AGO Art Talks and Tours

Paul Graham is a British photographer based in New York. Lauded as "a profound force for renewal of the deep photographic tradition of engagement with the world", he was awarded the 2012 Hasselblad award for major achievements in photography.

Artist-in-residence Sara Angelucci; writer and historian Matthew Brower, Mark Peck, Royal Ontario Museum Ornithology Technician; and Bridget Stutchbury, author and Professor of Ornithology at York University, gathered to discuss the extinction and endangerment of North American birds as well as art and society's relationship with the natural environment. The talk was moderated by the AGO’s curator of Canadian Art, Andrew Hunter.

This talk features former artist-in-residence Sara Angelucci in conversation with artists Spring Hurlbut and Marla Hlady about their work, points of convergence and departure.

Dante's Divine Comedy expresses a radical new vision of religious faith that open doors to understanding spirituality and art in 14th-century Florence. Join Gilles Mongeau and Sasha Suda as they bring to light the challenges faced by the artists that tried to capture this radical new reality. Gilles Mongeau is the Director, Master of Divinity and Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Regis College in Toronto. Sasha Suda is the Art Gallery of Ontario's assistant curator of European art.

Contemporary art in the early twenty-first century is often discussed as though it were a radically new phenomenon unmoored from history. Yet all works of art were once contemporary to the artist and culture that produced them. In "What Was Contemporary Art?" Richard Meyer reclaims the contemporary from historical amnesia, exploring episodes in the study, exhibition, and reception of early twentieth-century art and visual culture.

Josef Sudek is regarded as one of the most legendary photographers from the twentieth century and is best known for his compelling photographs of Prague. AGO Next members learnt about this visionary artist and saw more than 175 photographs selected from the AGO’s Collection spanning his entire career.

Mauricio Toussaint, Consul General of Mexico in Toronto, and Dot Tuer, guest curator of Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting at the AGO, introduce a free screening of the 1983 Mexican film Frida, Naturaleza Viva (1983), directed by Paul Leduc with Ofelia Medina as Frida and painter Juan José Gurrola as Diego. They discuss the artists and their iconic status and how the film represents their lives, their time and their art. The recording ends with a Q&A with the audience.

In this talk Hayden Herrera interwove Kahlo's biography and her painting. Herrera discussed Kahlo's turning to painting after her bus accident at age eighteen, her difficult marriage to muralist Diego Rivera and its affect on her imagery, her childlessness and her numerous surgical operations and how she dealt with them in her self-portraits.

Camille Paglia is university professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the author of many books. In her latest book, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars, Paglia leads us chronologically through the paintings, sculptures, architectural styles, performance pieces and digital art that have defined and transformed our visual world.

The rise of Asia on the international scene is one of the most compelling stories in contemporary art. Provocative artworks command ever-higher prices as markets expand, and impressive new museums, schools and biennials continue to proliferate. Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, Tokyo and Beijing have established themselves as major art-world hubs, competing directly with London and New York. In order to understand this phenomenon and its connection to global movements of economic and political power, the Asia Contemporary Speaker Series presented a talk by Vishakha Desai.

Join the nominated artists as they chat with members of The Grange Prize 2012 Jury about the provocative issues and topics their works traverse.

Join the nominated artists as they chat with members of The Grange Prize 2012 Jury about the provocative issues and topics their works traverse.

Molly Ott Ambler and Elizabeth Gorayeb, vice-presidents from Sotheby's New York, visited the AGO on June 6 for a fascinating discussion about the intriguing world of the art market for Pablo Picasso while he was alive, as well as his relationship with his dealers. They also addressed the current market for Picasso's work.

Join us for this rare opportunity to meet the creators of Einstein on the Beach, the influential masterwork featured in this year's Luminato Festival.

During the early years of the twentieth century a new form of painting was born. This was not a further resolution of the aesthetic conundrum that had been teasing European artists for centuries – this wasn’t an evolutionary step that took us closer to understanding the mechanics of paint and canvas – this was the establishment of a new kind of aesthetic aim. This is the beginning of a radical change in pre-war cultural trajectory, an unstoppable revolution that defined post-war popular culture, and continues to inform the arts. It was a shift that found its most dramatic form in the work of Pablo Picasso, but was triggered and inspired by the art of Africa.

Follow Iain Baxter& on his journey from zoologist to conceptual artist to Br&. The &man will share his insights on the ecology of life and art &......

Join Simon Stephens to hear about ships, ship models and Tintin. Simon Stephens is curator of the Ship Model and Boat Collection at the National Maritime Museum, London. He curated the Thomson Collection of ship models installation at the AGO and co-curated the National Maritime Museum's 2005 Tintin At Sea exhibition.

In the 1300s plague ravaged Europe and was called the Black Death. The horrors of this pervaded all aspects of medieval culture and especially art. What are today’s plagues and how do we cope with them physically, psychologically and spiritually?

In this talk David Ciavatta draws from the philosophical insights of existentialist phenomenologists Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to suggest that what these paintings make visible is, in the end, the expressive movement of existence itself: through these paintings our eyes bear witness to the spontaneous emergence of a pre-objective sense and purpose out of the contingency of the world’s sensuous materiality.

In mid-career, Rembrandt shifted to a new model of Jesus based on a living, accurate-looking model, possibly the first time in the history of Christian Art this had been done. Lloyd DeWitt will outline the recent exhibition he organized at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which travelled to the Musée du Louvre and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Lloyd DeWitt is Curator of European Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and organizer of the exhibition Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus.