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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.

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.

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.

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.

Colette Whiten (Birmingham, England 1945- ) is a Toronto-based sculptor and educator.

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.

Helen Galloway McNicoll (1879-1915) was a Canadian impressionist painter.

Frances Loring (1887-1968) and Florence Wyle (1881-1968) were Canadian sculptors. Frances Loring was born in Wardner, Idaho. She studied art in Europe as well as Chicago, Boston, and New York. Florence Wyle was born in Trenton, Illinois, and studied medicine at the University of Illinois and then art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she later taught classes. She then worked in New York where she shared a studio with Frances Loring. Loring and Wyle moved to Toronto in 1912, and in 1920 bought an old church and converted it into a studio. Loring and Wyle were both active in Canadian art movements and were founding members of the Sculptors Society of Canada in 1928. Their work can be seen at the National Gallery in Ottawa, Art Gallery of Toronto, and in the streets of Toronto on such buildings as the Toronto General Hospital and Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, and on memorials in small towns in Ontario, New Brunswick and Maine.

Goldwin Smith (1823-1910) was a prominent journalist, academic and liberal reformer who spent the latter part of his life in Toronto. Born in Reading, England, he was educated at Eton College and Oxford University, and was the Regius Professor of History at Oxford from 1858 to 1866. Smith began to publish widely on history and political reform. He moved to the United States in 1868, and taught briefly at Cornell University, to which he retained a connection for the rest of his life. He moved to Toronto in 1871, and married Harriet Elizabeth Mann (née Dixon) the widow of William Henry Boulton, in 1875. Smith thus became master of the Grange house and estate in central Toronto, and became a pillar of Toronto society. His journalistic career included a brief employment at the Globe, after which he joined independent publishing ventures including the Canadian Monthly and National Review and the Evening Telegram. He then published his own journal, the Bystander, sporadically between 1879 and 1890. Smith also published widely in other local and international news journals. He took part in important civic and educational reform initiatives, including serving on the new board of the University of Toronto. The Grange remained his wife's property and was willed by her to the city of Toronto to serve as a public art gallery, later becoming the first home of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

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.