Canadian Artists Outside Canada
- Diamond Zhou
- Oct 31
- 15 min read
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
November 1st, 2025
In 2016 a national poll asked Canadians to name a Canadian visual artist. More than half could not. 54 percent of respondents admitted they could not recall a single name. 97 percent, however, could name at least three hockey players. It is a statistic both comic and unsettling, really, a polite national embarrassment wrapped in trivia. In a country filled with painters, photographers, sculptors, and conceptual artists, we have somehow forgotten to say their names aloud.
That silence is not proof of ignorance but of absence. It suggests that somewhere between art’s making and its reception, between public funding and public pride, a story has gone broken and untold. Canada builds excellent institutions, sustains artists through grants and residencies, publishes catalogues of remarkable scholarship, and yet hesitates when it comes to declaring its own greatness. We underwrite creation but under-narrate accomplishment.
We sustain the art but lose the artist in the telling.
Meanwhile, the world knows our names. Agnes Martin, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Jeff Wall, Edward Burtynsky, Marcel Dzama, David Spriggs, any many more, are artists who command museums from New York to Paris, who are “international”. They appear in biennials, retrospectives, and textbooks, and their work shapes how the world sees itself. The irony is that many Canadians still meet them only through foreign headlines. The paradox is that international recognition so often becomes the condition for national respect.
Perhaps this reveals something deeper about our Canadian temperament. We are a country that believes in modesty as moral hygiene. We mistrust success that speaks too loudly. Our culture of “niceness” produces artists who are disciplined, sincere, and intelligent, but it also teaches them to apologize for ambition. In the global art world, modesty reads as mystery, but at home it risks invisibility.
Agnes Martin was born in Macklin, Saskatchewan, on March 22, 1912, raised among the prairie’s flat horizons and long meditative skies. Her grandparents arrived from Scotland in covered wagons, her father managed a wheat elevator and a chop-mill. She left for the United States in her twenties, studying and teaching across the country before settling in New York in the late 1950s. It was there, in a modest studio at Coenties Slip near the East River, that she began to paint the luminous grids and faintly coloured bands that would define her vision, works so restrained they seem less made than meditated. Critics called her a Minimalist, though she rejected the term, “I paint with my back to the world,” she once said, meaning that she painted not to withdraw from life but to face it inwardly.
Standing before one of her canvases, you begin to hear silence as a physical presence. Each line trembles slightly, a record of the artist’s hand, of breath and patience. Her art refuses drama and in that refusal becomes radical. The world saw in Martin an American mystic of abstraction, but her sensibility, that quiet exactness, the spiritual endurance, feels deeply northern. The prairie never left her work, as it simply found new light in the desert. She became a citizen of the United States in 1950, yet her understanding of emptiness, of form as an act of attention, remains one of the most profound Canadian exports in art history.
If Martin’s paintings are quiet introspection, Jean-Paul Riopelle’s flaunts joy and exhaustion. Born in Montréal in 1923, Riopelle came of age in the ferment of the postwar avant-garde. He studied with Paul-Émile Borduas and joined the Automatistes, signing the incendiary Refus global manifesto that denounced clerical conservatism in Quebec and demanded artistic freedom. In 1947 he left for Paris, where he quickly entered the orbit of André Breton and the Surrealists, only to distance himself soon after. What he found instead was his own physical language of paint: a mosaic of thick impasto laid down with a palette knife, colour upon colour until the surface vibrated like stained glass struck by sunlight.
Within a few years Riopelle was showing with Galerie Maeght, exhibiting alongside Miró and Giacometti, and hailed by European critics as one of the leading figures of the École de Paris. In 1962 he represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, winning the UNESCO Prize. Yet back home he was admired with a certain reserve, as though his success in Paris rendered him foreign. Canada was still defining its modernism through landscape; Riopelle had turned the landscape on its head.
His paintings are rarely still. They swarm and flare, suggesting forests seen in motion or cities seen through rain. They embody a kind of exuberance that Canadian culture often mistakes for excess. But what Riopelle achieved abroad was not exile; it was scale. He found in Paris a conversation large enough for his ambition. When he returned decades later, the country greeted him as a hero but still slightly bewildered by his freedom.
Riopelle’s story tells us something about the delicate balance between geography and identity. His art is not “French” in the sense of assimilation, nor “Canadian” in the sense of representation. It is what happens when a mind raised in one landscape meets the intensity of another. The northern sense of endurance meets the southern sense of splendour. In his paintings the two climates wrestle and became one, and that perhaps, is the essence of Canadian art at its best: not isolation, but translation.
Jeff Wall, born in Vancouver in 1946, never needed to leave home to find the world. In the late 1970s he began producing large photographs mounted on light boxes, images that looked like cinema stills but revealed the constructed nature of photography itself. Works such as The Destroyed Room (1978), Picture for Women (1979), and Mimic (1982) established a new kind of picture: a tableau that merged documentary realism with the compositional weight of painting. Each scene was meticulously staged, each gesture deliberate. What looked spontaneous was as planned as a film set.
Wall emerged from the conceptual milieu of the Vancouver School, alongside Ian Wallace, Stan Douglas, and Rodney Graham, yet his work carried an ambition that extended beyond academic discourse. His writing on representation and art history placed him within the international conversation, and by the mid 90s, his photographs were in the collections of MoMA, the Tate, and the Centre Pompidou. Wall turned the damp light of Vancouver into something universal, a theatre of social relations and moral tension. His figures could be anywhere, but they remain distinctly local in their posture, their weather, their gaze.
Wall’s success matters because it dismantles the old belief that Canadian art must emigrate to matter. His work proves that staying put can be an international act when the thinking is large enough. Yet his name, like those of Martin and Riopelle before him, is seldom on the Canadian general public tongue. That is no fault of the artist or his work, but of a media culture that treats visual art as a special interest rather than a civic conversation. When The Globe and Mail covered our Jack Bush exhibition earlier this year, it felt like a national event precisely because it treated art as news. Imagine if that were normal rather than exceptional.
Edward Burtynsky, on the hand, gave us the unstaged planet. Born in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1955, Burtynsky has spent more than four decades photographing the monumental infrastructures of modern life: quarries, oil fields, ship-breaking yards, mines, and recycling plants. His images are at once terrifying and beautiful, a paradox that defines the Anthropocene. He does not condemn or romanticize; he observes with precision and scale. Collaborations with filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier produced Manufactured Landscapes (2006), Watermark (2013), and Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018), films that brought his vision to millions beyond the museum.
Burtynsky’s art speaks in the language of aerial perspective and industrial geometry, but its accent remains unmistakably Canadian. The same nation that worships untouched wilderness also depends on extraction and transformation. His photographs capture that contradiction with a calm eye, reminding us that moral clarity and aesthetic pleasure can coexist. To look at a Burtynsky print is to feel implicated and awe-struck at once.
Burtynsky’s career is also a study in how ambition can be ethical. His work is vast in scale and collaborative in spirit, involving scientists, architects, and environmentalists. It insists that beauty is not a distraction from conscience but a path toward it. The world recognized that early; Canada sometimes takes longer to applaud its prophets.
Marcel Dzama represents a later generation for whom the idea of leaving home is no longer geographic but conceptual. Born in Winnipeg in 1974, Dzama gained early attention as a member of the Royal Art Lodge, a collective known for small drawings filled with strange, masked figures performing allegories of desire, violence, and absurdity. The drawings are delicate, even childlike, but their humour carries an undercurrent of menace. In the late 90s he began showing internationally and was soon represented by David Zwirner in New York, a partnership that brought his work to a global audience.
Dzama’s appeal lies in his ability to combine intimacy with theatricality. He draws by hand, on modest paper, yet his imagination occupies an entire universe. His characters appear in music videos, ballets, and films, moving effortlessly between high art and popular culture. He makes it possible to be both local and cosmopolitan, to speak a language that feels prairie-born and world-fluent at once. His success reminds us that Canadian art need not announce its nationality to express it. The melancholy wit, the precision of craft, the moral irony that runs through his images are recognizably ours.
David Spriggs, by contrast, fills space with light itself. Born in Manchester in 1978 and long based in Canada, he developed around 1999 a technique of painting on successive transparent sheets of acrylic so that, when layered, the image appears to hover in three dimensions. His installations combine the illusion of holography with the gravity of sculpture. To walk around one of his pieces is to move through a thought made visible. Exhibited in museums from Prague to Seoul, Spriggs has become one of Canada’s most internationally engaged artists, yet his practice remains rooted in the phenomenological questions that preoccupy much of our contemporary art: how perception shapes power and how light defines presence.
