Join Renée van der Avoird, associate curator of Canadian Art, in celebration of the opening of Edna Taçon: Verve and Decorum. A prominent figure in the Toronto and New York City art worlds throughout the 1940s, Edna Taçon had a crucial impact on the development of abstract painting in Canada.  Remarks at 2:15pm 

American-born, but raised in Canada, Edna Taçon (1905–1980) was a trained violinist who considered music and abstraction as similarly intuitive and creative pursuits and wrote about the “sublime summit” attainable by both. She exhibited her collages and paintings throughout the 1940s, splitting her time between Toronto and New York. In 1941, she received a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Scholarship, which allowed her to work and exhibit in group shows at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). The museum has subsequently acquired five of her paintings. Concurrently, in Ontario, Taçon exhibited at the Hamilton Women's Art Association and The Art Gallery of Toronto (now Art Gallery of Ontario). The AGO purchased her watercolour Improvisation No. 2 in 1947. She was a member of the Ontario Society of Artists and the Canadian Group of Painters. Today, her work can be found in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa.