Sandford Borins

I first visited China in November 1984, spending one week in Beijing and another in Tianjin, where my department had an academic exchange program. It was cold and it even snowed in Beijing; because it was slightly before the date the government allowed furnaces to be turned on north of the Yangtze River, the worst […]

My home office is my Zoom room. I prefer to let participants in my calls, especially students, see into my world. On the wall directly behind me is a large (17 by 29 inch) watercolour of three lobster boats at anchor. The sea is relatively calm, with small waves. The boats are perpendicular to the […]

Margaret Florence grew up in Peterborough, Ontario. She was a talented painter and was inspired by the lakes, rivers, waterfalls, forests, and hills of the nearby Kawartha Lakes region. She studied at and graduated from the Ontario College of Art (now Ontario College of Art and Design University) in 1951, when relatively few of its […]

Buried in the intellectual detritus that was left in an office I was moving into some years ago was a print. It has the title “Proof # 5. Plate 3,” is signed “John Piper” and is dated April 11th, 1974. I liked the print and took it home. It now sits in our vestibule across […]

I first met Bev Abramson when she was the coordinator for the Coop program in administration at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. But she is also a talented photographer and in the mid-Nineties she decided to leave UTSC to begin her second career. I kept in touch with her and hired her to photograph […]

Mary Ellen McQuay – as she signs her work – is a Canadian photo-artist whose forte is hand-painting photographic prints to deepen colours and enhance contrasts. I first saw her work and met her at Whetung Gallery in the Eighties and then at the Buckhorn Art Festival. I regard her as a friend. Mary Ellen […]

I had a research leave scheduled for 1993-94 and wanted to spend it at the Harvard Kennedy School. With the reinventing government movement taking off and the Clinton Administration taking office, it seemed like the place to be. I visited Cambridge the spring prior to the leave and it was clear I would be receiving […]

On my first visit to Kyoto in 1985, I stopped in at the Kyoto Handicraft Center, a wonderful emporium of traditional and modern Japanese art. I bought three silkscreen prints of typical Kyoto scenes: a Zen garden; the bannered entrance to a restaurant; and a traditional wooden house with shoji screens. They are hanging together […]

This post is about a silkscreen print by Toronto-based artist Wayne Mondok of Patricia Lake near Jasper in the Canadian Rockies. I bought the print at Whetung Ojibwa Centre, which I mentioned in my previous post. I’ll begin with the store and then move to the print. Indigenous Enterprise For many years, the Whetung family […]

Around the same time I bought the Pachter print Noblesse Oblige – the mid-Seventies – through  through the agency of my parents’ art store I bought a Morrisseau print entitled Power with Unity, one of a limited edition of 89. Up the Wall First a word about my parents’ store. It was called Up the […]

On my Christmas holiday in December 1969, I had the great privilege of seeing the landmark 50 years bauhaus exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. It also traveled to Stuttgart, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Chicago, and Pasadena. I kept the monumental catalogue, which I’m looking at now. It was printed sans serif with not one […]

Duke Ellington Sipho Ketye. That’s a name to reckon with. We must assume his parents hoped he would assert his black identity through the arts. Duke Ketye (1943 – 2002) grew up in Soweto, first studied art in South Africa, then took Norman Rockwell’s famous correspondence course while working in a ceramics factory. In his […]

Charles Pachter’s 1972 painting Noblesse Oblige, depicting the queen in regalia taking a salute mounted on a moose, deeply offended not only monarchists, but respectable Canadian opinion. Hence the title of my post. But it has since become an iconic Canadian image. If you don’t know it, you can see it as the thumbnail for […]

I am changing the focus of my blog this summer to write about pieces of art that I’ve collected over the years. Summer is an appropriate time to take a break from the heaviness of politics and policy. I want to think and write about art works that I cherish. I also want to connect […]