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Rolph Scarlett was a pioneering non-objective painter, jewellery designer, stage designer and educator known for his association with the Guggenheim Museum and Hilla Rebay. Born in Guelph, Ontario, Scarlett had early training in jewellery design through apprenticeship in a family business, and briefly attended the Art Students' League in New York. He returned to Canada for periods of time in the 1910s and 1930s, in between efforts to establish his career as a designer in the United States and internationally. On business travel to Switzerland in 1923, he encountered Paul Klee and became a proponent of pure abstraction in art. Scarlett moved to New York in 1937, becoming acquainted with Hilla Rebay and Rudolf Bauer, and winning a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Rebay purchased sixty of Scarlett's works for the collection of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, affirming his significance to the founding collection of what would become the Guggenheim Museum. Scarlett joined the staff as the museum's chief lecturer from 1940 to 1946. Scarlett's work is held in major collections including the Guggenheim Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the de Young Museum.

George Agnew Reid (1860-1947) was a Canadian artist, architect, educator and administrator influential in the early 20th century and instrumental in the formation of a number of important Canadian art institutions. Born in Wingham Ontario to a Scottish farm family, he studied architecture and book-keeping at his father’s insistence. In 1878 he moved to Toronto to study art. He was able to extend his art education under Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia, where he met the painter Mary Heister. In 1888 the couple travelled to Europe and studied at the Julian and Colorossi Academies, returning to Toronto in 1889. The house he designed and built in Wychwood Park was his home until the end of his life. In 1890, George Reid began reaching at the Central Ontario School of Art and Design. He eventually became principal and researched new theories of art education in the United States and Europe. Under his direction, the art school became independent of the Board of Education and moved into its own building, which he designed, in 1921. He also served as its first Principal. In 1892, George and Mary Reid built two cottages from his design at the artist colony in Onteora, New York. This led to the design of other summer homes and a small church in the Catskills community. They spent summers at this location until 1917 when the war made travel to the United States difficult. In 1921 Mary Heister Reid died, and in 1923 George Reid married Mary Wrinch, a former student and close friend of his first wife. His later life was filled with accomplishments, including the painting of murals for public spaces in Toronto City Hall, Jarvis Collegiate, the Royal Ontario Museum and elsewhere. He was instrumental in obtaining permanent funding and staff for the National Gallery in Ottawa, and was a force behind the establishment of the Art Gallery of Toronto. He was a member of the RCA, serving as President 1906-1907. He influenced a generation of students, among them C.W. Jefferys, through his teaching and created a number of works that exemplify his generation, including Forbidden Fruit, Mortgaging the Homestead, and The Foreclosure of the Mortgage.

Judith Nasby is a retired curator and educator based in Guelph, Ontario, known for her work at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre (now Art Gallery of Guelph), in particular her exhibitions on Inuit artists and artists from the Guelph area. She made contact with Rolph Scarlett in the mid-1970s, visiting him at his home and establishing a friendship and correspondence. Scarlett entrusted her with a group of his early abstract studies and copies of key documents for her research. He undertook to teach her his method of non-objective composition through a lively correspondence course in 1976 and 1977. Nasby's 2004 book Rolph Scarlett: Painter, Designer, Jeweller was the eventual culmination of her research.

Walter Moos was born in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1926. He was educated at the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce in Geneva (graduated 1946) and at the New School for Social Research, New York, from 1948 to 1951. Moos moved to Toronto from New York in 1959, having become acquainted with the city through visits with his brother, an engineer, who lived there. He married Martha Wegmuller in 1962, and had two sons, Michel André and David Alfred. The Moos family has a well-established history as gallery owners. Walter Moos was a founding member of the Art Dealers Association of Canada, and served as its president from 1971 to 1978. He was the chairman of its appraisal committee from 1972 to 1989. He served on the Canadian Eskimo Arts Council from 1972 to 1982 and was the founder and past trustee of the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation. Moos died in Toronto in 2013.

Doris Jean McCarthy (1910-2010) was a Canadian artist born in Calgary, Alberta, but long associated with the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. She entered the Ontario College of Art in 1925 and studied under Arthur Lismer, JEH MacDonald, JW Beatty and Emanuel Hahn, graduating in 1930. She became an art teacher and travelled widely within Canada and Europe during school vacations. She has been a member of the Ontario Society of Artists, the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, and was elected an Associate of the Royal Canadian Academy. She is represented in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the London Public Library and Art Museum and in many private collections. She received in honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto and was honoured by the City of Scarborough in 1996. During her career she assembled files on Canadian women artists gathered by friends in every province, with the intention of creating a book on the subject. In the early 1990s, realizing that the task was larger than anticipated, she offered her files to her friend, Lora Senechal Carney, a professor in the Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. Professor Carney also kept files on Canadian artists as background for her research and writing on various topics in North American modern and contemporary art. The files were amalgamated and used by Professor Carney until 2005.

