Curated by Concordia Professor of Art History, Dr. Brian Foss and Visual Art Curator Dr. Janice Anderson, Quiet Harmony: The Art of Mary Hiester Reid includes forty-five works from private and public collections in Canada and the U.S. The exhibition introduces visitors to an artist long neglected in Canadian art history, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. Available in both English and French, the catalogue includes essays exploring the life of Mary Hiester Reid, emphasizing her involvement with the burgeoning women's rights movement that was so vital at the time.

Reid met her husband, prominent Canadian painter George Reid, while studying with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. The Reids later made their home in Wychwood Park in Toronto, which became the subject of many of her paintings. Mary Hiester Reid was acclaimed by critics and collectors alike for her poetic colour harmonies and exquisite sense of composition that embraced an ideal of refined taste and artistic expression. A well-known painter and teacher, she played a central role in the city's burgeoning visual art community. She was a member of both the Ontario Society of Artists and the Royal Canadian Academy, and she was only the second woman elected to the executive of the OSA.

Reid's life was a duality that many female artists of her time experienced. Although she was a respected and commercially successful artist, her social role was to remain private and demure. Unlike her husband, she pursued decorative subjects prized by the commercial market. That her work was highly sophisticated was irrelevant; her range of subjects was limited by the social mores of the times and the accompanying attitudes towards women.

Anne Douglas Savage (1896 - 1971)

In conjunction with Quiet Harmony: the Art of Mary Heister Reid, The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery of Concordia University is pleased to present selected
works from its permanent collection by Canadian artist Anne Douglas Savage. Included in this show is an important recent donation of three large panels
from the PSBGM Cultural Heritage Foundation, eight seldom-exhibited painted sketches and two finished paintings. The exhibition will be open to the public
from August 15 to September 21, 2002, and a reception will be held on Tuesday, September 10 at 5:30 p.m. The Gallery is located at 1400, boul. de
Maisonneuve ouest, in the J.W. McConnell Library Building.

Organized by Lynn Beavis, The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery Interim Director, this exhibition is an opportunity to debut three panel paintings formerly part
of a mural in the library of the Baron Byng High School on St-Urbain Street. Painted by Savage in the 1920s, during her years as art teacher, these panels remained in the possession of the Cultural Heritage Foundation of the former PSBGM after the Baron Byng High School closed its doors in 1980. Newly restored with funds from the Faculty of Fine Arts, these works were guided into the Ellen Art Gallery collection by Concordia University Professor Emerita Leah Sherman. One of Savage's former students at Baron Byng, Professor Sherman has written the essay for the illustrated, bilingual catalogue that accompanies this exhibition.

Born in Montréal, Anne Douglas Savage was a central figure in the early Canadian modernist movement. A founding member of both the Beaver Hall Hill
Group of Painters and the Canadian Group of Painters, Savage also had close ties to the Group of Seven. Like many painters of that period, one of her
enduring interests was capturing the Canadian landscape, which she rendered according to her own sense of design and compositional organization. The
eight oil sketches in this exhibition were painted in the landscape surrounding her studio at Lake Wonish. In the catalogue essay, Sherman discusses
Savage's dual roles of artist and teacher, and her important influence on the development of Art Education in Canada.


Reception: Tuesday September 10, 2002 at 5:30 p.m.
Gallery hours: Monday - Friday 11:00 - 19:00
Saturday 13:00 - 17:00