Beaver Tales: Canadian Art and Design

This exhibition showcases both emerging and established designers and craft makers, alongside seminal artists who spearheaded the tradition of interpreting and celebrating Canadian countryside and wildlife in their artwork.

Guest curators Rachel Gotlieb and Martha Kelleher selected just over 100 pieces, to illustrate how artists, designers and craft makers, working over the last two centuries, have managed to transcend the pitfalls of kitsch and cliché, while creating universal works drawn from and inspired by motifs of Canadian identity. The objects demonstrate the extraordinary ways in which, nature-based signifiers of Canadianness have endured – and despite the enormously diverse ethnic heritage of our by now overwhelmingly urban society. Martha Kelleher believes that, “Today these now iconic indigent flora and fauna images help to form a rich and diverse heritage that provides us with a greater understanding of our culture.”

By bringing together works from art, design and craft, often regarded by scholars and curators as distinct and separate disciplines, the curators also address this low art/high art bias by revealing that Canadian symbolic flora and fauna are vital sources of inspiration and discourse across the craft, art and design communities.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Rachel Gotlieb and Martha Kelleher, and a third by Ross Fox, of the Department of Western Art and Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum.