Join art historian Elizabeth Legge, artist Ilene Sova and AGO Associate Curator of modern art Kenneth Brummel for a conversation exploring Picasso’s complex relationships with the women in his art and life. This conversation will uncover the everlasting effect of Picasso’s influence on painters and consider why artists continually return to dialogue with his work. Presented as part of Picasso: Painting the Blue Period

Elizabeth Legge works on Dada, Surrealism, and contemporary Canadian, U.S., and British art. She has written for a number of journals including Art History, Word and Image, and Representations. She has written books on Max Ernst and psychoanalysis; and on Michael Snow’s radical New York film of the 1960s, Wavelength. Her intellectual interests include: the ways that artists have worked with language; and the instrumental uses of religious, racial, and national stereotypes and rhetorics in art. She has been a visiting professor at the Humanities Centre at Johns Hopkins University.

Ilene Sova is the Ada Slaight Chair of Contemporary Painting and Drawing at OCAD University. Ilene’s painting practice focuses on social change with a feminist focus on creating a dialogue around anti-oppression. She is also heavily involved in the areas of arts advocacy, community activation, and promoting pluralism in the arts. Sova is the founder of the Feminist Art Conference and Blank Canvases, an in-school creative arts programme for elementary school students. She holds an honours BFA from the University of Ottawa in Painting and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Windsor. With extensive solo and group exhibitions in Canada and abroad, Sova’s work has most notably been shown at Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and Mutuo Centro de Arte in Barcelona.

Kenneth Brummel is Associate Curator, Modern Art, at the AGO, where his selected exhibitions include Picasso: Painting the Blue Period (2021), Andy Warhol (2021), Mitchell/Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation (2018), Anthony Caro: Sculpture Laid Bare (2016-17) and Painting Tranquility: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammershøi (2016). Prior to joining the AGO in 2014, Kenneth Brummel held curatorial positions in several major art museums in the United States, including the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. He holds a Master’s in Art History from The University of Chicago. Brummel’s area of specialty is late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century international modernism.