Sandra Paikowsky

Contact information

Email:

sandra.paikowsky@concordia.ca

Biography

Sandra Paikowsky retired from the Department of Art History in 2010 after coming to the department in 1969. She is the First Distinguished Fellow of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. She co-founded the Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d'histoire de l'art canadien in 1974 and was its Managing Editor until 2010, although she remains the Journal's publisher and a member of its editorial board. She is currently editing two special issues of the Journal with articles in honour of Dr. François-Marc Gagnon. 

From 1981 to 1992 she was the Director/Curator of the Concordia Art (now the Ellen Art Gallery). Since then, she has guest-curated several exhibitions, including the Goodridge Roberts 1904-1974 traveling retrospective (1998) and was a co-curator ofAchieving the Modern. Canadian Abstract Painting and Design in the 1950s (1992). In 2010 she curated the exhibition John Fox: Refiguration in Montreal and most recently John Fox: Opera su carta in Venice, Italy. Sandra Paikowsky is also a co-editor of the recent publication, The Visual Arts in Canada and the series co-editor with Dr. Martha Langford of the McGill-Queen's Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History. She has also lectured and presented papers on issues in Canadian and Montreal art across Canada, in the United States and in Venice.
 
In her many years with the Department of Art History, she taught undergraduate courses in Canadian art history, Montreal art associations, the Renaissance in Venice, foreign artists in Venice in the early 20th Century as wells as critical writings on Abstraction Expressionism and the de Koonings, among many other topics. Her graduate teaching focused on museum exhibitions, art societies and university art galleries.

Research activities

• The Work of John Fox
• The Venetian Painting and Drawings of James Wilson Morrice 
• The Critical Writings of Walter Abell

Publications

• The Girls and the Grid. Montreal Women Abstract Painters in the 1950s and early 1960s" in Rethinking Professionalism. Essays on Women and Art in Canada 1850-1970 (forthcoming 2012)
• John Fox: Refiguration (2010)
• "Modernist Representational Painting before 1950" in The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century (2010)
• "James Wilson Morrice's Return from School: A Modernist Image of Quebec Children," in Depicting Canada's Children (2009)
• "From Away: The Carnegie Corporation, Walter Abell and American Strategies for Art in the Maritimes from the 1920s to the 1940s," Journal of Canadian Art History (2006)
• "James Wilson Morrice in Venice. The Campiello delle Ancore," Journal of Canadian Art History (2005)
• "Constructing an Identity. The 1952 XXVI Biennale di Venezia and 'The Projection of Canada Abroad'," Journal of Canadian Art History (1999)