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Gershon Iskowitz (1919-1988) was an abstract painter based in Toronto for much of his artistic career. Born in Kielce, Poland on 24 November 1919, he survived internment in Nazi concentration camps and lost his entire family in the Holocaust. Iskowitz studied art in Munich at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in 1947, soon transferring to private studies with Oskar Kokoschka. He moved to Toronto in 1949. His work developed from wartime imagery to a focus on landscapes (particularly inspired by practice in the Parry Sound area), eventually arriving at his mature abstract expressionist style in 1967. Iskowitz began exhibiting with Gallery Moos in 1964, a relationship which continued throughout his career. He taught at the New School (Toronto) from 1967-1970, and his informal mentoring of artists in Toronto is often noted. Iskowitz, along with Walter Redinger, represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1972. The artist established the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation in 1985, with the mandate of awarding the Gershon Iskowitz Prize to a mature practising artist; since 2007 the Foundation has partnered with the Art Gallery of Ontario to administer the Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO.

Micah Lexier (1960- ) has established a national and international recognition as an artist, curator, and avid collector. His artistic practice is rooted in conceptual art and is often characterized by its collaborative nature. He works across a multitude of media which include sculpture, drawing, photography, video, and installation. Lexier’s artworks are often recognized for their engagement with concepts such as time, language, and the everyday, which are emphasized through his preference for process over the end product, and an artistic methodology that centers around documenting, collecting, and organizing.

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Lexier studied at the University of Manitoba, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1982. He went on to earn a Master of Fine Art from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in 1984. Lexier then spent more than a decade living and working in Toronto, before moving abroad to New York in 1999. In 2008 he returned to Toronto, where he has since remained.

In 2015 Lexier received the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts. His extensive exhibition history includes over 100 solo exhibitions and more than 200 group exhibitions. He has also been commissioned to produce more than a dozen public art installations at venues including the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery (1991), Toronto’s Metro Hall (1992), and Toronto’s Bay-Adelaide Centre (2016). His work is in many major Canadian and international collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the British Museum, and the Contemporary Art Gallery (Sydney, Australia). In 2013, Lexier exhibited a landmark solo show at The Power Plant (Toronto, ON) entitled One, and Two, and More Than Two. The “one” portion of the show presented a 30 year retrospective of his work in the form of an artwork entitled Working as a Drawing. It was complemented by parts “two” and “more than two,” which showcased his practice in collaboration with more than 100 Toronto artists.

Frederick Sproston Challener, painter, was born in Whetstone, England in 1869 and came to Canada in 1870. He studied at the Ontario School of Art, was first exhibited in 1900 at the Royal Canadian Academy and subsequently worked as a newspaper artist. After a tour of Europe and the Middle East in 1898-99, he began working as a muralist and participated in the decoration of the recently completed Toronto City Hall. At the end of the First World War, Challener worked as a painter for the Canadian War Records Department. He made his career chiefly by creating murals for passenger boats, restaurants, hotels—such as Fort Rouillé in the King Edward Hotel,Toronto—office buildings and theatres, including the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto. He also produced easel paintings, watercolours and drawings in a realistic, romantic style. From 1927-1952 he taught at the Ontario College of Art, during which period he made notes and assembled material on Canadian artists. He died in Toronto in 1959. Challener was a member of numerous arts organizations including the Toronto Art Students’ League, Ontario Society of Artists, Royal Canadian Academy, Society of Mural Decorators of Toronto and the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto (founding member, 1908). His work is in the National Gallery of Canada, the Civic Art Gallery, Winnipeg, the Art Gallery of Ontario and numerous public buildings.

Charles Wyatt Eaton (1849-1896) was a Canadian painter, illustrator, author and teacher who spent much of his life in the United States. Born in Philipsburg, Canada East (now Quebec), he left to study in New York at the National Academy of Design around 1867 and subsequently (1872) in France at the École des beaux-arts in Paris. There, he was influenced by Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon painters. Returning to Philipsburg in 1876, Eaton began painting portraits locally and in Montreal. From 1877 to 1882 he taught drawing and portraiture at the Cooper Union in New York and helped found the Society of American Artists, of which he was president in 1883. He married Charlotte Collins of New York in 1887. During and after this period he produced portraits of American authors and poets (notably pen-and-ink drawings for Century Magazine) and prominent Canadians along with well-received genre pictures of the Quebec countryside in the manner of Millet. In 1895 he went to Italy to recover from illness and surgery. He returned to the United States the following year and died in Newport or Middletown, Rhode Island. He is buried in Philipsburg.