Arthur Lismer, painter and art educator, was born in Sheffield, England in 1885. He studied at the Sheffield School of Art 1899–1906 and later at the Académie royale des beaux-arts in Antwerp. In 1911 he immigrated to Toronto where he worked as a commercial illustrator for the Grip Engraving Company and taught at the Ontario College of Art. He married Esther Mawson in 1912 and their only child Marjorie was born in 1913. Lismer's career as an art educator began at the Victoria School of Art and Design in Halifax, 1916–1919, followed soon after by his appointment as Vice-President of the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. In 1920 he became a founding member of the Group of Seven. His best-known works in oil are wilderness landscapes, expressionist in style with a use of raw colour and simplified form. He also produced many works on paper, including several portraits. Lismer established a Children's Art Centre at the Art Gallery of Toronto, where he was educational supervisor, 1927–1938. He was briefly educational supervisor at the National Gallery of Canada, later holding that post at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from 1941 to 1967. He was assistant professor of fine arts at McGill University, 1948–1954. He died in Montreal in 1969. Arthur Lismer was a member of the Arts and Letters Club, Ontario Society of Artists, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Canadian Group of Painters, Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, and Federation of Canadian Artists. His work is in many Canadian public collections. Following her father’s death, Marjorie Lismer Bridges devoted a number of years to organizing his archival records and gradually donating them to public repositories. She wrote the “Arthur Lismer source book”, which is included in the fonds.

Robert Frederick Hagan, painter, printmaker and educator, was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1918. He was educated at Central Technical School (Toronto) and the Ontario College of Art. From 1941-1946, Hagan was employed as Resident Artist and Master at Pickering College in Newmarket, Ontario. In the spring of 1946, Hagan journeyed to New York for further studies. Later the same year, he began teaching at the Ontario College of Art. In 1955 he became Head of Printmaking, a position which he held until his retirement in 1983. Frederick Hagan has held memberships in the Canadian Society of Graphic Art (of which he was made an Honourary Member in 1965), the Canadian Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, the Ontario Society of Artists, and the Print and Drawing Council of Canada. His work is in the collections of numerous Canadian galleries.

Paterson Ewen (1925-2002) was a Canadian painter best known for his abstract landscapes and monumental paintings dealing with themes of nature and cosmology. Born in Montreal, Ewen was associated with the mid-century abstraction movement in Quebec. He moved to London, Ontario in 1968, where he lived and worked until his death in 2002.

Ewen briefly attended McGill University, studying geology, but transferred to the School of Art and Design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1948. It was here that Ewen developed an interest in painting landscapes, inspired by his teachers Arthur Lismer and Goodridge Roberts. While attending the School of Art and Design, Ewen met his first wife, Francoise Sullivan, with whom he had four sons: Vincent, Geoffrey, Jean-Christophe, and Francis. It was through Sullivan that Ewen was exposed to the work of the Surrealist poets and Automatiste abstract painters, such as Jean-Paul Riopelle and Paul-Emile Borduas. Ewen married Sullivan in December 1949, and a few months later left art school, dismissed by Lismer in response to an exhibition of Ewen’s paintings at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Ewen held various part-time jobs to support his family during this period, including caretaker and training coordinator at a box factory and supermarket chain. Ewen and Sullivan divorced in 1968, and he moved to London, Ontario. It was in London that Ewen came into contact with local artists such as Greg Curnoe, Jack Chambers, and David Rabinowitch. Their influence impacted Ewen’s art, as he moved from representational landscapes to a more abstract style. It was around this time when Ewen developed techniques that would be a hallmark of his later works, such as the use of plywood gouged with an electric router as a painting surface. He also began using more unconventional materials in his art, including wire and other metals. In 1972, Ewen began teaching painting at University of Western Ontario, where he met his second wife, Mary Handford. The two married in 1995.

In 1982, Ewen was chosen to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale, and he received other recognition in the form of several awards, including the Chalmers Award for Visual Arts and the Toronto Arts Award. In 1996, the Art Gallery of Ontario mounted a retrospective exhibition of Ewen’s works that travelled to the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art. Ewen’s work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and other museums.

John Faichney is a Canadian dancer, television producer and software analyst born in Montreal in 1952. He graduated from Oberlin College where he developed an interest in choreography and dance improvisation. In May 1976 he performed at the Centre for Experimental Art & Communication (CEAC) in Toronto and was invited to join the Centre’s staff. Amongst other activities, he designed printed matter, maintained exchange programs with other artists’ groups, curated an exhibition of artists’ books and managed distribution of mailings and periodicals (including Strike, a quasi monthly newspaper.) John Faichney lives in Kitchener, Ontario, and remains involved with Contact Improvisation.