Founding Donors and Members of the First Advisory Committee

Gail Jarislowsky

Gail Merilees Jarislowsky received her BA from the University of British Columbia. She is also an alumna of Concordia University, where she completed a Master's degree in English in 1991. Mrs. Jarislowsky has taught at both the elementary and secondary levels as well as in special education. She has worked in the field of public relations and occupied the position of Director for Virgin Records (Canada) Inc. during the early 1980s. Gail Jarislowsky is an active member of the Montreal community and is highly committed to volunteer work with a variety of organizations. Mrs. Jarislowsky is the past Chairman of The Montreal General Hospital Foundation.

Stephen A. Jarislowsky

Stephen A. Jarislowsky is a scholar, investment analyst and counsellor, and avid art collector. Born in Berlin, Germany, Mr. Jarislowsky attended schools in the Netherlands, France and the United States, and served with the US Army in post-war Japan before returning to complete a B.Sc. at Cornell, an MA at the University of Chicago and an MBA at Harvard University. In 1955 Mr. Jarislowsky established Jarislowsky, Fraser & Company in Montreal and directed the growth of the company to become one of the largest and most successful investment management firms in Canada. As a prominent leader in the field of Canadian investment counselling and analysis, his recent publication The Investment Zoo: Taming the Bulls and the Bears(Transcontinental, 2005) has received great acclaim for its incisive integration of history, culture, politics and finance.

Mr. Jarislowsky has sat on numerous corporate boards of directors including SNC-Lavalin, Canfor, Southam, Swiss Bank Corp., Velan, Abitibi and Goodfellow, participated in educational, cultural and charitable activities of many kinds, and endowed eleven S.A. Jarislowsky Chairs at various universities in different fields. He also frequently contributes commentaries to television and radio, as well as in magazines and newspapers. Mr. Jarislowsky is a recipient of the Order of Canada, a Chevalier de l' Ordre National du Québec, Honorary LL.D. from Queen's and the University of Alberta, the Université de Montréal, McMaster University, Concordia University, Assumption University as well as from the Université Laval. The Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia was established in 1998 through the generous financial support of Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky.

External Advisory Committee Members

Philip Cercone

Philip Cercone is the Executive Director of McGill-Queen’s University Press. He did graduate work in American Colonial history and in 1976 began working with the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Canada Council in charge of scholarly dissemination and principally as Director of the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program for almost ten years.

In 1985, he took up an academic appointment at McGill University coupled with being Executive Director and Editor-in-chief of McGill-Queen's University Press. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Press and Chairs its Publication Review Committee that decides which manuscripts are to be published on Scholarly grounds. As well, he is series editor of the Press's internationally distinguished "History of Ideas Series," on which some 90 books have been published since it was established in 1985. Since his employment at the Press, he has published over 3,000 books by Canadian authors. During his 35-year tenure, the Press is now recognized as among the ten best North American University presses, the leading scholarly press in Canada, and the largest Canadian owned trade publisher in number of books published yearly.

He has been on the Board of Directors of many not-for-profit organizations in Canada and US and has been involved in peer-review panels on the funding of journals and trade books at both the Canada Council and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He has been president of the following organizations: Association of American University Presses; Association of Canadian Publishers (three times); President of the Association for the Export of Canadian Books, now called Livres Canada Books (6 times); Association of Canadian University Presses; Association of Quebec University Presses (twice); Association of English Language Publishers of Quebec. He was one of the founders of eBOUND Canada on whose Board he sat during the organization’s first 4 years. He has also been President of the Italian-Canadian Professional and Businessmen Association of Canada.

For his dedication and contribution to the publishing industry in Canada, he received the Association of Canadian Publishers’ President Award for “leadership through volunteer service to the publishing industry and to ACP.” As president of ACP, in 1992 he spearheaded the creation of the Canada Book Fund at the Department of Heritage Canada, which is still in place. In 2018, he became part of a think tank, which co-authored the highly regarded and influential More Canada Report: increasing Canadians’ Awareness and Reading of Canadian Books (168 pages). He remains a director of the Canadian Forum Foundation, and The More Canada three-person steering Committee. Currently he is also vice-President of the Association of Canadian University Presses and his term on the Board of Livres Canada Books, representing the ACP, has been renewed for a further three years.

