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Dennis Burton (1933-2013) was a Canadian artist and art educator, based much of his life in Toronto and Vancouver. Born in Lethbridge, Alberta, Burton moved to Ontario in 1950 on a scholarship to Pickering College, Newmarket, where he attended Fred Hagan’s art classes. Burton’s education continued at the Ontario College of Art (graduated 1956); the University of Southern California (1955) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (1959). He worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a senior graphic designer, 1957-60. Burton achieved artistic fame in the mid-1960s with his controversial paintings of female undergarments (giving rise to the term “Garterbeltmania”) and abstractions inspired by genitalia. He was represented by the Isaacs Gallery, Toronto, through the 1960s and 1970s, and became associated with other gallery artists. He was a founding member of the Artists’ Jazz Band, in which he played saxophone. Burton worked extensively as an illustrator throughout this period. His career as an art educator began with his tenure as Chairman of Drawing & Painting Department at the Ontario College of Art, 1970-71; he was Director of the New School of Art 1971-1977, and a founding faculty member and President of Arts’ Sake inc. (1977-78). Burton also taught at the Banff School of Fine Arts (1974), and the University of Lethbridge (1976 & 1989). He was Artist-in-Residence at the Emily Carr College of Art, 1979-80, before accepting a full-time teaching position there in 1980. Burton has exhibited extensively throughout Canada; his work is in numerous public and private collections, including that of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Burton's third wife, the artist Diane Pugen, was the model for a number of his paintings. He had two daughters, Varyn and Maihyet.

Sorel Etrog (Jassy, Romania 1933 - Toronto, Canada 2014) was an artist, writer and philosopher. He began his art studies at the Institute of Painting and Sculpture in Tel Aviv; his first solo show in Tel Aviv (1958) led to a scholarship at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In New York, he caught the attention of Samuel Zacks, which led to his first show at Gallery Moos in Toronto. Etrog subsequently immigrated to Toronto in 1963, and made his home here for the remainder of his life (apart from sojourns in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, working with the Michelucci foundry). Etrog’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada and internationally, and his artwork is in the collection of major
museums and private collections worldwide, in addition to the public art works noted above. A retrospective of his work was held at the AGO from April 27-September 29, 2013. Sorel Etrog died on February 26, 2014.

Murray Favro (1940- ) is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, sculptor, and musician based in London, Ontario. He is known for his multimedia installations and his work with the Nihilist Spasm Band, of which he is a founding member.

Favro was born in Huntsville, Ontario where he lived until moving to London, Ontario in 1957 with his mother. Here he attended the H.B. Beal Technical and Commercial School (1958-62), where he studied art and became acquainted with a number of other artists in the area. In 1968 Favro married Judith Bryon, and their son, Mark, was born in 1969. After receiving a Canada Council Arts Bursary in 1970 he was able to leave a job as a commercial artist at a printing company and begin working on creating and exhibiting his art full time.

Throughout his career Favro has worked with a diverse range of materials and mediums, including paint, sculpture, projections, film, instruments, and machinery, although he is perhaps best known for his projected reconstructions and technical objects, which cross the borders between art and invention. Much of his work reflects a strong interest in perspective, the relationships between art and science, and technology, and is known to challenge traditional categorization. Two major retrospective exhibitions of Favro’s work have been held to date, the first by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1983 and the second by the London Regional Art and Historical Museums and the McIntosh Gallery in 1998.

In addition to his artistic career, Favro is the guitarist for the Nihilist Spasm Band, which he founded alongside John Boyle, John Clement, Greg Curnoe, Bill Exley, Art Pratten, Archie Leitch, and Hugh McIntyre in 1965. Favro has described his work with the band as influential and parallel to his work as an artist, noting the band’s lack of hierarchy and their music’s lack of structure as intentional and significant. The instruments he plays as guitarist for the band are of his own creation, as are a number of the instruments played by other members of the band. They have performed shows across Canada and internationally, including an appearance at the Paris Biennale in the 1970s and at least two Japan tours in 1996 and 1999.

Throughout his career Favro has given artist talks and lectures at institutions across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, and taught classes at the Ontario College of Art in the 1970s. Together with a number of other artists who were active in London in the 1960s and 70s, such as Jack Chambers and Tony Urquhart, he was involved with some of the first artist-run galleries in Canada, namely the 2020 Gallery, which existed from 1966-1970 and the Forest City Gallery, founded in 1973.

Favro’s work is held and has been exhibited by many major art institutions and private collections across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Montreal Fine Arts Museum. He has been represented variously by the Carmen Lamanna Gallery and the Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto. Favro received the Gerhson Iskowitz Award in 1997 and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2007.

Robert Fones (born in London, Ontario, 1949) is a visual artist, curator, writer, designer and educator. Employing a strong ethnographical and archaeological component in his work, Fones uses sculpture, painting, woodblock printmaking, typography and photography to investigate the transition from manual to industrial production, and the hidden processes and impacts of geological and cultural change within contemporary society. Since 1976 he has lived and worked in Toronto, represented variously by Carmen Lamanna
Gallery, S.L. Simpson Gallery and (currently) Olga Korper Gallery. He has exhibited at artist-run centres and public institutions throughout Canada and, internationally, in the USA and Germany. His work is held by the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and other public and corporate collections. Fones is an active participant in the visual arts community, having served on the board of the Art Gallery of Ontario, C Magazine Foundation and the Acquisitions Committee of the Design Exchange. He curated an exhibition for The Power Plant on the work of Toronto furniture designer, Russell Spanner, and Cutout: Greg Curnoe, Shaped Collages 1965–1968 for Museum London. He has written extensively
about art and artists such as Greg Curnoe, Murray Favro, Donald Judd and John Massey. Fones has taught at OCAD University, the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, and in the Art and Art History Program at Sheridan College. He has published numerous reviews and articles in Vanguard, C Magazine, Parachute and other publications, published several artist books, participated in several poetry readings across the country; and undertaken several design and public art projects. He received the Toronto Arts Award in 1999 and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2011.

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.

Frances Norma Loring, sculptor, was born in Wardner, Idaho October 14, 1887. She studied sculpture in Geneva, Munich and Paris 1901-1905. In 1905 at the Art Institute of Chicago, she met Florence Wyle with whom she subsequently shared studios in New York (1909-1912) and Toronto (1912-1966). A member in 1920 of the Ontario Society of Artists, she was a founding member (1928) of the Sculptors' Society of Canada and a chief organizer of the Federation of Canadian Artists and the National Arts Council. Among her best-known public monuments are the lion of the Queen Elizabeth Monument in Toronto (originally near the entrance to the Queen Elizabeth Way) and war memorials at St Stephen, New Brunswick and Cambridge (formerly Galt), Ontario. Frances Loring died in Newmarket, Ontario February 3, 1968. Florence Wyle, sculptor, was born in Trenton, Illinois November 24, 1881. While studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905, she met Frances Loring, with whom she later moved to New York. Loring moved to Canada in 1912, where Wyle joined her the following year. They each produced a considerable body of work in their studio, a converted church, in Toronto. A member of the Ontario Society of Artists (1920), Wyle was the first woman sculptor to become a full member of the Royal Canadian Academy. She was also a published writer (Poems, 1958). Among her public sculptures is the relief of Edith Cavell on the grounds of the Toronto General Hospital. Florence Wyle died in Newmarket, Ontario January 13, 1968. Loring & Wyle’s works are in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian War Museum and in several public and private buildings in Ontario.

Robert Nelson Markle (Hamilton, Ontario, 1936-Holstein, Ontario, 1990) was a Canadian artist, writer, educator and musician. He began his studies at the Ontario College of Art (OCA) in 1954, but was expelled before graduation. While at OCA, he met Marlene Shuster, a fellow student, whom he married in 1958. The focus of Markle’s work from his early days was the female nude, particularly burlesque dancers, and Marlene became his primary model and muse. In 1962 Markle had his first group exhibition at The Isaacs Gallery in Toronto, becoming one of the “Isaacs Group” of artists. In 1965, Markle paintings shown in the exhibition Eros ’65 at the Dorothy Cameron Gallery were seized on a charge of obscenity, drawing considerable media attention. In the mid-1960s Markle began to write for magazines such as the Toronto Telegram Showcase, Maclean’s, and Toronto Life, publishing widely on topics as diverse as striptease, hockey, childhood Christmases, and Gordon Lightfoot. Markle also worked extensively as an illustrator, contributing images to magazines and literary journals. His work as an educator included terms at The New School of Art (1966-1977) and Arts’ Sake (1977-1982) as well as OCA and the University of Guelph. From the early 1960s, Markle played tenor saxophone and piano in the Artists’ Jazz Band. In 1970 the Markles moved to a farmhouse outside of Holstein, Ontario, although Robert re-established a studio in Toronto from 1979 to 1982. In 1979, he won a commission to decorate a Toronto hamburger restaurant, which was named Markleangelo’s in his honour. His other large-scale commissions include wall-sculptures for the Ellen Fairclough Building in Hamilton, Ontario, and the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. He executed painted outdoor murals in Owen Sound and Mount Forest, Ontario. Markle was killed in a traffic accident in 1990. Of Mohawk ancestry, Markle used his mother’s spelling of his surname, although it was spelled “Maracle” on his birth certificate. Markle worked primarily in painting and ink drawing, and also explored photography, collage, printmaking, wooden sculpture and neon. He collected folk art, which inspired a number of whirligig works later in his career. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada.

Michael James Aleck Snow (1928-2023) was a Canadian painter, sculptor, filmmaker, photographer and musician. He was born in Toronto and educated at Upper Canada College and subsequently at the Ontario College of Art (1948-1952). After travels in Europe (1953-54) he worked for Graphic Films in Toronto (1955-56), producing his first independent film, A-Z. His first solo exhibition as a painter was at the Greenwich Gallery in Toronto in 1956. Between 1961 and 1967, mostly while living in New York, Snow produced work in the Pop-art mode based on the silhouette of a young woman, entitled Walking Woman, probably his most widely recognized creation. A series of 11 stainless steel sculptures of the image was created for the Ontario pavilion at Expo 67 and is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. After moving to New York in 1964, he made films regarded as Minimalist, such as New York Ear and Eye Control (1964) and Wavelength (1966-67). Returning to Toronto in 1972, Snow worked mainly on cinematic and photographic projects including ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen. His work is concerned with the nature of media themselves, with perception and with the interrelation of language, sound and meaning. Snow has been the subject of exhibitions and retrospectives in Toronto, Vancouver and Paris.

Elizabeth Fraser Williamson (1914-2000) was a sculptor and educator who worked as artist in residence for many years at the Guild Inn, Scarborough.