Canada History Week 2022

VISUAL ARTS

KENOJUAK ASHEVAK was an Inuit artist and the first woman involved in the famed co-op printmaking shop at Kinngait (Cape Dorset). Her most well-known print, The Enchanted Owl (1960), was used on a postage stamp to commemorate the centennial of the Northwest Territories. Although her drawings and prints gained the most praise, she was also a carver, designed blankets, and created a mural at the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan. Watch the Heritage Minute on Kenojuak Ashevak to learn more.

Kenojuak Ashevak (Library and Archives Canada/National Film Board fonds/e011177387).

FRANCES LORING and FLORENCE WYLE , collaborators and lifelong partners, were founding members of the Sculptors Society of Canada. Loring worked on fostering a climate to make sculpture possible for others. She was a chief organizer of the Federation of Canadian Artists and the Canada Council for the Arts. Wyle was the first woman accorded full membership in the Royal Canadian Academy of Art. Her public art commissions were frequently sculptures of women and tended to have an intimate style. Both Wyle and Loring died in 1968; in their wills they donated the proceeds of their work to a fund set up to purchase pieces by young sculptors to have them exhibited in public galleries across Canada.

Yousuf Karsh, June 1936 (Joseph Alexandre Castonguay/ Library and Archives Canada/e010683549).

YOUSUF KARSH came to Canada as an Armenian refugee in 1924, studying photography with his uncle, and later moved to Boston to study portrait photography with John H. Garo. In 1932, Karsh opened a portrait studio in Ottawa. Known as the twentieth century’s portrait photographer, he would go on to take photographic portraits of major international figures such as Portia White, Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy, and Marshall McLuhan, to name a few. Karsh’s 1941 portrait of Winston Churchill, which appeared on the cover of Life magazine, remains one of his most well-known.

Mural in Victoria (Meunierd/Dreamstime.com).

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