Images clockwise from left: Jenn Goodwin; Jean-François Bélisle; Lawren Harris, Laurentian Landscape, 1913–14.
Our editors’ weekly roundup of Canadian art news.
The newly renovated and reopened Musée d’art de Joliette has announced that Jean-François Bélisle will be the museum’s director, beginning April 4. Previously the director of Arsenal, a private art foundation with locations in Montreal and Toronto, Bélisle has also worked at Montreal’s Association of Contemporary Art Galleries, Sotheby’s auction house in Geneva and the McCord Museum in Montreal. He succeeds Annie Gauthier, who began leading the museum in 2012.
Three paintings by Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris garnered more than $3 million at Heffel Fine Art Auction House’s spring live auction on Wednesday. Harris’s Laurentian Landscape, the leading lot in the auction, sold for $2,183,000, exceeding its estimate of $1,200,000–1,600,000. Other works that exceeded their estimates at the auction, which totalled $17.2 million in sales, include E.J. Hughes’s The Post Office at Courtenay, BC, which sold for $1,593,000, and Alex Colville’s Swimming Dog and Canoe, which more than doubled its highest estimate and sold for $1,180,000.
The Art Museum at the University of Toronto has announced that Jenn Goodwin has received the 2016 Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award. Founded by art historian Reesa Greenberg, the award recognizes outstanding work in the first semester of the University of Toronto’s Masters of Visual Studies program with a $5,000 prize. The inaugural recipient of the award was curator and writer cheyanne turions.
The Vancouver School gets the Hollywood treatment in the upcoming series of PBS’s Art 21, a documentary show that profiles North American artists. This season, hosted by actress Claire Danes, Vancouver artists Stan Douglas, Brian Jungen, Liz Magor and Jeff Wall will be profiled alongside others, including Mexican artist Pedro Reyes and American artists Nick Cave and Barbara Kasten. The season premieres September 16, 2016.
