The U.S. Consulate General in Toronto is pleased to partner with the McMichael Canadian Art Collection to organize the Higher States: Lawren Harris and His American Contemporaries exhibition through the U.S. Mission in Canada’s Public Affairs Grants Program. Higher States frames the iconic Canadian artist Lawren Harris in the larger North American context during his years in New Hampshire and New Mexico, and features the work and documents the influence of his American counterparts, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, and Marsden Hartley. Guest curators Dr. Roald Nasgaard and Gwendolyn Owens investigate the evolution of Harris’s painting from landscape to abstraction and demonstrate his integral role in cross-border artistic developments. This exhibition is part of the McMichael’s Canadian Art Collection’s celebration of Canada’s 150th anniversary and includes the Harris & Modernity Symposium also supported by the U.S. Consulate General in Toronto. The exhibition is open now through September 4, 2017. A short video tour of the exhibition with Consul General Juan Alsace and the Chief Curator Sarah Stanners is available through Facebook.
The Harris & Modernity Symposium took place on March 20, 2017 and was a forum for Canadian and American scholars to re-examine Lawren Harris’s artistic career in the context of the prevailing modernist and spiritual trends. The event offered a deeper understanding of the milieus, both artistic and literary, that were crucial to Harris’s artistic development. The Symposium also examined the influence of artists from American Modernists Georgia O’Keeffe and Thomas Wilfred, to the Expressionist Wassily Kandinsky, and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman.
The Toronto Consulate is also supporting the performance of the Buffalo Chamber Players at McMichael Canadian Art Collection on April 2, 2017. This project also represents a valuable partnership with the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and enhances the understanding in Canada of U.S. history and culture and the cross-border influences between Canada and the United States. During 2016-2017, the Consulate has supported art that fosters understanding, partnering with many of Ontario’s world-class institutions such as the Toronto International Film Festival, the Hot Docs Documentary Festival, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Gardiner Museum, and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.
