A place comes into existence through the depth of relationships that underwrite somewhere, a spot, with layers of sedimented names. In Place Matters scholars and artists conduct varied forms of place-based inquiry to demonstrate why place matters. Lavishly illustrated, the volume brings into conversation photographic projects and essays that revitalize the study of landscape. The collection investigates place in such named sites as Colonus, Mont St. Victoire, Chomolungma | Everest, Hiroshima, Fort Qu’Appelle, Donetsk airport, the island of Lesbos.

Contributors engage the study of place through an approach that Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick call critical topography: the way that we understand critical thought to range over a place, or how thought and symbolic forms invent place through text and image as if initiated by an X marking the spot. Critical topography’s tasks are to mediate and to diminish the gap between representation and referent, to be both in the world and about the world; to ask what place is this, what are its names, where am I, how and with what responsibilities may I be here? Chapters map the deep cultural, environmental, and political histories of singular places, interrogating the charged relation between history, place, and power and identifying the territorial imperatives of place making. With contributions from the renowned artists Hamish Fulton and Edward Burtynsky, the Swedish poet, Jesper Svenbro among others, the collection examines profound shifts in place-based thinking as it relates to the history of art, the anthropocene and nuclear ruin, borders and global migration, residential schools, the pandemic and sites of refuge.

In his prologue W.J.T. Mitchell writes: “Places, like feasts, are moveable. They can be erased and forgotten, lost in space, or maintained and rebuilt. Both their appearance and disappearance, their making and unmaking, are the work of critical topography.” Global in scope, Canadian in spirit, and grounded in singular sites, Place Matters presents critical topography as an approach to analyze, interpret, and reflect on place.

Jonathan Bordo is professor of cultural studies at Trent University.
Blake Fitzpatrick is professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University.

A Governor General’s Award–winning poet and a member of the Order of Canada, Phyllis Webb was a major Canadian cultural figure from the 1950s through the 1980s, publishing ten celebrated collections of poetry and prose and co-founding the CBC Radio program Ideas (in 1965). When “words abandoned” her in the early 1990s and she was no longer able to write, she took up photography, photocollage, and eventually painting.

Devotion: Today’s Future Becomes Tomorrow’s Archive, edited by Jarrett Earnest, contains essays and interviews, reproductions of notes, diagrams, works of art, and rare ephemera representing an archive of overlooked and excluded material.

Queer people have had to create and maintain archives as alternate repositories due to systematic exclusion from traditional archival practices and institutions. Propelled by the editor’s meticulous collecting and explorations of experimental living practices and embodied materiality, this book is a beautifully designed, radical collection of overlooked and forgotten IBPOC and LGBTQ2S+ archives.

Published by PUBLIC Books and distributed in Canada by Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Jarrett Earnest is an American writer and curator living in New York City. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (David Zwirner Books, 2018) and editor of Painting is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980–1993 (Soberscove Press, 2021). Earnest recently curated the exhibitions The Young and Evil (2019), Ray Johnson: WHAT A DUMP (2021), and Jesse Murry: Rising (with Lisa Yuskavage) (2021) all at David Zwirner, New York, and the final installment of Ways of Seeing: Three Takes on the Jack Shear Drawing Collection (2022) at the Drawing Center, New York. 

This catalogue documents a multi-year art-science project called Immune Nations, produced on the occasion of its exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Initiated in 2014 and co-led by Steven Hoffman (York University), Sean Caulfield (University of Alberta), and Natalie Loveless (University of Alberta), Immune Nations brought together scientists, policy experts, academic scholars, and artists to work on an interdisciplinary and collaborative research-creation project tackling complex issues related to the use and distribution of vaccines in the world today. The project launched at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art’s Galeri KiT (2017), moved to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) headquarters building in Geneva, Switzerland (2017), and concluded at the McMaster Museum of Art at McMaster University (2021). Contributors: Jesper Alvær, Sean Caulfield, Timothy Caulfield, Susan Colberg, Patrick Fafard, Caitlin Fisher, Steven Hoffman, Johan Holst, Annemarie Hou, Alison Humphrey, Jude Kang Hwirin, Rachelle Viader Knowles, Kaisu Koski, Vicki Sung-yeon Kwon, Natalie Loveless, Patrick Mahon, Tegan Moore, Carol Podedworny, Sergio Serrano, Florian Schneider, Lathika Sritharan, Mkrtich Tonoyan, Lalaine Ulit-Destajo, Susan Rogers Van Katwyk, Morgan Wedderspoon, Arman Yeritsyan

Natalie Loveless (project co-lead) is Associate Professor, Contemporary Art and Theory, in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta. She also directs the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory.

A colourful journey through Newfoundland and Labrador as seen through the distinctive, whimsical style of internationally renowned artist Adam Young.

Highlighting the last ten years of Adam Young’s artistic work in Newfoundland and Labrador, this book features over 100 paintings and sketches based on the artist’s representation and vision of the Atlantic coast. Inspiration for Young’s work comes from the stark beauty of the landscape and architecture and the warmth of the people who live here. His mediums of choice are acrylics and inks, and the work focuses on light, repetition, movement, and colour. The fishing stage and saltbox house are common themes in Young’s paintings, and these objects stand in as characters. The colourful little shacks embody a playful feeling of curiosity and wonder as they balance on the rocky and sometimes harsh coastline of the North Atlantic.

Adam Young is best known for his whimsical and colourful depictions of Eastern Canada, particularly Newfoundland. He was born in Halifax, NS, and raised in Moncton, NB; he’s been living on Fogo Island, off the northeast coast of Newfoundland, since 2008. Adam graduated with a BFA from Mount Allison University in 2003 and started his artistic career as a freelance illustrator for newspapers and magazines throughout Canada. His professional body of work began after his first visit to Newfoundland in 2005. He is the co-author and illustrator of the children's book, The Little Red Shed. Find more at ayoungstudios.com

Bringing together fifteen scholars of art and culture, Unsettling Canadian Art History addresses the visual and material culture of settler colonialism, enslavement, and racialized diasporas in the contested white settler state of Canada.

This collection offers new avenues for scholarship on art, archives, and creative practice by rethinking histories of Canadian colonialisms from Black, Indigenous, racialized, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit perspectives. Writing across many positionalities, contributors offer chapters that disrupt colonial archives of art and culture, excavating and reconstructing radical Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic creation and experience. Exploring the racist frameworks that continue to erase histories of violence and resistance, this book imagines the expansive possibilities of a decolonial future.

Unsettling Canadian Art History affirms the importance of collaborative conversations and work in the effort to unsettle scholarship in Canadian art and culture.

Erin Morton is professor of visual culture in the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick.

A captivating account of the formative years of one of Canada’s best-known artists, Jackson’s Wars follows A.Y. Jackson’s education and progress as a painter before he was a well-known artist and his time on the battlefield in Europe, before he cast his lot in with a group of like-minded Toronto artists.

Jackson fought many battles: he was a feisty and opinionated combatant when he crossed swords with critics, collectors, museums, galleries, and fellow painters as an emerging artist. Moving from Montreal to Toronto in 1913, he became a key figure in a landscape movement that was determined to depict Canada in a bold new way, only to have a war dash the group's collective ambitions. Alone among his close associates, Jackson enlisted to fight with the 60th Infantry Battalion. Wounded at Sanctuary Wood in 1916, he returned to the field of combat as an official war artist – the first Canadian artist appointed, the only infantryman in the program – and militated for other Canadian appointments to what is now a storied moment of creation for such artists as F.H. Varley and Arthur Lismer. Jackson produced some of Canada’s most memorable depictions of the world’s first industrial-scale conflict, even as he reckoned with the anguish caused by the mysterious death of his close friend Tom Thomson. A life-changing event for soldiers, families, and nations alike, the First World War has been understood as a moment of stasis in the visual arts in Canada – the dead ground from which the Group of Seven emerged in the early 1920s. Douglas Hunter shows how Jackson’s war was a moment of intense transformation and artistic development on the canvas as well as an experience that tempered a young man into a constructive elder statesman for Canadian art. On his return home he was not only instrumental in the formation of the Group of Seven in Toronto, but a key figure for the Beaver Hall Group in Montreal.