Spriggs belongs to a generation for whom internationalism is a condition rather than a goal. His art circulates through images online as easily as through physical space. It proves that spectacle can be intelligent, that beauty can still surprise without resorting to noise.
All these artists, different in medium, temperament, and generation, share a common thread: they were seen clearly by the world before they were embraced by their own country (or yet to be embraced). The reasons are structural as much as psychological. Canadian media coverage of art remains fragmented, often regional rather than national. Museums excel at scholarship but can be cautious in advocacy, waiting for foreign validation before mounting retrospectives. Art education lingers on the margins of curricula, treated as enrichment or elective rather than foundation. These are not failures of talent but of narrative. We have the art, but we lack the chorus.
The numbers tell the same story. Studies by the Canada Council and the Cultural Human Resources Council show that more than half of working artists in this country earn under $40,000 a year, and that many struggle for visibility beyond their immediate circles. Those statistics do not describe failure; they describe a nation still learning how to see itself through art.
Our culture of modesty, admirable in so many respects, becomes a limitation when it confuses discretion with doubt. True humility is spacious, while false humility is cramped. Looking at the artists as excellent examples of humility: Agnes Martin’s quiet was philosophical, not apologetic; Riopelle’s confidence was exuberant, not arrogant; Burtynsky’s vastness is not boastful; it matches the magnitude of the subject. We can celebrate without bragging; we can promote without preening.
To change the poll numbers, we must change the story. Begin in schools, teach art history as the record of our shared imagination, not as an optional pastime. Let children learn the names of artists, until they speak them as naturally as they do the names of athletes. Continue in media: cover exhibitions with the same energy as sports or film, not as cultural duty but as public conversation. Continue in collecting: display Canadian art prominently in corporate and civic spaces and explain it proudly. Every acquisition, every wall label, every catalogue essay contributes to memory, and it doesn’t take vast corporate collections, they are not the only ones with this duty.
And let us imagine art as part of national myth. If we could love our artists as publicly as we love our players, our national character would be complete. The artists who “made it out there” have already done half the work for us. They have shown us what Canadian art looks like when it stops apologizing and starts imagining. Now the task is ours: to speak their names until they belong to everyone.
When the next poll arrives and someone asks a stranger to name a Canadian artist, I hope the answer comes easily. Art, after all, is the country’s other language, quieter than hockey but no less heroic. It tells the story of who we are when we stop skating long enough to look. A society that sees itself clearly through art becomes not just creative but self-aware, and that self-awareness is the beginning of dignity. The ability to look at a canvas, a photograph, or an installation and say “This is ours” is not pride in the shallow sense, but participation in the story of what the country is becoming.
The transformation must begin where the public most often encounters art: in schools, galleries, and media. Imagine if every child in Canada, upon learning arithmetic and geography, also learned to recognize a Lawren Harris mountain, an Emily Carr forest, a Jeff Wall light box. Imagine if art history were taught not as a parade of isolated geniuses but as a living conversation that includes painters, photographers, sculptors, filmmakers, and installation artists across this vast land. Art gives us continuity, it connects the West coast to the East, and the living to the dead. It tells us that creative thought is not regional but national.
Museums are the natural custodians of this conversation, but they are also its stage managers. Their work is not merely to preserve the past but to choreograph the present. When the National Gallery or the Vancouver Art Gallery mounts an exhibition of a living artist and does so with conviction, it announces to the country that contemporary creativity is worth our collective attention. The risk is not financial; it is imaginative. A nation that curates timidly teaches timidity. A nation that curates boldly teaches courage.
Collectors, too, are part of this ecosystem of meaning. Private collections often serve as laboratories for public taste. A collector who lends generously, writes, commissions catalogues, or supports museum research becomes an informal historian of the moment. Every work purchased from a Canadian artist is an act of cultural investment, a way of saying, “This belongs in our shared imagination.” The art market, often dismissed as commerce, can be a site of cultural citizenship when guided by discernment and generosity. The collector, in that sense, is not a consumer but a custodian.
