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The N.E. Thing Company was developed by artists Iain and Elaine Baxter in 1967. The company functioned as an “aesthetic umbrella,” allowing the Baxters to work collaboratively and anonymously to produce a wide range of art forms and projects. The N.E. Thing Co. was formally incorporated in 1969, with Iain Baxter as President and Elaine as Vice President; the two later became co-presidents. Elaine Baxter adopted Ingrid as her preferred name in 1971. Among the company’s projects was the Eye Scream Restaurant, in operation
from 1977 to 1978. Following the Baxters’ divorce, the company dissolved in 1978.

The institution was established in 1880. In 1913, the Government of Canada passed the National Gallery Act, formally outlined the institution's mandate as a national art museum. In 1988, the museum was relocated to its present location. The museum's permanent collection includes over 93,000 works from European, American, and Asian, Canadian, and indigenous Canadian artists. In addition to exhibiting works from its permanent collection, the museum also organizes and hosts a number of travelling exhibitions.

Joan Murray (1943-) is an art historian, curator, author and museum administrator known for her work at art museums including the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Jean-Baptiste Norman Henry Morrisseau (1931–2007), known primarily as Norval Morrisseau, was a Canadian Anishinaabe painter and printmaker who signed his work with his Ojibwa name “Copper Thunderbird.” A self-taught artist, he was born at Sand Point reserve near Beardmore, Ont. At the age of six, he was sent to a Roman Catholic residential school for two years, after which he attended a local community school. In 1957, he married Harriet Kakegamic (1935–1995) with whom he had several children. They lived in the Red Lake area and elsewhere in northwestern Ontario. In later years, the artist stayed in Nanaimo, B.C.
In a manner known as the Woodland Style he is known for initiating, Norval Morrisseau painted in thick black outlines and bright colours, basing his images on Anishinaabe cultural sources and Christian symbols. Several of his earliest solo exhibitions were held at the Pollock Gallery, with which he was associated until the gallery closed in 1981. In 1978, Norval Morrisseau was made a member of the Order of Canada. He was also a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the Professional National Indian Artists Incorporation (“Indian Group of Seven”). He retired from painting in 2002.
Norval Morrisseau died in Toronto in 2007. His works are in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ont.), the McMichael Canadian Collection and other public art museums in Canada.

Edmund Montague Morris (1871-1913) was a Canadian portraitist, landscape painter and author. Born in Perth, Ontario, he studied in Toronto privately as well as at Toronto Art Students’ League 1889-91, and in New York at the Art Students’ League, 1891-92. Between 1893 and 1896 Morris was a student at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He returned to Toronto in 1896 to set up a studio and became involved in art societies, including the Royal Canadian Academy (ARCA [associate] 1898), the Ontario Society of Artists, and the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto. A founding member of the Canadian Art Club in 1907, he was its secretary for several years. He was on the council of the Art Museum of Toronto—now the Art Gallery of Ontario—from 1909. Beginning in 1906 Morris produced the works for which he is chiefly known, portraits in pastels of Canadian aboriginal leaders. Many of these, executed during extensive travel in the Canadian West, were done on commission from the governments of Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan to be hung in provincial legislature buildings. Morris also painted landscapes, especially of scenes along the St Lawrence River in Quebec. It was while working at Portneuf near Quebec City that he drowned in August 1913. He is buried in Toronto. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and other galleries, especially in Western Canada.

James Wilson Morrice (1865-1924) was a Canadian painter. He was born in Montreal and studied at the University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall law school. Although he was called to the Ontario Bar in 1889, he never practised law. Instead, he went to France in 1890 and studied art in Paris at the Académie Julian and with painters Henri Harpignies and James McNeill Whistler. Morrice returned to Canada often to visit and became a member of the Canadian Art Club in Toronto around 1907. On several of those occasions, he painted scenes of Quebec City and the surrounding countryside—his chief Canadian works. Among Canadian painters of the day, Curtis Williamson, Maurice Cullen and William Brymner were colleagues and friends. He travelled extensively in Europe but lived for the most part in Paris, exhibiting at the Salon d’Automne and associating with artists like Henri Matisse and Robert Henri and writers such as Arnold Bennett and Somerset Maugham. His trips to North Africa and the Caribbean produced some of his most colourful canvases. Morrice is generally considered the earliest Canadian painter to achieve an international reputation. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery in Ottawa and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, as well as the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the Tate Gallery, London. He died in Tunis in 1924.

