![]() Exterior view of Gallery Arcturus | |
Established | 1994 |
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Location | 80 Gerrard Street East Toronto, Ontario M5B 1G6 |
Coordinates | 43°39′36″N79°22′41″W / 43.6600986°N 79.3780152°W |
Type | Art museum |
Curator | Deborah Harris |
Public transit access | ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Website | www |
Gallery Arcturus is an art gallery and museum in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is located in the Garden District neighbourhood on Gerrard Street East near Toronto Metropolitan University and the Church and Wellesley area. The gallery is a member of Galeries Ontario / Ontario Galleries [1] [2] and the Ontario Museum Association.
The museum operates as a public, not-for-profit contemporary art gallery with a permanent art collection of over 200 works including drawings, paintings, collages, photographs and sculptures made by notable North American artists including the photographer Simeon Posen, the Inuit art sculptor Floyd Kuptana, and the renowned artist, teacher, writer, and founder of the School of Reductionism, E.J. Gold. Established in 1994 and opening in its present location in 1997, Gallery Arcturus has held many public exhibitions including Thomas Henrickson "Inner Mirror", [3] E.J. Gold "Large As Life", [4] [5] Peter Banks "Emergence", [6] Carol George "Asia Calling", [7] Deborah Harris "Toward the One", [8] and Dominique Cruchet & Joan Cullen "Crossing the Great Waters". [9] The artist-in-residence and curator of the gallery is Deborah Harris.
Gallery Arcturus was established in 1994 by the Foundation for the Study of Objective Art, a Canadian federally registered charitable organization, to provide the public with an opportunity to view and study works by contemporary North American artists free of charge and without commercial motives. The gallery was first located in rented space on Parliament Street in Toronto. The gallery began acquiring an extensive permanent art collection for display and study, starting with a significant purchase of works by members of the "School of Reductionism" in Grass Valley, California, including paintings by E.J. Gold, Della Haywood, Heather Valencia, Robert Trice and Kelly Rivera.
In 1997, the Foundation for the Study of Objective Art purchased a 10,000 square foot heritage building located at 80 Gerrard Street East in downtown Toronto and renovated it to serve as the permanent location for the gallery and its administrative offices. The Gallery Arcturus building, in addition to being a historic property (built in 1858 in the Georgian Revival style and may be known as the Green House), [10] was immortalized by the famous Canadian Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris in a 1912 painting entitled Houses, Gerrard Street, Toronto (now part of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection). [11]
The permanent art collection has grown every year and totals over 225 works of art. Pieces from the collection are often displayed as part of new exhibits or installations. Shows tend to debut every six to eight weeks, with each space changing at different time intervals. [12]
Gallery Arcturus consists of nine exhibit areas: Genesis West and East, Up North, Collage, Photographic and Ascending Galleries as well as the Library and the Drawing and Dark Rooms.
The Genesis Gallery is the space where artists are invited to create work in response to an inquiry initiated by curator and artistic director Deborah Harris. The Up North Gallery features landscape paintings and sculptures reflecting northern Canada. Sculptures by Floyd Kuptana are displayed in the Library which also includes artworks and books by E.J. Gold. The Collage Gallery adjoins this second-floor space with works by Deborah Harris and other artists currently working in collage.
The Ascending Gallery, extending from the first to the fourth floor, features works by many of the gallery's collected artists including photographer Simeon Posen and multiple media artist Sae Kimura. [13]
The third floor is currently consists of three exhibit spaces: the Drawing Room, the Dark Room, and the Photographic Gallery. The Drawing Room features graphite and pencil drawings by Daniel Hanequand as well as works by other artists in pencil, ink and charcoal. The Photographic Gallery overlooks Gerrard Street and features photographs from the permanent collection as well as selections from previous shows of the CONTACT Photography Festival, Toronto's yearly celebration of photo art.
The Gallery Arcturus permanent art collection includes the following artists: [14] Dara Aram, Gisele Boulianne, William Caldwell, Peter Chung, Ed Cramer, Dominique Cruchet, Joan Cullen, Carol Currie and Stuart Leggett, Chris Dolan, Marie Fournier, Neil Fox, Camie Geary-Martin, Luke Gilliam, E.J. Gold, Jeremy Gordaneer, Christopher Griffin, Scott Griffin, Marni Grossman, Deborah Harris, Michael Hayes, Della Heywood, Lenka Holubec, Randy Hryhorczuk, Louis Irkok Jr, Olena Kassian, Floyd Kuptana, Dongmin Lai, Grabriel Lalonde, Chris Langstroth, Elaine Ling, Yousha Liu, Ruth Luginbuehl, Jorge Luna, Andrea Maguire, Eric McConnachie, Larry Middlestadt, Sharon Naidos, Joachim Oepkes, Simeon Posen, [15] Terri Quinn, Kelly Rivera, Wendy Rombough, Paul Saari, R.C. Trice, Heather Valencia, Susan Valyi, Francine Vernac, Irena Vormittag and Pamela Williams.
The Group of Seven, once known as the Algonquin School, was a group of Canadian landscape painters from 1920 to 1933, with "a like vision". It originally consisted of Franklin Carmichael (1890–1945), Lawren Harris (1885–1970), A. Y. Jackson (1882–1974), Frank Johnston (1888–1949), Arthur Lismer (1885–1969), J. E. H. MacDonald (1873–1932), and Frederick Varley (1881–1969). A. J. Casson (1898–1992) was invited to join in 1926, Edwin Holgate (1892–1977) became a member in 1930, and Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald (1890–1956) joined in 1932.
