Jarislowsky Institute welcomes new research chair and director
Martha Langford, one of Canada’s leading art historians, has been appointed research chair and director of Concordia University’s Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. Her five-year term began on July 1, 2011.
As she takes the helm of the country’s only endowed institute devoted to Canadian art, Langford aims to enhance and promote the institute’s mission to foster greater appreciation and understanding of Canadian visual culture of all eras. The institute supports research, develops technological and other dissemination resources, and establishes links among museum and art communities and the general public.
Langford believes the institute can play an active role in strengthening the Canadian visual arts network by pursuing new dialogues and partnerships and by consolidating resources.
“I want to ensure that the institute is joining in various conversations already happening across the country,” says Langford. “This is an exciting time of national debate about past and future art history models, and collaborative research involving both established researchers and young graduates from our universities.”
Langford is an associate professor in Concordia’s Department of Art History where she has taught courses on photographic history and theory, Canadian art and institutional frameworks.
As research chair, she will continue to pursue projects on Canadian art and photography, including an intellectual biography of multidisciplinary Canadian artist Michael Snow. She is also leading a team research project involving graduate students in the creation of a common research tool on Canadian photographic history to be made available online.
Langford’s professional background includes nearly two decades in Ottawa where she served as executive producer of the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board of Canada and as founding director and chief curator of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, an affiliate museum of the National Gallery of Canada where she was concurrently an assistant director. As an institutional and independent curator, she has organized exhibitions of Canadian art that have been shown across Canada, in Europe and the United States.
Her major works include Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (2001) and Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (2007), as well as an edited collection, Image & Imagination (2005), all from McGill-Queen’s University Press (MQUP). A Cold War Tourist and His Camera, co-written with John Langford, was also published by MQUP in 2011.
Langford is editor-in-chief of Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien and co-editor, with Sandra Paikowsky, of the MQUP/Beaverbrook Foundation Series on Canadian Art History. She is also a contributing editor for Border Crossings (Winnipeg), Exit (Madrid) and Photography & Culture (London), an advisory board member for Ciel variable (Montreal), and a regular book reviewer for Source (Belfast). She is the organizer of the Department of Art History’s lecture series, Speaking of Photography, which has welcomed photographic scholars from Canada, Britain, and the United States, since 2007-08.
Langford succeeds François-Marc Gagnon, who was the founding director of the institute since its inception in 1998. He continues his immense contribution to the institute as a Distinguished Research Fellow.
Related links:
• Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art
• Concordia’s Department of Art History
• Speaking of Photography