Working in oils, watercolour, pastels and glass media, Jerry Grey explores themes of nature, politics and history. Her work from the 1970s links directly to her time participating in the highly influential Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops in Saskatchewan. Modern painting in North America was evolving toward ever more austere, reduced realms of colour and form and Grey participated in the 1964 and 1965 Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops, which were jointly led by painter Jules Olitsky & composer Stefan Wolpe (’64) and artist Lawrence Alloway and John Cage (’65). The works she produced between 1968-1978 stand as meditative monuments to the grid as a visual structure that continues to offer up transformative possibilities.

Susan Crean was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, and is of Scots-Irish descent. She began travelling in the sixties, studying at universities in France and Italy. In 1989 she moved to British Columbia where she spent a decade researching, writing and teaching. Her articles and essays have appeared in magazines and newspapers across Canada, and she is the author of seven books. The first, Who’s Afraid of Canadian Culture, appeared in 1976. Her landmark work, The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr, was nominated for five awards including the Governor General’s Literary award and won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2002. Crean currently lives in Toronto.

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