Land acknowledgments—that semi-ceremonial rite that precedes many public and academic gatherings, noting in some manner the Indigenous presence on the local landscape that preceded colonization—has been having a commentator moment in the United States. Writers in The Atlantic and the New York Post have weighed in lately, on the negative side: the New York Post's... Continue Reading →
“Uninvited”: by whom, and to what?
The exhibition catalogue for Uninvited There's a big exhibition now open to the public at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario. Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Movement runs until January 16, 2022. If you're at all interested in what Canadian artists period were producing, mainly in the between-war years, I would... Continue Reading →
“Stop Messing Around: The Creative Work of William ‘Bill’ Hunter”
My father, William J. (Bill) Hunter, of Hamilton, Ontario, died last spring; he would have turned ninety-one today. He was adamant about not having a funeral, that we should instead have a party. My brother, Andrew, an artist and curator, working with his son, Max, may have gone one better with this exhibition of his creative work.
Attack(s) of the suffragettes
In my earlier long post, Slashers in the Louvre, and the Beautiful Ideas That Kill, I wrote about a disturbing series of attacks on paintings in the Louvre in 1907. Readers may be interested to know (as I was) that leading British galleries suffered their own series of attacks in 1913-14, by suffragettes.
Not Above It All: Henry Hudson’s Troubled Exploration Record
Gotham, the blog of the Gotham Center for New York City History, sponsored by the Graduate Center, CUNY, asked me to contribute to a weeklong series on Monuments of Colonial New York. I obliged with this essay on the Henry Hudson statue that overlooks his eponymous river.
The Aesthetic of the Northland
The good people at the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE) asked me to contribute an essay to a series marking the 100th anniversary of the formation of the Canadian landscape art collective, the Group of Seven. Fresh from a boat trip up eastern Georgian Bay, through many locales where members of the Group painted during and before its formation, I was happy to oblige.
Douglas Hunter 