Sandra Paikowsky

Sandra Paikowsky CM (born December 29, 1945) is a Canadian art historian, academic, curator and writer with a career spanning five decades In 2015, she received the Order of Canada for her contributions to the development of Canadian art history as a discipline.

Paikowsky was born in Saint John, New Brunswick. She received her B.A. from Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University), Montreal (1967) and her M.A. from University of Toronto (1969).^[1]

Paikowsky began her career in 1969 teaching artt history at Concordia University in Montreal. A professor there for for over 40 years, she helped found the country’s first Canadian art history program.^[1] In 1981 she also became the Director/Curator at the Concordia Art Gallery, responsible for organizing many exhibitions over a broad range of Canadian art. She was the co-founder and then the Editor and Publisher of the peer review "Journal of Canadian Art History" for over 35 years (1974 on).^[1]

She taught undergraduate and greaduate courses on different aspects of Canadian art. She retired in 2012 as professor emeritus.^[2][3]

She also has lectured widely on Canadian art, both nationally and internationally, and organized conferences on Canadian art, such as "Untold Histories", on art in the Maritime Provinces which was held at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. She also created the first history of the Maritime Art Association with a helpful website available at maa.concordia.ca.^[4] In addition to teaching, she has supervised M.A. and Ph.D. theses in the area of Canadian art history.^[2]

Paikowsky organized, co-organized or contributed essays to exhibitions on the art of Bruno Bobak (1983), Joyce Wieland (1985), Betty Goodwin (1986), Medrie MacPhee (1986), Rita Letendre (1989), and Irene Whittome (1990), and many others. She has curated exhibitions on a broad range of subjects from the L'Association des artistes non figuratifs de Montréal = The Non-Figurative Artists' Association of Montréal (1983) to an exhibition on Robert Ayre: Le critique face à la collection = Robert Ayre : The Critic and the Collection (1992).^[5]

In 2010 she curated the exhibition John Fox: Refiguration in Montreal at the McClure Gallery, Montreal and in 2011 John Fox: Opera su carta in Venice, Italy.^[6]

She has had a long involvement with the peer review "Journal of Canadian Art History". She was its co-founder and then the Editor and Publisher for over 35 years (1974 on). She was the co-editor of The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2010) for which she also wrote a chapter and is the author of the book James Wilson Morrice: Paintings and Drawings of Venice (2023), the first complete survey of the artist's images of Venice, Italy.^[7][8] It was given a rating of five stars out of five on Goodreads.^[9]

She has written numerous articles on Canadian art subjects. In 2015, she wrote the Foreword for an exhibition and catalogue of Peter Krausz : photographies = photographs : 1969-2015.^[10] In 2017, she wrote the chapter on "James Wilson Morrice's Quebec landscapes: outside regionism and national art" in Morrice: the A.K. Prakash Collection in trust to the nation by Katerina Atanassova^[11] These chapters were called "wonderfully readable essays" in Goodreads.^[12] In 2019, she wrote the chapter on "Youth and sunlight: reflections of childhood" in Canada and Impressionism: new horizons, 1880-1930, the catalogue/book again by Atannasova for the National Gallery of Canada exhibition.^[13]

• First Distinguished Fellow of the Gail and Stephen Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University, Montreal (1998);^[7]
• Order of Canada (2015);^[1]