David Brown Milne (Burgoyne, Ontario 1882-Bancroft, Ontario 1953) was a painter and etcher; he is widely considered to be among the most outstanding Canadian artists. He worked as a schoolteacher before deciding to study painting in New York where, in 1903, he enrolled in the Art Students’ League. Milne supported himself through commercial artwork but actively and successfully developed his own painting, exhibiting five canvases in the famous Armory Show of 1913. His friends during this period included James (“René”) Clarke, with whom he maintained a correspondence for many years. In 1916, Milne and his wife Patsy (née May Frances Hagerty), whom he had married in 1912, left the city and settled in Boston Corners, New York. In late 1917 Milne joined the Canadian army as a private, and in 1918 was appointed as a war artist to record the locations of battles that had involved Canadian troops. Milne returned to Boston Corners in 1919, where he spent most of his winters until 1928, summering in the Adirondacks. He moved to Ottawa for one year in 1923, when the National Gallery of Canada bought six of his watercolours. In 1928, Milne moved permanently back to Ontario (he separated from his wife in 1933), spending extended periods of time alone in the wilderness regions north of Toronto. Palgrave, a short drive from Toronto, became Milne’s home from 1930 to 1933, and from 1933 to 1939 he lived in a cabin on Six Mile Lake near Georgian Bay. He maintained an interest in the Toronto art scene and developed a small group of patrons including Alice and Vincent Massey, and Douglas Duncan of the Picture Loan Society, who acted as Milne’s agent and dealer for many years. He met his second wife Kathleen Pavey in 1938 and lived with her from 1939; their only child David Jr. was born in 1941. The Milnes lived in Uxbridge from 1940 to 1946. From 1947 Milne lived and worked at Baptiste Lake, with Kathleen and David Jr. joining him periodically. As Milne’s health deteriorated, the family moved to Bancroft to be closer to Baptiste Lake. Milne died at Bancroft in December 1953. His work is represented in numerous public collections, notably the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Leslie Mezei (born 1931 in Budapest, Hungary) is a former computer scientist who did pioneering work in the theory and practice of computer art and graphics while he was a professor at the University of Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s. His computer art experiments and writings thereon are among the earliest explorations of the medium. In 1972, Mezei completed the manuscript of a book, Computer Art: An International Portfolio, containing a history and overview of the medium illustrated with reproductions of early computer artwork from around the world.

Tanya Mars (1948- ) is a feminist performance and video artist, educator, and arts administrator active mainly in Toronto, Ontario. She was born in Monroe, Michigan and attended Fine Arts courses at the University of Michigan. In 1967 she moved to Montreal with her former husband where she attained landed immigrant status in Canada. She attended Fine Arts courses at Sir George Williams University and Loyola College (now incorporated into Concordia University) before eventually moving to Toronto in 1979. She has been an integral figure in the Canadian art scene since her 1974 exhibition Codpieces: Phallic Paraphernalia. She has performed widely across Canada and also internationally in Chile, Mexico, Sweden, France, Poland, China and Finland. Mars’ approach to art is interdisciplinary, borrowing themes and performance techniques from vaudeville, theatre, stand-up comedy, film, photography, magic shows, and dance. In her early works, she would center a repertoire of vibrant female characters within layers of visually rich, satirical, absurdist imagery to disrupt and question sociopolitical relations of power and cultural narratives of gender (e.g. “Pure” series). For Mars, the live presence is critical. Her art is an ongoing process involving an interactive experience with her audience, leading to a dialogue of meanings that only become materialized when the piece is performed (e.g. Competing for Space). Furthermore, she directly involves herself as both a performer and a physical object (e.g. Tanya-in-the-Box) whereby the human body and its movement or constraint becomes an integral component of each piece. In doing so, she explores the relationships between costume and wearable art, presentation, sculpture, and spectacle to speak to how the body engages with materials to inform how we perceive ourselves and our social conditions. In the 1980s, Mars began to incorporate video art into her repertoire, creating video adaptations of her live performance art (e.g. Mz Frankenstein), however she views these as creative adaptations designed for home consumption rather than documentations of the live experience. Since the 1990s, Mars has shifted her artistic direction towards creating immersive, site-specific, durational performance art featuring evolving tableaux vivant structured around repetitive tasks (e.g. Hot, Tyranny of Bliss, In Pursuit of Happiness).
Mars was a founding member, curator, and director of Powerhouse Gallery (La Centrale) in Montreal from 1974-1978, editor of Parallelogramme magazine from 1977-1989, and a board member of ANNPAC (the Association of National Non-Profit Artist-run Centres) from 1977-1989. Since 1998 she has been a member of the 7a*11d Collective which produces a bi-annual International Festival of Performance Art in Toronto. She previously taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University and the Ontario College of Art and Design. Most recently, she taught performance art and video at the University of Toronto Scarborough and was part of the graduate faculty of the Master of Visual Studies Program at the University of Toronto. In 2004 Mars was named Artist of the Year at the Untitled Arts Awards in Toronto and she is also the winner of a 2008 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. In 2014 she received an honorary doctorate from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University.