AGO Art Talks and Tours

Join art historian Dennis Reid, curator of Jack Chambers: Light, Spirit, Time, Place and Life, for a tour of the exhibition.

Listen to AGO conservator, Sherry Phillips, talk about Betty Goodwin's Tarpaulin # 8.

Yael Bartana is an Israeli-born artist and filmmaker now based in Amsterdam, Berlin and Tel Aviv. Her film trilogy "And Europe will be Stunned" made between 2007 and 2011, was shown at the Polish Pavilion of the Venice Biennial in 2011. The films revolve around the activities of a Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland invented by Bartana. As the artists says "This is a very universal story; as in previous works, I have treated Israel as a sort of a social laboratory, always looking at it from the outside". In 2010 she won the Artes Mundi prize for work that stimulates thinking about the human condition.

Yale University's Professor Benjamin Harshav is the preeminent Jewish culture critic today. As a respected scholar on Chagall, his recent publications include Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World: The Nature of Chagall's Art and Iconography (Rizzoli, 2006); Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative (Stanford University Press, 2004).

In connection with the exhibition Haute Culture: General Idea – A Retrospective, 1969-1994, join artist Luis Jacob, artist and writer Sholem Krishtalka and art historian Virginia Solomon for a stimulating discussion about this foundational Canadian artist group's diverse and increasingly influential production.

The digital revolution, for it truly to be revolutionary, involves more than increasing efficiencies of production and distribution. It involves profoundly different ways of understanding the world and ourselves. We create our media, and our media then re-create us. Where are our media leading us—politically, spiritually, psychologically? Do we want to go there? How can we influence our own futures via the kinds of media that we create and use?

Inaugurating their collective enterprise in the heyday of the "medium is the message," General Idea were often dismissed as camp "triviality." Yet they created a fictional system based on popular culture that was as coherent as the media analyses of Marshall McLuhan and the International Situationists. The lecture considers General Idea's contribution to the Toronto School of communication theory.

David Jaffé, Senior Curator in the Department of Painting, National Gallery, London will talk about the work of 17th Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. In particular he will discuss the Massacre of the Innocents by Rubens from the Thomson Collection at the AGO.

Dr. Allan Peterkin will engage Dr. Susan Abbey and artist Deirdre Logue in a conversation around the issues of mindfulness in the arts and medicine. A selection of Deirdre Logue's work will be screened. Dr. Susan Abbey specializes in psychiatry concentrated on the interface of mind and body – with a particular focus on depression, quality of life and stress management with the medically ill and transplant patients and families. Deirdre Logue's film, video and installation work focuses on self-presentational discourse, the body as material, confessional autobiography and the passage of 'real' time.

Join Todd Eberle for the first in a series of brown-bag lunch-time talks. Born in Cleveland, OH, in 1963, Todd Eberle is a professional photographer and artist based in New York City. He is currently photographer-at-large for Vanity Fair. First celebrated for his photographs of Donald Judd's works and architecture, Eberle is best known for his interpretive work comprising of iconic subject matter such as art, architecture, interiors, design, and portraits. Turning his lens on these subjects, Eberle presents the disparate images that make up international architecture, landscapes, and society. His vision is united by a minimalist aesthetic; a potent mix of control, symmetry and proportion.

In this talk David Wistow provides a personal look at the life of Marc Chagall and his art during a time of enormous social and political upheaval - World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917. The talk offers a glimpse into Chagall's youth and Jewish upbringing, his search for a powerful new language of expression, his obsession with the village of his childhood and six decades of creative activity in exile. It also explores Chagall's friends and rivals - the Constructivists - who created radical forms of art to capture their vision of a new, idealized world of social equality. David Wistow is an Interpretive Planner at the AGO.

Companies claiming to represent the "creative industries" have turned into unlikely advocates of censorship, surveillance and control. Entertainment industry associations have asked world leaders to remake the Internet as a nightmarish panopticon, in the name of defending the arts and copyright. But for all the censorship, easy takedown, digital locks, and warrantless surveillance and seizure, copyright infringement goes on, and artists find themselves increasingly serving as the justification for totalitarian policies that could have been ripped from the Chinese politburo's playbook. Can we design a copy-native, Internet-friendly copyright system? If so, what would it look like? Which artists would it serve? Which artists should it serve?

No two critics have been more closely associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement in America than Greenberg and Rosenberg. Their pitched battles over formal purity versus existential meaning were played out in art magazines, galleries, and museums nationwide. Their rivalry was so intense that satirist Tom Wolfe dubbed them the "Bergs." Norman Kleeblatt, chief curator of the Jewish Museum in New York, offers an opportunity to reconsider Abstract Expressionism's evolution through the contradictory explanations of these two major critics and tastemakers.

In this clip, Robert Motherwell talks about what inspired his series of 1965 drawings called Lyric Suite. For these works, Motherwell bought 1000 sheets of Japanese rice paper, and determined to paint on them spontaneously, with no preconceptions or revisions. Motherwell abruptly stopped at around 600 sheets when he learned of the tragic death of his close friend and fellow artist, David Smith. To hear the entire lecture, visit http://www.ago.net/robert-motherwell-ocad-talk

Glenn D. Lowry, director of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and AGO director Matthew Teitelbaum discussed art, ideas and the future of museums. Glenn D. Lowry became the sixth director of The Museum of Modern Art in 1995. He leads a staff of 750 and directs an active program of exhibitions, acquisitions, and publications. Matthew Teitelbaum, the Art Gallery of Ontario's Michael and Sonja Koerner director, and CEO, joined the AGO in 1993 as chief curator and was appointed director in 1998.

Photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank is still best known for The Americans, his 1958 book, a foundational work in American photography and art history. Cultural critic, writer, historian Luc Sante maintains that there isn't a documentary photographer who came of age in the 1970s and '80s who didn't absorb the book and reflect its lessons in some way. In his talk, Sante will consider Frank's work and its enduring appeal.

9 to 5 was an exhibition that let visitors experience art in an unexpected way: by interacting with the artists while they make it! The first half of the symposium featured 9 to 5 artists Anitra Hamilton, Graeme Patterson, and Ed Pien and curators Katherine Dennis, Mary MacDonald and Zach Pearl reflecting on the project.

David Blackwood, one of Canada's leading printmakers and most popular artists, was born in 1941 in the outport town of Wesleyville to a family with a long seafaring history. He has been telling stories about Newfoundland in the form of epic visual narratives for 30 years. He will be joined in conversation by fellow Newfoundlander, writer, broadcaster and teacher Rex Murphy. Murphy is a regular contributor to CBC's The National, writes a weekly column for The National Post and is the author of the book, Points of View, a collection of his columns and commentaries.

In conjunction with Merge, an annual exhibition showcasing emerging artists, Pamela Chang recently spoke with three Toronto based arts professionals about what you need to know to stay on top of the rising stars in the art market. This year's exhibition featured works by Tristram Lansdowne, Jenn Law, Bogdan Luca, Amanda Nedham, Meryl McMaster and Alex McLeod.

Paterson Ewen's paintings are kin to phenomenological philosophy, in that they spring from a sense of wonder at the things around us and plunge us into insights about the nature of things and ourselves. In many of his works, Ewen seeks to show, in paint and wood, celestial bodies that are out of this world and beyond easy perceptual grasp. In bringing these things down to earth, he illuminates fundamental dimensions of perceptual experience: spatial and temporal scale, movement and our rootedness in place, surface and depth, lighting and the lit. The talk will introduce phenomenology and its relationship with painting. No philosophy background needed, just wonder.