Originator: Finlay. Circulating Exhibition.
Originator: Spies/ Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations. Exhibited at AGO July 31-August 29, 1982 and circulated in Ontario April 1983-March 1984.
Formula in title is sic, referencing the dancer Merce Cunningham.
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.
James Stanley McLean (1876-1954), Toronto business executive and art collector, was president of Canada Packers and founder of the J.S. McLean Collection of Canadian art. He was born in Clarke Township, Durham County, Ontario. Having graduated from the University of Toronto in 1896, McLean became an employee of the Harris Abattoir Company in Toronto in 1901, rising to become president in the 1920s. He achieved a merger of his firm with three others in 1927, forming Canada Packers Limited — of which he was president until his death. J.S. McLean was a founder-member of the Art Gallery of Toronto and a member of its executive from 1934 until his death. He was a patron of Canadian art himself and started collecting in 1934. In 1939 he began to buy Canadian artworks of art to hang in the offices and other areas of Canada Packers’ plants across the country. The result was a significant collection amassed at a time when such art was not widely sought after. Among the creators of modern art in Canada, he focused especially on the work of A.Y. Jackson, Carl Schaefer, Paraskeva Clark and David Milne. In 1952 the collection was the subject of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Paintings and Drawings from the Collection of J.S. McLean. Many of the works lent for this exhibition were subsequently donated to the Art Gallery of Ontario. J.S. McLean died in Toronto in 1954.
Helen Galloway McNicoll (1879-1915) was a Canadian impressionist painter.