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Alfred Harold Howard (1854–1916) was a British Canadian graphic artist, calligrapher and decorative designer in Toronto in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Liverpool, England, he apprenticed as a lithographer with the Liverpool branch of the firm Maclure, Macdonald and Macgregor. In 1876 he immigrated to Canada and eventually opened an office of graphic design in the Temple Building in downtown Toronto. He received the Marquess of Lorne’s Medal for Design in 1881 and was made an academician of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1883.
Howard’s commercial design work took the form of illuminated addresses of welcome, certificates and diplomas and addresses of condolence. In 1891 he produced the City of Toronto address of condolence presented to Lady Macdonald on the death of the Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. Howard exhibited with the Ontario Society of Artists at their Applied Art Exhibition in 1900 and with the Canadian Society of Applied Art in 1905. He was a member of the Toronto Art Students’ League and the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto. When he died in Toronto in 1916 (26 February), the Art Museum of Toronto held a memorial exhibition of his work.
Howard’s artworks are in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Toronto Reference Library, the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Built by the Boulton family between 1817 and 1820, The Grange is Toronto's oldest remaining brick house and a national historic site. The Grange was bequeathed at the beginning of the twentieth century to become the home of Toronto's first art museum. During the nineteenth century, The Grange was at the centre of this city's social and political activity. Today, with its collection of furniture, artifacts and art, it is an historic house museum and a unique part of the Art Gallery of Ontario. The house embodies the AGO''s development over the past century, when it grew to become the eighth largest art museum in North America.

The works of several contemporary artists will be special "guests" in The Grange, the Gallery's first home, in celebration of the Art Gallery of Ontario's first century and the fact that the Gallery was founded with the work of then living artists. The exhibition, which is entitled House Guests: Contemporary Artists in The Grange, provides the opportunity to interweave our past and our future. Drawing upon the continuous transformations that have characterized The Grange, its holdings and its social and cultural role, these artists have been invited to respond to this rich site with works that will be installed throughout the house. This co-mingling of historical and contemporary forces will reveal our artistic heritage as the living legacy from which many current artistic practices are fashioned.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of a book, featuring an essay about The Grange by Charlotte Gray, author of Sisters in the Wilderness. The artists participating in House Guests will provide commentary on their installations and the impact that the house and its place in Toronto's history and culture had on their creative process.

Among those currently conceiving special projects for this unique exhibition in The Grange are Luis Jacob, Robert Fones, Rebecca Belmore, Christy Thompson, all from Toronto, Elaine Reichek (New York), Elizabeth LeMoine (London) and Josiah McElheny, (New York).

The project was originally conceived by AGO Curators Christina Ritchie and Jessica Bradley of the Contemporary Art department, in collaboration with Grange Curator Jenny Rieger. The publication is supported by The Grange Council.

Born in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1940, Pamela Harris completed her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at Pomona College in 1962, and moved to Toronto in 1967. A self-taught photographer, her work has consistently engaged with issues of social activism and feminist themes. In 1984, she embarked on perhaps her best known project Faces of Feminism, spending the next several years photographing women across Canada. The resulting work was exhibited extensively around Canada, and a selection of 75 photographs was published by Second Story Press as the book Faces of Feminism in 1992.

Pamela Harris first visited Spence Bay in September 1972. In 1973, she spent another four months in Spence Bay, Northwest Territories (now Taloyoak, Nunavut) photographing the people and landscape of the community, conducting interviews, and establishing a community darkroom where she taught local residents (mostly Inuit craftswomen) how to process film and print their own photographs.

In addition to the monograph Another Way of Being, published in 1976, Harris’ Spence Bay. N.W.T. photographs were exhibited in 1974-76 at The Photographers' Gallery in Saskatoon, the David Mirvish Gallery in Toronto, and the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art in California. Photographs taken and printed by the Spence Bay residents as part of the darkroom project and natural dyes workshop were exhibited in 1974 at the Arctic Women's Workshop, a craft conference and exhibition held at the TD Centre in Toronto. An interview Harris conducted with Theresa Quaqjuaq, one of the Inuit women who participated in the darkroom project with Pamela Harris, was recorded and included in the 1973 Women’s Kit, a teaching aid Harris produced for the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) to be used in high schools and colleges for teaching women’s history in Canada. Excerpts of this interview, as well as an interview with Pamela Harris, were also aired on CBC Radio.

A small settlement near Boothia Peninsula (formerly Boothia Felix) in the Kitikmeot Region, Spence Bay was established by the Hudson Bay Company as a trading post in the 1950s, and settled by Netsilik and Dorset people. According to Harris, the population was about 400 in 1972-1973, most of whom had settled there within the past fifteen years, and many of whom spoke only Inuktitut. Her portraits of the people she met during her stay there and photographs of the landscape she encountered document the traditional ways of life and the rapid changes it underwent due to the cultural influences of the south.

Melvin Ormond Hammond (1876–1934) was a Canadian journalist, editor, photographer and author. He was born in Clarkson, Ont. to Alvin and Catharine (Nauman) Hammond, and attended local public schools. In 1895 he became a reporter in Toronto with The Globe newspaper, where he continued in various positions for his entire career. In 1900 he married Clara Williams (b. 1875), with whom he had two children, Harold James (b. 1901) and Helen Isabel (b. 1909).
Melvin Hammond joined the Toronto Camera Club in 1906 and took up photography, the pursuit for which he is today best known, exhibiting his amateur photos at the Canadian National Exhibition and elsewhere in Toronto. His journalistic interest in Canada resulted in photographs of Canadian monuments and memorials and in portrait photographs of prominent figures of the day. As an author, he wrote three books, the last of which was Painting and Sculpture in Canada (Toronto : Ryerson Press, 1930).
M.O. Hammond was also a member of the Canadian Literary Club, the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, the Ontario Historical Society, and the Canadian Historical Society. He died in Toronto in 1934.

Robert Frederick Hagan, painter, printmaker and educator, was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1918. He was educated at Central Technical School (Toronto) and the Ontario College of Art. From 1941-1946, Hagan was employed as Resident Artist and Master at Pickering College in Newmarket, Ontario. In the spring of 1946, Hagan journeyed to New York for further studies. Later the same year, he began teaching at the Ontario College of Art. In 1955 he became Head of Printmaking, a position which he held until his retirement in 1983. Frederick Hagan has held memberships in the Canadian Society of Graphic Art (of which he was made an Honourary Member in 1965), the Canadian Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, the Ontario Society of Artists, and the Print and Drawing Council of Canada. His work is in the collections of numerous Canadian galleries.

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.

W.H. Graham is the author of The Tiger of Canada West (Clarke Irwin & Co., 1962) and Greenbank: Country Matters in 19th Century Ontario (University of Toronto Press, 1990). In the 1970s, he researched and wrote a stage documentary on the life of Tom Thomson.