The National Gallery of Canada, located in the capital city of Ottawa, Ontario, is Canada's national art museum. The museum's building takes up 46,621 square metres (501,820 sq ft), with 12,400 square metres (133,000 sq ft) of space used for exhibiting art. It is one of the largest art museums in North America by exhibition space.
The Art Gallery of Ontario is an art museum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located in the Grange Park neighbourhood of downtown Toronto, on Dundas Street West. The building complex takes up 45,000 square metres (480,000 sq ft) of physical space, making it one of the largest art museums in North America and the second-largest art museum in Toronto, after the Royal Ontario Museum. In addition to exhibition spaces, the museum also houses an artist-in-residence office and studio, dining facilities, event spaces, gift shop, library and archives, theatre and lecture hall, research centre, and a workshop.
Frederick Horsman Varley was a member of the Canadian Group of Seven.
Lawren Stewart Harris LL. D. was a Canadian painter, best known as one of the founding members of the Group of Seven. He played a key role as a catalyst in Canadian art, as a visionary in Canadian landscape art and in the development of modern art in Canada.
Franklin Carmichael was a Canadian artist and member of the Group of Seven. Though he was primarily famous for his use of watercolours, he also used oil paints, charcoal and other media to capture the Ontario landscapes. Besides his work as a painter, he worked as a designer and illustrator, creating promotional brochures, advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and designing books. Near the end of his life, Carmichael taught in the Graphic Design and Commercial Art Department at the Ontario College of Art.
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Jack Hamilton Bush was a Canadian abstract painter. A member of Painters Eleven, his paintings are associated with the Color Field movement and Post-painterly Abstraction. Inspired by Henri Matisse and American abstract expressionist painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Bush encapsulated joyful yet emotional feelings in his vibrant paintings, comparing them to jazz music. Clement Greenberg described him as a "supreme colorist", along with Kenneth Noland in 1984. Bush explained that capturing the feeling of a subject rather than its likeness was
a hard step for the art loving public to take, not to have the red look like a side of a barn but to let it be the red for its own sake and how it exists in the environment of that canvas.
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Helen Barbara Howard was a Canadian painter, wood-engraver, drafter, bookbinder and designer who produced work consistently throughout her life, from her graduation in 1951 from the Ontario College of Art until her unexpected death in 2002.
Floyd Kuptana (1964-2021) was an Inuvialuk (Inuit) artist in Canada whose work is primarily stone carvings as well as paintings and collage.
The Art Gallery of Hamilton (AGH) is an art museum located in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The museum occupies a 7,000 square metres (75,000 sq ft) building on King Street West in downtown Hamilton, designed by Trevor P. Garwood-Jones. The institution is southwestern Ontario's largest and oldest art museum.
Kathleen Jean Munn is recognized today as a pioneer of modern art in Canada, though she remained on the periphery of the Canadian art scene during her lifetime. She imagined conventional subjects in a radically new visual vocabulary as she combined the traditions of European art with modern art studies in New York. She stopped painting about 1939 and when she died in 1974 at age 87, she was unaware that her long-held hope for "a possible future for my work" was about to become reality.
Barbara McGivern, also known as The Gold Lady, was a Canadian artist from Toronto, Ontario. One of her best known series is The Extraordinary Journey. The series was inspired by her trips through the deserts of Oman and Saudi Arabia, when she began incorporating the use of gold leaf into her work. Her style is most notable for presenting gold as a colour rather than as a precious metal. Her paintings are in private and corporate collections in Canada, Europe and the Middle East.
Edna Jeanette Taçon, whose name is often written, incorrectly, as Edna Tacon, was a Canadian pioneer of modernism.
Sydney Strickland Tully was a Canadian painter. She is known for her pastel and oil portraits, landscapes and genre pictures, and for her success in a number of exhibitions. Tully kept a studio in Toronto from 1888 until her death. Her major works include The Twilight of Life (1894), an oil painting in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Albert Jacques Franck was a Canadian artist. He is known for his realistic paintings of Toronto winter scenes, dilapidated neighbourhoods and back lanes. His detailed paintings provide a historical record of conditions in some of Toronto's once less affluent neighbourhoods.
Deborah Grant is a Canadian-born African-American artist noted for her work in painting and collage, particularly for her series "Random Select". She lives and works in Harlem, New York.
Claire Kerwin (1919–2005) was a Belgian-born Canadian artist that worked and experimented with several different mediums which included acrylics, collages, metalworking, mixed media, painting, pastels, graphics, and printmaking. She was born in Chatelet, Belgium and emigrated to Canada in 1947 at the age of 28. Her artistic style consisted of combining the elements of urban life and nature. Kerwin was a member of five different Canadian art societies, including the Royal Canadian Academy of Art. Kerwin's works were exhibited in public and private collections in Canada as well as internationally in Belgium, France, England, Brazil, and the United States. The Art Gallery of Northumberland houses several of her works in their permanent collection. Kerwin was awarded a Medal of Service from the City of Toronto for her contributions to the local art scene.
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