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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.

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.

Angela Nairne Grigor is a writer and art educator living in Picton, Ontario. Born in Britain, she attended the Wimbledon School of Art and the Brighton College of Art. She became a Canadian citizen in 1974 and received her MA and PhD from Concordia University in 1982 and 1985, respectively. She worked as a travelling art specialist for five years in England, and taught in Canadian high schools and at Concordia University. She has also exhibited her own drawings, soft sculptures and textiles. She began her research on Arthur Lismer’s teaching career in the 1980’s, and her book, Arthur Lismer, visionary art educator, was published by the McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2002. In that year she was awarded the Prix des Fondateurs de L’Association Canadienne de Histoire de l’Education for the best work in English.

Donald J. Gillies (1938-) is a former professor of photography who corresponded for many years with the artist Dennis Burton. Gillies attended Dennis Burton's History of Art course at The Three Schools in Toronto, where he befriended the artist. He joined the Photographic Arts Department of Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in 1968, eventually retiring as Director of the Joint York-Ryerson Graduate Program in Communication and Culture, Ryerson University, in 2003.

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.

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.

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.

A Canadian painter, Jackson was a founding member of the Group of Seven (1919) and the Canadian Group of Painters (1933). He taught at the Ontario College of Art (now OCADU) (1925) and the Banff School of Fine Arts (1943-1949) . He also serviced as a war artist during World War I.He was appointed a Companion to the Order of Canada 1967) and received the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts medal for lifetime achievement (1970).

Tanya Mars (1948- ) is a feminist performance and video artist, educator, and arts administrator active mainly in Toronto, Ontario. She was born in Monroe, Michigan and attended Fine Arts courses at the University of Michigan. In 1967 she moved to Montreal with her former husband where she attained landed immigrant status in Canada. She attended Fine Arts courses at Sir George Williams University and Loyola College (now incorporated into Concordia University) before eventually moving to Toronto in 1979. She has been an integral figure in the Canadian art scene since her 1974 exhibition Codpieces: Phallic Paraphernalia. She has performed widely across Canada and also internationally in Chile, Mexico, Sweden, France, Poland, China and Finland. Mars’ approach to art is interdisciplinary, borrowing themes and performance techniques from vaudeville, theatre, stand-up comedy, film, photography, magic shows, and dance. In her early works, she would center a repertoire of vibrant female characters within layers of visually rich, satirical, absurdist imagery to disrupt and question sociopolitical relations of power and cultural narratives of gender (e.g. “Pure” series). For Mars, the live presence is critical. Her art is an ongoing process involving an interactive experience with her audience, leading to a dialogue of meanings that only become materialized when the piece is performed (e.g. Competing for Space). Furthermore, she directly involves herself as both a performer and a physical object (e.g. Tanya-in-the-Box) whereby the human body and its movement or constraint becomes an integral component of each piece. In doing so, she explores the relationships between costume and wearable art, presentation, sculpture, and spectacle to speak to how the body engages with materials to inform how we perceive ourselves and our social conditions. In the 1980s, Mars began to incorporate video art into her repertoire, creating video adaptations of her live performance art (e.g. Mz Frankenstein), however she views these as creative adaptations designed for home consumption rather than documentations of the live experience. Since the 1990s, Mars has shifted her artistic direction towards creating immersive, site-specific, durational performance art featuring evolving tableaux vivant structured around repetitive tasks (e.g. Hot, Tyranny of Bliss, In Pursuit of Happiness).
Mars was a founding member, curator, and director of Powerhouse Gallery (La Centrale) in Montreal from 1974-1978, editor of Parallelogramme magazine from 1977-1989, and a board member of ANNPAC (the Association of National Non-Profit Artist-run Centres) from 1977-1989. Since 1998 she has been a member of the 7a*11d Collective which produces a bi-annual International Festival of Performance Art in Toronto. She previously taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University and the Ontario College of Art and Design. Most recently, she taught performance art and video at the University of Toronto Scarborough and was part of the graduate faculty of the Master of Visual Studies Program at the University of Toronto. In 2004 Mars was named Artist of the Year at the Untitled Arts Awards in Toronto and she is also the winner of a 2008 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. In 2014 she received an honorary doctorate from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University.