Generations: The Sobey Family and Canadian Art

This touring exhibition, organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, features over 120 works from a renowned family collection. Viewers familiar with Canadian art collections will recognize early settlers like 19th-century painter Cornelius Krieghoff and 20th-century artists like the Group of Seven, known for their unpeopled modern landscapes. By the same token, many will recognize that Canadian art today is defined less by those unpeopled landscapes than it is by the artworks of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples who, for various reasons, were made absent from those landscapes.

In addition to other important 20th-century artists like Tom Thomson, Emily Carr and the Quebec Impressionists, featured are contemporary Indigenous artists making work in and about a so-called Canada, and garnering significant interest for it. Yet while works by Brenda Draney, Brian Jungen, Kent Monkman and the late Annie Pootoogook are becoming ever-present in the Canadian imaginary (and beyond), so too are the canvases of collection artists like Peter Doig, whose recurrent paintings of an unsettling hippie canoeman are as uncertain in their presence as many of today’s white settler artists.

Though the historical role of the “North Atlantic” and its effect on the imaginations of the artists is a stated theme of this exhibition, it is art’s loose threads that often draw us in. But for those partial to grand gestures, it doesn’t get much better than Krieghoff’s Crossing the St. Lawrence with the Royal Mail at Quebec (1859) as seen through the lens of Monkman’s study for mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People): Resurgence of the People (Final Variation) (2019).

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