On view at Griffin Art Projects from September 20 to December 14, 2025, Christos Dikeakos: The Collectors presents nearly forty portraits of collectors and their collections, photographed over more than a decade. Curated by Lisa Baldissera, the exhibition offers a fascinating look into the private worlds where art lives and circulates, a must-see for anyone interested in the culture of collecting.
The media can give this conversation wings. A nation’s art is only as visible as the stories told about it, and ours deserves to be seen with the same excitement we grant to a championship win or a scientific breakthrough. When a new exhibition opens, it should belong in the headlines. When a gallery takes a risk, that act should be celebrated like innovation. To write about art is to document what we value. Visibility, not volume, builds pride. When the media make art visible, they give citizens permission to care, and caring is the first step toward belonging.
Our institutions are already capable, what they need now is confidence. Every acquisition, every exhibition, every catalogue is an act of authorship, a way of saying “This is who we are.” Collecting art is not about possession, it is about participation. Each work that finds its place on a wall, whether public or private, becomes a declaration that beauty and history has agency here.
But confidence must be matched by conscience. Our museums, capable as they are, have grown cautious. They collect what everyone else is collecting, turning consensus into policy and fashion into legacy. The result is a mirror that flatters but does not reflect. A museum’s duty is not simply to fill the historical gaps left by predecessors, nor to appease the politics of the moment, but to understand the living culture of its own city. Its curators should know who is working nearby, who is showing in private galleries, and why those artists matter. To collect responsibly is to know your community, and to see the pulse of its imagination before the rest of the world tells you it was important.
That is the duty of the Vancouver Art Gallery, as much as it is the National Gallery’s. The responsibility belongs to every institution that claims to speak for Canada. Yet too often curatorial energy is spent courting international relevance rather than local truth. We see the same names appear in every collection, while others vanish completely. Artists who have achieved international recognition often remain underrepresented at home. Why is that? Because they are mid-career, or male, or white, or straight? And if that is the case, is the solution to erase one imbalance by creating another? We are not rewriting history when we swing the pendulum; we are only rehearsing the same mistake in a new costume.
The purpose of collecting is not to correct the past through apology, but to understand the present through honesty. A great museum should be courageous enough to ask: who are the artists shaping our time, regardless of category or convenience? If representation becomes a numbers game, art loses its moral authority. Diversity is essential, but sincerity is more so. The question must always be: is this artist expanding our language, deepening our seeing, changing our sense of what it means to be here?
If we fail to ask that, we end up with collections that are polite, fashionable, and hollow. We claim progress while silencing those who do not fit a preapproved narrative. That is not inclusion; it is substitution.
And the rot runs deeper than museums. Even our cultural organizations, those meant to foster new voices, are strangled by their own criteria. They ask for credentials before imagination, for PhDs before ideas. A fellowship for “new voices” that demands academic degrees misses its own premise. It excludes the very people who might have something to say, young artists, working writers, those without institutional footing but with extraordinary clarity of vision. How does that serve Canadian culture? How does that help the next generation believe there is a place for them here?
We are raising the drawbridge in the name of fairness. We talk about accessibility, but we design programs that reward those already privileged enough to know the password. Art should never be a club. It should be a commons, a field where courage, not credentials, earns entry.
This is where conviction must replace comfort. Museums must look outward, not upward. Collectors must buy with curiosity, not compliance. Critics and curators must stop fearing disagreement and start risking judgment again. Canada cannot build a meaningful art history by outsourcing its taste to other nations or by outsourcing its conscience to political trends. Our institutions must learn to lead, not follow.
If we do this, if we recover integrity and courage, then collecting will become a creative act again. A museum will be a site of revelation rather than reconciliation. A collection will not be a checklist of categories but a living portrait of a country that has learned to see itself clearly.
That is what confidence means. Not bravado, not branding, but the quiet authority of institutions that know what they stand for. To collect art is to declare faith in thought. To exhibit it is to make that faith public. And to do either without conviction is to betray the very culture we claim to defend.
Art, at its heart, is not about fame at all. It is about recognition: the recognition of ourselves in the creativity of others. When we name our artists, we name our capacity for imagination. When we remember them, we remember what it means to look, to feel, to think. And when we finally claim them as part of us, we complete the circle that has always been open between art and nation.
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