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

Kathleen Jean Munn (1887-1974) was a modernist Canadian painter active in Toronto between the World Wars. She was the youngest of six children born to a Toronto jeweler who died when she was four (of an infection caused by the impact from a champagne cork) leaving her mother to manage the family business. Her talent for drawing was encouraged by her maternal grandmother, an accomplished amateur painter, and she was sent to study at the Westbourne School with F. McGillivray Knowles from 1904 to 1907. Knowles encouraged personal expression and an understanding of the principles of art and Munn thrived in this environment. In 1909 she began to exhibit Barbizon inspired landscapes at the OSA, RCA and CNE exhibitions, moving through periods influenced by Whistler, Corot, Puvis de Chavannes and the post-impressionists. About 1912 Munn first traveled to New York to study at the Art Student’s League and in 1914 she was awarded first prize at the Summer School in Woodstock NY. In 1915-16 she began a series of landscapes in which she showed a mastery of modernist techniques. Her association with the Art Student’s League, whose teachers were early proponents of modernism, was an important influence. Her notebooks show that she was reading extensively and broadly in the areas of literature, philosophy and aesthetics. She studied Jay Hambridge’s mathematical principles, the concept of ‘dynamic symmetry’ and Denman Ross’s colour theory. She seems to have been drawn to writers who proposed an underlying system of order and logic as a basis for individual expression. She also toured Britain and the major art centres of continental Europe in 1920, accompanied by her sister, and this trip seems to have encouraged her quest for a means to express religious and spiritual themes in a contemporary fashion. She was ultimately uncomfortable with complete abstraction and believed that art should express a larger purpose, influenced by readings of Blavatsky, Blake, Whitman, and others. The Group of Seven shared her interest in the spiritual content of painting but she was intolerant of their nationalism; of her contemporaries she formed the closest bonds with Bertram Brooker and Lemoine Fitzgerald. Her studio, in a large room overlooking the ravine at the family home at 320 Spadina Avenue, was visited often by Brooker. The household consisted of three unmarried siblings: Will (Jr.), who ran the family business, May, a teacher who ran the household, and Kathleen. During the 1920’s she began to work on a series of paintings that explored Christian themes and she devoted the 1930’s to the subject of the Passion. Two major drawings from this series were purchased by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1945. She exhibited a number of these drawings with Fitzgerald and Brooker at the Malloney Galleries in Toronto in 1935 but there as little critical response. Discouragement at her lack of critical success, combined with the death of her brother in 1935 and her sister’s increasing disability, led to the end of her artistic output around 1939. Most of her work remained in family hands. The Art Gallery of Toronto exhibited her Passion drawings in several group shows in the 1940’s and the Willistead Art Gallery in Windsor included her Ascension in a 1954 show of drawings. She died twenty years later, in October 1974.

Frederick Horsman Varley, painter, was born in Sheffield, England in 1881. He studied at the Sheffield School of Art 1892–1900, and at the Koninklijk Akademie voor Shone Kunsten (Académie royale des beaux-arts) in Antwerp for the following two years. After working as an illustrator and art teacher in England, he immigrated to Canada and obtained work as a commercial illustrator in Toronto in 1912, the same year he first exhibited his art work at the Canadian National Exhibition. In 1914, Varley joined Tom Thomson, A.Y. Jackson and Arthur Lismer on sketching trip to Algonquin Park in Ontario. Some of his most famous works resulted from his association with these artists. He participated in the War Art program after the war in 1918 and was a founding member of the Group of Seven in 1920. Although he painted numerous landscapes, his interest lay more in portraiture, which he pursued during the 1920s. Varley moved to Vancouver in 1926 to teach at the School of Decorative and Applied Arts. His landscapes from this period are marked by fine draftsmanship, exotic colour and unusual vantage points. In 1933 he and J.W.G. Macdonald opened their own school, the British Columbia College of Arts, which closed in 1935. Varley lived subsequently in Ottawa and Montreal, returning in 1944 to Toronto. The Art Gallery of Ontario held a retrospective of his work in 1954. He died in Toronto in 1969. Varley was a member of the Arts and Letters Club, Toronto. His work is in numerous Canadian public collections.

Anita Aarons (1912-2000) was an Australian-born artist, educator, curator and arts administrator who was active in Toronto from 1964 to 1984. During her time in the city she taught at Central Technical School, was the allied arts editor for Architecture Canada (1965-1971), worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario as a curator in the Extension Services department in the early 1970s, and became the founding Director of the Art Gallery at Harbourfront (precursor of The Power Plant), 1976-1984. In 1985 Aarons moved to Noosa, Queensland with her husband, the artist Merton Chambers, where they were both instrumental in the establishment of the Noosa Regional Gallery.

John Henry Pollock (1930–1992), known primarily as Jack Pollock, was a Canadian art dealer, painter, art instructor, author and owner/director of the Pollock Gallery in Toronto. Born in Toronto, he attended the Ontario College of Art there and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, England. He opened the Pollock Gallery in Toronto in 1960. In 1962, Jack Pollock met Anishinaabe painter and printmaker Norval Morrisseau while teaching in northern Ontario. Shortly after, he mounted an exhibition (1962) of the artist’s work at the Pollock Gallery, which continued to represent Morrisseau for several years. In 1979, Jack Pollock collaborated with author and broadcaster Lister Sinclair (1921–2006) on the illustrated publication The art of Norval Morrisseau (Toronto: Methuen, 1979). Pollock also wrote We all are all (Toronto, 1980), a privately-published book of poetry illustrated with his own drawings; Dear M (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989), a memoir in letters written to his psychiatrist between 1984 and 1987; and several exhibition catalogues. After he became chronically ill, the Pollock Gallery closed in 1981. In 1984 he moved to Gordes in the south of France. Jack Pollock died in Toronto in 1992. Paintings, prints and drawings by Jack Pollock are in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ont.) and other public art museums in Canada.