Join writer and curator Ray Cronin for a talk about the significance and enduring appeal of the art of Alex Colville (1920 – 2013). From the early 1950s, Colville achieved a signature style, maintaining a set of images, subjects and contextual concerns that remained remarkably consistent over sixty years. His family, the immediate environs of his homes in Sackville, New Brunswick, and Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and animals, most often his family pets, the dogs and cats that shared his home, were his most frequent subjects. His critical acclaim waxed and waned over his career, but his public standing never did, and he died as, arguably, the most well-known living Canadian artist. Cronin knew Colville for the last 15 years of the artist’s life and explores how the artist eschewed abstraction at the height of its critical acclaim in North America, becoming simultaneously an outlier and a success with his existential approach to realism. 

Ray Cronin is a writer and curator living in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the traditional unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq and the Wəlastəkewiyik (Maliseet) Peoples. In 2023, he was named the Curator of Canadian Art at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. From 2001 to 2015, he worked at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia as Curator and as Director and CEO. He is the founding curator of the Sobey Art Award and the author of fourteen books on Canadian art, including Alan Syliboy: Culture is Our Medicine;  Our Maud: The Life, Art and Legacy of Maud Lewis; Halifax Art & Artists: An Illustrated History;  Nova Scotia Folk Art: An Illustrated Guide and Alex Colville: Life and Work. He is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Bachelor of Fine Arts), the University of Windsor (Master of Fine Arts), and the Getty Museum Leadership Institute. 

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Moments in Modernism.