Arts & Culture

If you are ready brave to the cold, January is bringing an unusually generous number of big art shows to Toronto which will tide art lovers over at least until March. Whether you’re preparing for a cultural expedition or settling down with a big cup of cider afterwards, Toronto Public Library has books to help enrich the experience.

Royal Ontario Museum and MOCCA

On January 31st, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art will collaborate on a major retrospective Douglas Coupland: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything. Work by the artist/novelist/essayist will appear at both venues. A week earlier on January 22, Daniel Faria, Coupland’s Toronto gallery, will launch an additional show.

What exactly does it mean to be “modern” in the 21st century? And does being a modern Canadian mean something different? Coupland’s work fuses traditional Canadiana with arch appropriations from American Pop and sly references to a generation of media savvy Canadian artists such as General Idea, Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov and Tim Jocelyn.

Art Gallery of Ontario

Suzy Lake’s major retrospective is still in full swing until March 22nd. Her long career survey–including huge photo murals–explores issues of identity, representation, feminism and aging. A huge influence on the early work of Cindy Sherman, her catalogue is a must see, especially for viewers interested in the history of Women’s art.

Art Spiegelman’s CO-MIX: A Retrospective follows his early work (like the notorious “Garbage Pail Kids”), through his pioneering magazine RAW, his Pulitzer Prize winning Holocaust memoir Maus, and his memorable tenure at the New Yorker. The show closes on March 15th.  

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time will run from February 7 to May 10. In the middle of the 1980s when German Neo-Expressionism dominated the art world, Basquiat reasserted Modernism’s roots in African art. He melded graffiti, cartoons and Abstract Expressionist scrawls with images from Black history including African artifacts, jazz pioneers like Charlie Parker and political figures like Malcolm X.

The Power Plant

The Unfinished Conversation: Encoding/Decoding draws from the writing of media theorist Stuart Hall who argued that viewers actively interpret television messages according to their personal social contexts. But this process of communication doesn’t end at reception; messages are further reinterpreted and reproduced within those social contexts. Hall’s essays, especially ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,’ are standard texts for both media studies and Black History students. Many visitors to this group show, opening January 24th, will be particularly interested in the work of artist Steve McQueen, the Academy Award winning director of “12 Years a Slave.”

This is just a small sampling of what the city has to offer this season. To learn more, why not pick up a copy of Slate or visit the Arts Department on the 5th floor of Toronto Reference Library?