Collections
Prints and drawings made by (non-Indigenous) Canadian artists after 1950 account for the largest portion of the University’s art collection, some 17,713 works.
Significant early works were purchased from the Canadian Printmakers’ Showcases, a series of exhibitions and sales hosted by Carleton University from 1969 through 1974.
Michael Bell, CUAG’s first director, was passionate about printmaking. He built collections of record by such artists as Cecil Buller, John Murphy, Hugh Mackenzie, Fran Jones and Frederick Hagan. Other Canadian printmakers represented in depth include Jennifer Dickson, Vera Frenkel, Otis Tamasauskas, Stanley Lewis, Carl Heywood and Leslie Reid.
CUAG celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2017 with Open Edition, an ambitious exhibition which brought diverse prints from the collection into dialogue with prints and print-based installations by invited contemporary artists.
The University’s extensive collection of prints is accompanied by comparably large holdings of drawings. Solo exhibitions of drawing selected from the collection have highlighted the work of such artists as John Scott, Ron Bloore, Ken Lochhead, Duncan de Kergommeaux and John Heward.
Artists whose drawings have been collected in depth include Claude Breeze, Lyn Donoghue, Richard Gorman, Jean-Marie Delavalle, Hilda Woolnough and William Ronald.
The University’s collection of photographs, 3743 in number, is largely contemporary Canadian in content but also includes intriguing pockets of images documenting the medium’s history and development.
The collection contains the largest publicly held body of photographs by Meryl McMaster, and small but significant holdings of the work of Lynne Cohen, Geoffrey James, Evergon, Robert Bourdeau, Jocelyne Alloucherie and Marlene Creates, among others.
Lorraine Gilbert, Michael Schreier, Eldon Garnet, Phil Bergerson and Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge are some of the artists who are represented by more than fifty works each.