An art school is an educational institution with a primary focus on practice and related theory in the visual arts and design. This includes fine art – especially illustration, painting, contemporary art, sculpture, and graphic design. They may be independent or operate within a larger institution, such as a university. Some may be associated with an art museum.
Garry Neill Kennedy, was a Canadian conceptual artist and educator from Halifax, Nova Scotia. In the mid-1970s, he created works that investigated the processes and materials of painting. In the first decade of the 2000s, he expanded his work to investigate art and its social, institutional, and political framework.
Hosting the region's largest urban population, Halifax, Nova Scotia is an important cultural centre in Atlantic Canada. Halifax is home to a vibrant arts and culture community that enjoys considerable support and participation from the general population. As the largest community and the administrative centre of the Atlantic region since its founding in 1749, Halifax has long-standing tradition of being a cultural generator. While provincial arts and culture policies have tended to distribute investment and support of the arts throughout the province, sometimes to the detriment of more populous Halifax, cultural production in the region is increasingly being recognized for its economic benefits, as well as its purely cultural aspects.
Bruce Barber is an artist, writer, curator, and educator based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches at NSCAD University. His artwork has been shown at the Paris Biennale, the Sydney Biennial, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Walter Phillips Gallery, London Regional Gallery, and Artspace NZ in Auckland. Barber is the editor of Essays on Performance and Cultural Politicization and of Conceptual Art: the NSCAD Connection 1967–1973. He is co-editor, with Serge Guilbaut and John O'Brian of Voices of Fire: Art Rage, Power, and the State. His critical essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals and magazines. His art practice is documented in the publication Reading Rooms. He is best known for his early performance work, his Reading Rooms, Squat Projects and his writing and theory on Littoral Art.
Robert Bean is an artist, writer and teacher living in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Gerald Ferguson was a conceptual artist and painter who lived and taught in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Born in Cincinnati he was both a Canadian and US citizen. After receiving his MFA from Ohio University, Ferguson taught at Wilmington College and Kansas City Art Institute before coming to Canada in 1968, invited to teach at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax. He continued to teach at NSCAD until his retirement in 2006.
John Greer is a Canadian sculptor who likes to bring cultural and natural history together. One critic calls him one of Canada's most philosophically minded artists. He looks to ancient Celtic stones and Greek sculpture for inspiration. Greer was the catalyst behind "Halifax Sculpture", a 1990s movement, rooted in minimalism and conceptualism.
NSCAD conceptual art refers to a period beginning in 1969 when Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), a post-secondary art school in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada became an important art centre with an international reputation.
The Local Council of Women of Halifax (LCWH) is an organization in Halifax, Nova Scotia devoted to improving the lives of women and children. One of the most significant achievements of the LCWH was its 24-year struggle for women's right to vote (1894-1918). The core of the well trained and progressive leadership was five women: Anna Leonowens, Edith Archibald, Eliza Ritchie, Agnes Dennis and May Sexton. Halifax business man George Henry Wright left his home in his will to the LCWH, which the organization received after he died in the Titanic (1912). Educator Alexander McKay also was a significant supporter of the Council.
Kim Morgan is a Canadian sculpture and installation artist based in Nova Scotia, and a faculty member of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD). Working with a wide range of materials, technologies and techniques from varying disciplines, Morgan explores "how we produce and negotiate the spaces we live in, how we move through them, and how this affect individual and collective identities." Morgan's examination of how we perceive time and space is the backbone of her art practice.
Ursula Johnson is a multidisciplinary Mi’kmaq artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Her work combines the Mi’kmaq tradition of basket weaving with sculpture, installation, and performance art. In all its manifestations her work operates as didactic intervention, seeking to both confront and educate her viewers about issues of identity, colonial history, tradition, and cultural practice. In 2017, she won the Sobey Art Award.
Kym Greeley is a Canadian painter based in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, known primarily for her screen-printed paintings of the province's landscape and roads. In 2011, she was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award, one of Canada's most prestigious contemporary art awards.
Elizabeth Styring Nutt, was an artist and educator, known for her leadership of the Nova Scotia College of Art in Halifax.
Lucie Chan is a visual artist born in Guyana, who is now based in Canada. Her artwork employs various techniques including large-scale drawings-based installation and animation focusing on such themes as cultural confusion, the transient nature of human connections, and shape-shifting identity.
Carole Condé D.F.A. was a Canadian artist whose practice responds to critical contemporary cultural, social, and political issues through the use of collaboration and dialogue. Condé and long-time collaborator and partner Karl Beveridge challenged concepts of ideology, power, and control. In their career, which spanned over thirty years, Condé and Beveridge have had over fifty solo exhibitions at major museums and art spaces across four continents, including: the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, UK; Museum Folkswang in Germany; the George Meany Centre in Washington; Dazibao Gallery in Montréal; Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires; the Art Gallery of Alberta; and the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney.
Karl Beveridge D.F.A. is a Canadian artist. His practice responds to critical contemporary cultural, social, and political issues through the use of collaboration and dialogue. Beveridge and long-time collaborator and partner Carole Condé challenge concepts of ideology, power, and control.
Charlotte Townsend-Gault is an art historian, professor emeritus, author, and curator. Townsend-Gault’s research, teaching and scholarship concerns contemporary visual and material Native American and First Nations cultures, particularly those of the Pacific Northwest.
The NSCAD Lithography Workshop was a program active at NSCAD University from 1969 to 1976 that gave practicing artists the opportunity to visit the school and produce limited edition prints in collaboration with a Master printer. The workshop allowed NSCAD students to witness professional artists develop their ideas and create work through the medium of printmaking. The Lithography Workshop succeeded in elevating the status of the school, both in terms of innovation and technical capacity.
Ann Noël is a British artist associated with the Fluxus movement. Noël has lived and worked in Berlin since 1980 and was married to the American artist and poet Emmett Williams. Noël's artistic practice integrates performance, installation, painting, graphic design, printmaking, and photography.
Theodore Saskatche Wan was a Hong Kong-Canadian photographer, conceptual artist, and performance artist. Wan is most well known for his series of self-portraits in which the artist positioned himself as the "patient" in medical and surgical-style instructional photographs.
