Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment

Most of the leading women artists in Canada during the first part of the twentieth century were highly trained, often having studied at the premier art schools of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, and in New York, London and Paris. Whereas prominent male artists of the day were largely trained in commercial illustration and graphic design.

Isabel McLaughlin was mocked for her painting of a fearsome and overpowering tree, with critics implicitly asserting that landscape was an exclu­sively male pursuit. Yet she persisted.

In contrast to the theatrical and often doom-laden handling of Indigenous themes by male artists, who saw a dying way of life, a number of settler women artists in this period express a quiet kinship and gentle intrigue with these living communities, seeking to learn what they could.

As left-wing ideals about the social order were emerging in Canada, thanks to the crushing legacy of the Depression and the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, artists such as the Russian-born Paraskeva Clark and the Montreal painter Marian Dale Scott were deeply engaged with the movement toward a more equitable society.

In cities after WWI, women created new kinds of social relations in places of their own devising. The sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, for instance, took over a church hall and declared it home, creating a free space for ideas and explorations of all sorts, challenging both the gender norms and the sculptural practices of the day through their powerful subjects.

Women from Black and Mi'kmaq communities in Nova Scotia made traditional baskets and boxes to sell outside the entrance to the Halifax Market – both being unwelcome inside the market doors. In both cases, the making of these goods marked a connection to the generations of women in their families who had come before them.

During this period, industrial subjects and Cubist elements defined the work of women painters such as Bess Larkin Housser Harris and Kathleen Munn, while others found epiphany in the lines of everyday objects. This is particularly true of Margaret Watkins, whose photographs of daily domestic routine feature the handsome curve of a porcelain sink or a coiled rubber shower hose, claimed by fresh eyes.

Emily Carr called her tree stumps “screamers,” identifying them as victims of human greed. Her paintings caution but also comfort, as the heavens overhead seem to offer solace and a return of the life force.