Muhlstock for the Musée du Québec (1995) and collaborated on Frederick S. Coburn at the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke (1996). Most recently she organized the presentation, Riopelle et autres Maîtres québécois de la Collection de l’Université de Sherbrooke – Cinquante ans de mécénat.

Jan Noel

Jan Noel is an associate professor of Canadian History and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Winner of the Canadian Historical Association's John A. Macdonald Prize for her book Canada Dry : Temperance Crusade before Confederation, she is currently completing a book on women in Early French Canada. A Jarislowsky Institute Fellowship facilitates gathering and analysing visual material to enhance Professor Noel's writing as well as her teaching.

Rosa Schulenburg

Born in Germany, where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Heidelberg, Dr. Schulenburg is the Institute's first international Research Fellow. During her one-year tenure in 2001, Dr. Schulenburg pursued her interest in public art by conducting research into Montreal murals and graffiti, and she presented a public lecture at Concordia on her findings. Since returning to Berlin, she has recently been appointed head of the visual arts collection of the Akademie der Künste. She has also contributed two essays on contemporary art and urban space in the Jahrbuch der Guernica Gesellschaft (Yearbook of the Guernica Society), Universitätsverlag Osnabrück.

Julia Skelly

Julia Skelly received her PhD from the Department of Art at Queen’s University (2010) and her MA from the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University (2006). She is the author of No Strangers to Beauty: Black Women Artists and the Hottentot Venus (2008), and she has received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, a SSHRC CGS Master’s Scholarship, a Max Stern-McCord Museum Fellowship, and a William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Short-Term Fellowship from the University of California, Los Angeles, among other awards. Dr. Skelly’s research under the auspices of the Jarislowsky Institute will focus on banners produced for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and engravings by John Henry Walker (1831-1899).

Jakub Zdebik

Jakub Zdebik received his doctorate from The Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at The University of Western Ontario after completing his dissertation on the aesthetics of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. At the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, he is researching issues of cartography and landscape in the works of Janice Kerbel, Janet Cardiff and Paterson Ewen. This notion of landscape relies on the concept of geophilosophy applied to issues of mapping and diagramming of the environment represented in visual art.