Mark A. Cheetham

Cheetham’s research centres on art writing and art making from the mid 18th century to the present. He has written books and articles on the history, theory, and current practice of abstract art, the reception of Immanuel Kant’s thinking in the visual arts and the discipline of art history, on art historical methodology, on ecological art, and on recent Canadian and international art. He was the Project Director of a 3-year SSHRC initiative called CACHET (Canadian Art Commons for History of Art Education & Training), 2013–16, which linked five institutions and 20 researchers. See www.ArtCan.ca

His latest book - Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the ‘60s - was published by Penn State UP in 2018. Cheetham is active as a curator: recent projects include 'Struck by Likening: The Power & Discontents of Artworld Analogies' at the McMaster University Museum of Art in 2017 and Ecologies of Landscape (BE Contemporary, Toronto, 2018-19).

Cheetham is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute Fellowship, a University of Toronto Connaught Research Fellowship and two Chancellor Jackman Research Fellowships in the Humanities, several Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada research grants, the Edward G. Pleva Award for Excellence in Teaching (Western University1998), and the Northrop Frye Award for teaching (University of Toronto). Cheetham received the Art Journal Award from the College Art Association of America for “Matting the Monochrome: Malevich, Klein, & Now,” and the Curatorial Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, for “The Transformative Abstraction of Robert Houle,” in Robert Houle: Troubling Abstraction. His co-curated exhibition Jack Chambers: The Light From the Darkness/Silver Paintings and Film Work was awarded “Exhibition of the Year” by the Ontario Assoc. of Art Galleries. He became a member of the Royal Society of Canada in 2008. He is part of a national research project addressing settler-colonial practices in the art history of Canada. Cheetham is currently researching and teaching in four areas: ecological art in its relations to earlier landscape practices, Public Art in Toronto, the importance of analogy in art history and museums, and the image cultures of weather in 19th-century Arctic voyaging from the Anglosphere.

Catharine Mastin

Catharine Mastin is an independent scholar, writer and curator with specialization in modern art and feminism and is an Adjunct Member of the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Art History at York University, Toronto. She received her PhD from the University of Alberta, Edmonton in 2012 on women in artist-couple relationships. Elements of her doctoral research have been published in Mary Pratt (2013, 2^nd edition 2016) and Uninvited: Women in the Modern Moment (2021). Her most recent book is Territories: Brenda Francis Pelkey (2017) and she has a forthcoming book on Marion Nicoll: Life & Art with Art Canada Institute (2022). Her current exhibition and publishing projects include Franklin Carmichael: A Reverence for Nature (Art Gallery of Algoma, 2022), Frances-Anne Johnston: Shadow Effects (Ottawa Art Gallery, 2022), Cobalt’s Modern Artists (McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2024), and Women and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Before 1900 (Woodstock Art Gallery, 2023-24).

From 2010-2020 Mastin served as the 6^th Executive Director of the Art Gallery of Windsor during which time she led the gallery through a significant organizational change process and its 75^th anniversary. Prior to serving as an Executive Director, she served as Senior Art Curator and twice interim Vice-President (Exhibitions and Collections) for the Glenbow Museum, Calgary (1995-2006). She began her curatorial practice at the Art Gallery of Windsor where she served as Curator of Canadian Art (1989-1995).

Mastin holds as many individual peer awards and scholarships. In 1993 and 1995 her writing projects on Wyndham Lewis and colonial narratives in public art collections earned her Curatorial Writing Awards from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. During the late 1990s she was a two-time Nominee for Canada’s prestigious Top 40 under 40 Award for outstanding professionals in all sectors. Her book on The Group of Seven in Western Canada was the first multi-authored volume on an important Canadian art movement and the also the first volume on the Group of Seven to include female writers; it remained on the Canadian best-seller list through the summer of 2002 and was released in second edition in 2007. During her doctoral studies Mastin held four major fellowships including a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2008-2010), The University of Alberta’s prestigious Dissertation Fellowship (2010-2011), the President’s Doctoral Prize of Distinction (2008-2010), and the Recruitment Fellowship (2006-2008).

Mastin has volunteered on the Board of Directors of the Ontario Association of Art Galleries including a term as President (2017-2018). Since 2014 she has served as External Advisor and the Gail and Stephen Jarislowsky Institute for Canadian Art. She served on the jury for Canada’s national portrait competition, the Kingston Prize in 2017 and was its designated returning juror in 2019.