Jackson’s Wars is a story of brotherhoods of painters and soldiers, shot through with inspiration, ambition, trauma, and loss, on the home front as well as on the battlefield. Hunter widens and deepens A.Y. Jackson’s world of friends, family, and colleagues to capture the life of a complex man and the crucial events and relationships behind the creation of Canada’s best-known art collective.

Douglas Hunter is the author of numerous books including Beardmore: The Viking Hoax That Rewrote History, a finalist for the Wilson Prize for Canadian History. He lives in Port McNicoll, Ontario.

For centuries, women artists of the Wendat First Nation of Wendake in Quebec have created artworks of intricate design and complex meaning in moosehair and quill embroidery. Their work records and transmits ancestral knowledge across generations of artists and remains a vibrant and important practice today.

Breaking new ground in Indigenous art histories, Wendat Women’s Arts is the first book to bring together a full history of the Wendat embroidery art form. Annette de Stecher challenges the historical anonymity of Indigenous women artists by arguing for their central role in community history and ceremony. Through their art, these women played an important part in the diplomatic strategies that advanced the sovereignty of their nation, work that was an extension of their position of authority in their families and clans. Chiefs and community members wore finely embroidered attire as a brilliant focus of ceremonial events, a tradition that continues today. Women artists also supported their community economically as their embroidery was a souvenir of choice for European collectors. In vibrant illustrations, this book reconstructs the rich repertoire of Wendat embroidery now dispersed in collections throughout the world.

Wendat Women’s Arts combines a depth of historical understanding with a keen knowledge of contemporary Wendat artists, demonstrating that the story of Wendat women is one of cultural strength, innovation, resilience, and success.

Annette W. de Stecher is assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Judith Nasby, founding director and curator of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, animates the story of the gallery from its humble beginnings in the hallways of a university campus in 1916 to its latest incarnation as the internationally recognized Art Gallery of Guelph.

The book is beautifully illustrated with eighty images of artworks in the permanent collection, beginning with the gallery's first acquisition, Tom Thomson's 1917 masterpiece The Drive, the last large canvas he painted before his tragic death. As curator, Nasby oversaw the creation of one of the most comprehensive sculpture parks in Canada and the amassing of a permanent collection of some nine thousand artworks. In The Making of a Museum Nasby reveals how the museum developed its internationally recognized collection of contemporary Inuit drawings and wall hangings that toured four continents. She discusses the development of the collection's specializations in contemporary works by Canadian silversmiths; historical European etchings; Woodland and Northeastern Indigenous beadwork; and others that arose from curatorial collaborations, such as molas by Kuna women artists from Panama and contemporary paintings and indigenous woodcuts from Chongqing, China.

Nasby recounts her long career as founding director and curator, peppering the hundred-year history of cultural development on the University of Guelph campus and in the city with humorous anecdotes and personal insights to reveal how arts institutions can be created through dedication, serendipity, and perseverance.

Judith Nasby is curator emerita of the Art Gallery of Guelph, adjunct professor of fine art at the University of Guelph, and author of Irene Avaalaaqiaq: Myth and Reality and Rolph Scarlett: Painter, Designer, and Jeweller.

For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively being repressed, beading supported cultural continuity, demonstrating Tlingit women?s resilience, strength, and power. Beadwork served many uses, from the ceremonial to the economic, as women created beaded pieces for community use and to sell to tourists. Like other Tlingit art, beadwork reflects rich artistic visions with deep connections to the environment, clan histories, and Tlingit worldviews. Contemporary Tlingit artists Alison Bremner, Chloe French, Shgen Doo Tan George, Lily Hudson Hope, Tanis S?eiltin, and Larry McNeil foreground the significance of historical beading practices in their diverse, boundary-pushing artworks.

Working with museum collection materials, photographs, archives, and interviews with artists and elders, Megan Smetzer reframes this often overlooked artform as a site of historical negotiations and contemporary inspirations. She shows how beading gave Tlingit women the freedom to innovate aesthetically, assert their clan crests and identities, support tribal sovereignty, and pass on cultural knowledge. Painful Beauty is the first dedicated study of Tlingit beadwork and contributes to the expanding literature addressing women?s artistic expressions on the Northwest Coast.

Megan A. Smetzer is lecturer of art history at Capilano University.