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Established in 1872, the Ontario Society of Artists is Canada’s longest continuing art society. It is a professional association for visual artists who live and work across Ontario with a mandate to promote the visual arts through exhibitions, special projects and arts advocacy.

Jessie Oonark (1906-1985) was a Canadian Inuit artist, known primarily for her prints and textile works.

Sybille Oltea Yvonne Pantazzi (1914-1983) was the Librarian at the Art Gallery of Ontario for thirty-two years, a book-collector and a pioneering scholar in the area of Victorian book design. She was born in Romania, traveled widely as a young woman, and settled in Toronto at the end of the Second World War. Among her many interests were book jackets and the artists who created them.

Lawrence Arthur Colley Panton (1894-1954) was a Canadian painter, educator and academician active in Toronto from the 1930s until his death. Born in England, he immigrated to Canada at 17. He served in the Army during 1916-1919 and studied art in the evening after his return from the war. In Toronto, he worked at Rous and Mann as a designer until 1924 when he began his teaching career, first at the Central Technical School and then at Western Technical School (1926-37), Northern Vocational School (1937-51) and finally principal of the Ontario College of Art (1951-54). In 1920 he married Marion Pye; their son Charles was born in 1921 and died in action in 1944. Panton was active in a number of organizations, including the Ontario Society of Artists (President 1931-37), the Canadian Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, the Canadian Group of Painters, The Royal Canadian Academy and the Arts and Letters Club (President 1953-54).

Sybille Christiane Pflug (née Schütt) (1936-1972), German-Canadian realist painter, was born in Berlin, Germany and died of an intentional overdose at Hanlan’s Point, Toronto Islands. Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, Pflug was sent alone to live with family friends in the Austrian Tyrol town of Kitzbühl where she remained until her early teens. In 1953, Pflug left Germany for Paris to study fashion design. On a train to Paris in 1954, she met Michael Pflug (1929-,) a German medical student and aspiring artist. At his urging, and with the encouragement of artist friends Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenès, Christiane, who had no formal art training, began to paint. The Pflugs married in 1956 and moved shortly afterwards to Tunis, Africa where Michael had accepted a medical internship. In early 1958, Christiane and Michael held the first joint exhibition of their work at l’Alliance Française in Tunis. Christiane and the couple’s two young daughters, Esther and Ursula, joined her mother in Toronto in 1959 while Michael remained in Africa. In 1960, after completing his medical studies in France, Michael joined his family in Canada and soon began medical practice. The Pflugs settled in North Toronto, where Christiane painted her immediate surroundings including several series of city landscapes from her window, a series of interiors with dolls, and larger portraits of her daughters and her art dealer, Avrom Isaacs. In late 1962 Christiane held her first solo exhibition at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto and was represented there until 1967, at which point Michael assumed all management of her work. She was the recipient of Canada Council grants and participated in several major national shows, winning the purchase prize at the 1964 Winnipeg Biennial. Despite her lack of formal training, she taught briefly at the Ontario College of Art in 1969. Christiane Pflug’s work is represented in several Canadian public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, as well as in
Canadian corporate collections and private collections in Europe and North America. She died, committing suicide, on the Toronto Islands in April 1972.

Photo Eclipse was a group of photographers who operated The Photo Passage gallery at Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, from 1992 to 2000. Founding members Pamela Harris, Judy Whalen and Henry Jablonski organized themselves in the spring of 1992 upon learning that The Photographers Workshop (Gallery TPW) planned to relocate their exhibition space from Harbourfront, and recognizing a resulting loss to the photography community. Calling themselves initially the Committee for the Continuation of Photography at Harbourfront, and later the Curved Wall Collective, the group settled on the name Photo Eclipse. They successfully petitioned Harbourfront for use of the gallery space, naming it The Photo Passage and opening their first exhibition in November of 1992. Other group members included David Hlynsky, Elaine Ling, Vince Pietropaolo, Judith Sandiford, Irena Schön, John Scully, Volker Seding and Jane Watson. Photo Eclipse was active until 2000, mounting more than 30 exhibitions over the course of that time.

Pleasure Dome (active 1989– ), also operating as Artists Film Exhibition Group (Ontario), is an exhibitor of experimental and independent motion pictures and video recordings in Toronto, administered by an artistic collective. The original collective, comprising Jonathan Pollard, Barbara Sternberg, Gary Popovich, Phil Hoffman and Michael Hoolboom, presented its first program 22 Sept. 1989 at the Euclid Theatre in Toronto. Since then, Pleasure Dome has presented as many as 17 exhibitions per year, with works varying in length from less than 5 minutes to over an hour.
While it was in principle a requirement of the provincial government that publicly-exhibited motion pictures be approved by a board of examiners, the collective nonetheless declined to submit films and videos to the Ontario Film Review Board (previously the Ontario Censor Board) for approval as a matter of policy.
Annual membership subscriptions for Pleasure Dome events were introduced in the third season (1991–1992). Film and video exhibitions and associated lectures have been held in various locations in downtown Toronto apart from the Euclid Theatre (which closed ca. 1994), including chiefly Cinecycle, but also Latvian House, Jackman Hall at the Art Gallery of Ontario and others.