“We all understand that at this point in time, creativity and the liberal arts is under fire,” Thaddeus Holownia told a large crowd gathered in the atrium of Mount Allison’s Purdy Crawford Centre for the Arts on Saturday.

“And this institution stands head and shoulders above any place else in this country in giving people that kind of an opportunity that you come here and you study, but you are affected by the strength of the visual arts, the performing arts, the music,” he said as he launched his latest book, Leaders in the Field: The History and Legacy of Art at Mount Allison.

The 300-page volume, co-edited by Holownia and art historian John Leroux, tells the stories of the teachers, artists and students who made the Mount Allison art department into a national and international presence over 170 years.

“There’s no doubt that today being Mother’s Day is a really auspicious day for us to be here,” co-editor John Leroux told the crowd.

“Mother’s Day, it is so perfect that we’re talking about honouring an institution which was established by women, taught by women at the Ladies College in 1854 for the first several generations of this department. It was all centered around women teaching women.”

Leroux said the book shows the tangible, authentic and beautiful things that students and their teachers made over many generations at Mt. A. — works of art that included the self-portraits graduating students were required to paint beginning in 1947.

Like the one of Carol J. Bleackley in 1956.

Carol J. Bleackley, self portrait, 1956. Owens Art Gallery Facebook post

“A beautiful modern portrait. We used it in the book because formally, it was lovely,” Leroux said.

He added that after the book went to print, he discovered that the late Carol Bleackley had married Paul Sills, founding director of The Second City improv theatre in Chicago and that together they changed North American culture.

“She’s like a theatre god in Wisconsin, and her children are theatre professionals,” Leroux said as he told how he got in touch to tell them about the book.

“‘We always heard about this magical, mythical place that Mom talked about called Mount A. It’s like the Emerald City, high on a hill. And she spoke about it with such love and such reverence and passion,'” Leroux said quoting the Bleackley children.

“They’d never been here. And it warmed their heart to no end to know that their Mum is in this book and that her portrait was in an exhibition at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.”

‘Atlantic Realism’

The book tells how the teaching of fine arts at Mt. A. dates back to 1854 making it the oldest university art department in Canada.

The Owens Art Gallery, founded in 1895, is Canada’s oldest university art gallery and Mt. A’s Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, which dates from 1937, was the first of its kind in Canada.

“A Winter’s Evening” by Stanley Royle (1923). Owen’s Art Gallery, Facebook post

“Over a period of three decades from the late 1930s until the late 1960s, Mount Allison University rose to the position of the premiere fine arts program in Atlantic Canada and one of the major innovators in art education in the country,” writes Ray Cronin in one of three, extensively illustrated essays in the book.

He points to three key figures who inspired and led the transformation and three key students who pushed it along: British artist Stanley Royle, (who led the department from 1935 to 1945);  Lawren P. Harris, son of a Group of Seven artist (1946 until his retirement in 1975); and Alex Colville, Mt. A’s most famous graduate, teacher and professional artist. The three student prodigies were Mary (West) Pratt (class of ’61); Christopher Pratt (’61) and Tom Forrestall (’58).

Cronin writes about how these six figures fostered “Atlantic Realism” as a popular art movement that “still holds sway over much of the public’s memory.”

380 million Colvilles

“When Alex Colville died 10 years ago…the news in Canada froze for a 24-hour cycle,” John Leroux said during Saturday’s book launch.

“It was as if we lost a statesman and we had, and you realize the importance of this man who lived here, who went to school here, who came back and taught here and he lived a hundred metres that way in a house that’s still there,” Leroux said pointing up the hill toward York Street.

“We know that the most highly circulated artworks in Canadian history were designed 100 metres from here at his house, the Colville House. The 1967 Canadian coins, which were probably the most beautiful and most mass-produced Canadian artworks in history were designed here at Mount Allison,” he added.

“Do you know how many of these they made? 380 million!” Leroux said to laughter which got louder when he added: “He prints in editions of five!”

‘Learning how to look’

“A figure filmed in black and white appears on a screen, visible only from the chest up, and lights a cigarette,” writes Mireille Eagan, curator of contemporary art at The Rooms, in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Her illustrated essay chronicles the years from the 1970s to the present in the Mt. A. Fine Arts Department starting with Sackville, I’m Yours, a now-iconic example of video art created in 1972 by a young teacher named Colin Campbell who had been hired to teach sculpture at Mt. A.

Colin Campbell as Art Star. Screenshot of YouTube video

His 15-minute video, which was projected on The Cube in the Sackville Industrial Park in 2020 after the outbreak of the COVID pandemic, was shot using a reel-to-reel video recorder borrowed from the athletics department.

“My name?” Campbell says to an offscreen (and unheard) interviewer.

“I thought everybody knew. My name is Art Star,” he answers. “Well, uh, Sackville is a…it’s a great little town,” he adds before describing with a touch of irony how “there’s nothing I haven’t done or seen in this town,” including visiting “a great little dump — I would say probably — one of the best dumps, yeah, yeah, I spend a lot of time out there. Yes, oh yeah.”

“Campbell’s video walks a fine line between humour and sadness,” Eagan writes. “It is a veiled discussion of the oppressive feeling of being unable to express one’s sexual identity in public.”

She quotes Owens curator Emily Falvey who writes that the video describes the feeling “of living in a place without having arrived, or rather, arriving in Sackville while preparing to depart.”

Campbell as Art Star says to the video camera: “Sackville is my home. Sackville…what can I say? I’m yours.”

After Campbell failed to receive tenure, he left Mt. A. the next year touching off student protests with many leaving for the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax.

Eagan writes about sitting in a darkened room many years later as images from Canadian art history are projected on a screen.

“‘Which of these would you describe as a landscape?’ the professor asks. It seems simple at first, but it becomes apparent that the answer isn’t straightforward. With each slide, you learn how to look.”

Eagan reports that students’ eyes glaze over when the slide shows a watercolour scene, but respond with renewed interest when the professor suggests that Campbell’s video is about place as much as the watercolour is.

“Art draws attention to what has been in front of us all along,” she writes. “It also asks us to look compassionately at our surroundings.”