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Donald William Buchanan (1908-1966) was a Canadian author, art historian/critic and arts administrator. Born in Lethbridge, Alberta, he was the son of Senator W.A. Buchanan, publisher of the Lethbridge Herald. Donald Buchanan studied modern history at the University of Toronto and held a fellowship at Oxford University. In 1935, he founded the National Film Society of Canada (from 1950 The Canadian Film Institute). The following year, his biography of James Wilson Morrice was published in Toronto. Subsequently, he worked at the CBC (1937-40), Canadian Art Magazine (1942, as co-editor) and the National Film Board (1944-46), where he established the stills division. He was at the National Gallery of Canada from 1947 to 1960 and there founded the National Design Centre, eventually becoming Associate Director (1956-60) and afterward (1963) a trustee. In addition to the Morrice biography, Donald Buchanan wrote Educational and Cultural Films in Canada (1936), This Is Canada (1944), Canadian Painters from Paul Kane to the Group of Seven (1945), Design for Use (1947), The Growth of Canadian Painting (1950), Alfred Pellan (1962) and To Have Seen the Sky (1962). After leaving the National Gallery, he began a career as an artist/photographer; his work was exhibited successfully and appeared in published photo-essays. On his death in a car crash in Ottawa in 1966 his collection of artworks was bequeathed to the art gallery in Lethbridge.

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.

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.

Betty Roodish Goodwin (1923-2008) was a Montreal-based printmaker and installation artist.

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.

Barbara Astman (1950- ) is a Toronto-based artist who has worked in a wide range of photographic and mixed-media formats. Born in Rochester (NY), Astman was educated at the Rochester Institute of Technology School for American Craftsmen and, after moving to Toronto in 1970, the Ontario College of Art. She was a pioneer in the field of colour xerography, and her practice has included a mix of camera art, new media, sculpture and light projection installations. Thematically, her work has explored issues of identity, history, memory, systems of representation and gender perspectives, often involving her own body as a subject. She has executed a number of public art commissions for clients including the Calgary Winter Olympics, the City of Ottawa (St. Laurent Complex Recreation Project), Hayter Street Developments (Bay/Hayter Condominiums, Toronto) and Cadillac Fairview Corporation (Simcoe Place, Toronto). Astman is now a professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, where she has been teaching since the mid-1970s. She is represented by the Corkin Gallery. Her work is found in prominent public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Ontario, The Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris, France), and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Timothy Melvin Zuck, Canadian artist and educator, was born in 1947 in Erie, Pennsylvania. He attended Wilmington College from 1966-1967 and 1968-1969. There he majored in philosophy and psychology and took a few courses in art history and sculpture. In 1967-1968, Zuck joined his parents on a year-long mission to India, where he studied at Madras Christian College. Zuck received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in 1971. While at NSCAD, he did performance, film, photographic and other process-oriented and conceptual projects. In Halifax Zuck met and married Robyn Randell. He then earned his Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1972. After completing his graduate studies, Zuck returned to NSCAD in late 1972, where he was Assistant Professor until 1979. While teaching at NSCAD, he continued to work on his conceptual projects. In 1975, Zuck began to focus on painting, in which he had no formal training. In 1979, he resigned from NSCAD and began to paint full-time in Purcell’s Cove, near Halifax, Nova Scotia. Zuck became a Canadian citizen in 1983. The Zucks moved from Purcell’s Cove to Kingston, Ontario, where they lived from 1982-1984 and then lived for three years in downtown Toronto, where their daughter, Anna, was born in 1985. They then moved to Midland, Ontario. In addition to taking part in many artist expeditions, Zuck won a poster competition for the XV Olympic Winter Games in 1988 in Calgary, Alberta. He moved to Calgary in 2002 to teach at the Alberta College of Art and Design. Tim Zuck is represented by the Sable-Castelli Gallery in Toronto, Ontario and the Paul Kuhn Gallery in Calgary, Alberta. His work has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Europe, and may be found in the collections of numerous Canadian galleries and museums.

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.