AT THE MUSEUMS

As it marks the recent centenary of the first exhibition by the influential Group of Seven Canadian painters, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection presents a selection of more than two hundred artworks by Canadian women from the same period. The new exhibition Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment displays art by members of a talented generation of female painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, and architects while reflecting the disadvantaged positions from which women artists of their era worked and the fact that their achievements were long overlooked in Canadian art history. Organized by McMichael chief curator Sarah Milroy, Uninvited shows paintings by Emily Carr and by members of Montreal’s Beaver Hall Group, sculptures by Elizabeth Wyn Wood, Frances Loring, and Florence Wyle, as well as works by immigrant artists Paraskeva Clark and Regina Selden and Indigenous female artists from the period, including Attatsiaq, Elizabeth Katt Petrant, and Mrs. Walking Sun. While the Group of Seven is known for its members’ landscape paintings, the women artists’ work included portraiture as well as depictions of urban life, industrial landscapes, and marginalized people. Uninvited continues at the gallery in Kleinburg, Ontario, northwest of Toronto, until January 16, 2022.

Montreal’s Pointe-à- Callière museum is presenting an exhibition that showcases the heritage and contributions of one of the city’s oldest and largest immigrant cultural communities. Italian Montréal tells about the thousands of Italians who left behind economic and political problems in their birth country and sought opportunities in a new city and country in the late- nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also highlights the social, economic, cultural, and creative contributions made since then by Italo- Montrealers, including more than a quarter million residents of the city who today describe themselves as having Italian roots. The exhibition does this thanks to more than 325 objects donated by families and organizations. Those items include photographs and family heirlooms, as well as the bicycles and sports memorabilia seen in the section of the exhibition dedicated to the café — a place where Italo- Montrealers gathered to discuss politics, social conditions, and sports, or simply to relax.

Italian Montréal continues until January 9, 2022.

Left: Suzanne Duquet, Group, 1941, oil on canvas, 127 x 149.8 cm.

Pointe-à-Callière’s exhibition Italian Montréal shows how cafés have been important gathering places for Italo-Montrealers.

Above: Yvonne McKague Housser, Marguerite Pilot of Deep River (Girl with Mulleins), circa 1932, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 61 cm.