Glossary of Canadian Art History

French for “picture,” the term "tableau" refers to a formal grouping of people or objects, a striking scene.

French word for “spots” or “markings,” used to describe artist Robert Houle’s technique of linear hatching, which echoes Indigenous aesthetic practices such as quillwork and the painterly hatch-marks of Jasper Johns.

Along with Lyrical Abstraction and Art Informel, Tachism refers to an art movement of the 1950s considered the European counterpart of Abstract Expressionism. Strongest in France, it is also associated with Automatism (as practised by the Surrealists), for its emphasis on unplanned mark making, allowing imaginative expression to arise freely from the unconscious mind.

Early American modernist painter specializing in portraits, murals, and abstract landscapes that influenced the later colour-field painters like Milton Avery and Clyfford Still. Many of his landscapes were inspired by photographs of the American West, which Tack imbued with subjectivity and spiritual themes. Tack taught at the Art Students League in New York and Yale University.

Originally trained as a violinist, Taçon turned to abstract painting on the encouragement of her husband, the artist Percy Henry Taçon. She ultimately became a prominent figure in the non-objective art movement during the first half of the twentieth century, her fame eclipsing that of her husband.

An abstract painter and teacher of art and modern languages who emigrated to Canada from London in 1907. He was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the husband of Edna Taçon, a prominent figure in the non-objective art movement during the first half of the twentieth century.

A throat singer, experimental musician, painter, and novelist, Tagaq was born in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. She released her first album, Sinaa, in 2005 as Tanya Tagaq Gillis and has collaborated with Björk, Kronos Quartet, and the composer Derek Charke. Her recordings and performances combine traditional throat singing with experimental instrumental and electronic music. A Polaris Music Prize– and Juno Award–winning artist, Tagaq is a member of the Order of Canada.

One of the first professional Indigenous artists in the Canadian art world, Tailfeathers became known in the 1950s for his paintings and drawings of the Blood people’s life in the late nineteenth century, often featuring ceremonial life and hunting scenes. Concurrent to his career as a painter and sculptor, he worked as a graphic artist for the Hudson’s Bay Company.

A master calligrapher and painter known for his experimental, expressive, and rhythmic style. Yanagida Taiun learned about kanji kana and seal scripts from his grandfather and father and studied Western oil painting between 1918 and 1927.

Born in Vancouver, Ottawa-based artist Norman Takeuchi produced mostly abstract paintings until he began to directly address the complexities of his Japanese Canadian heritage in his work. In 1942 his family was forcibly relocated into the B.C. interior alongside many other Japanese Canadians who were interned by the Canadian government during the Second World War. His paintings and mixed media works now contain references that both celebrate his identity and confront Canada’s systematic mistreatment of Japanese Canadians.

A British Impressionist painter, etcher, and portraitist, Talmage was also an official war artist for the Canadian government alongside Augustus John during the First World War. He was an early influence on Emily Carr as a teacher at the Cornish School of Landscape, Figure and Sea Painting in St. Ives, England, encouraging the development of her forest paintings.

A painter known for his abstracted coastal landscapes, Reuben Tam was born in Hawaii. In 1941 he moved to New York City, where he became affiliated with the Downtown Gallery, the first commercial art gallery in Greenwich Village. He taught at the Brooklyn Museum Art School between 1946 and 1974.

Tanabe is a prominent British Columbia painter. Interned along with his family and the majority of Japanese Canadians under government policy during the Second World War, he went on to study art in Canada, the United States, England, and Japan. Tanabe’s early work was influenced by Japanese aesthetics and by the hard-edged style he was exposed to in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. After he returned to Vancouver in 1980, he turned from abstraction to landscape painting.

Credited to Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching is the foundational sacred text of Taoism. It is a book of poetry describing how followers of the Tao should live, though it is not prescriptive. The Tao Te Ching has influenced later Chinese religion and philosophy, from Confucianism to Buddhism.

Attributed to Lao Tzu, Taoism is an ancient Chinese philosophy that became the official religion of China during the Tang Dynasty of the seventh to tenth centuries. Based on the relationships between opposite forces (male and female, action and inaction, etc.), it emphasizes complementarity and unity, and describes a universe in which all things are connected. Taoism is essentially the following of the Tao, often translated as “the Way,” and involves the worship of various deities and adherence to the philosophical principals described in the Tao Te Ching sacred text.

In the 1940s, a collection of mostly abstract expressionist painters from New York City and San Francisco moved to Taos, New Mexico, and became known as the “Taos Moderns.” Influenced by the local light and landscape, they created primarily non-figurative work and transformed the town into an alternative to the art worlds and art markets from which they had come. Artists considered to be part of the group include Agnes Martin, Clay Spohn, Louis Ribak, and Beatrice Mandelman.

Founded in 1897 as the National Gallery of British Art, the Tate Gallery consists of a network of four major art galleries in the United Kingdom; the Tate Britain, the Tate Modern, the Tate Liverpool, and the Tate St. Ives in Cornwall. Its holdings include the United Kingdom’s national collection of British art as well as a large variety of international modern and contemporary art. It is one of the most visited museums in the world.

Located in the former Bankside Power Station in the Southwark neighbourhood of London, England, the Tate Modern is a modern and contemporary art gallery administered by the Tate Foundation. Converted to its current use by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog and de Meuron, its massive turbine hall is used to showcase large-scale contemporary art installations; collections and touring exhibitions are hosted in the galleries. It opened in 2000.

A pioneer in fibre art, Lenore Tawney was a sculptor who began making tapestries in 1954. By 1961, her work shifted to large-scale woven and knotted pieces designed to be hung in the middle of a gallery space. Tawney’s art is infused with mysticism, which continues from her early pieces to the assemblages of found objects that defined her later work.

A leading graphic artist, author, and illustrator from Cape Dorset. She first contributed to the Cape Dorset Annual Print Collection in 2004, and her critical and public recognition has risen steadily since. Her stylistically varied oeuvre includes formal experiments, particularly with pattern, and reveals an interest in the relationship between representation and abstraction.

A Latin term used in international law that translates as “nobody’s land.” It refers to territories that may be occupied, but that do not belong to a state, and has been adopted to legitimize colonization.

A small piece of glass or stone used in a mosaic, a tessera (plural tesserae) takes its name from the Latin for cube or die. Tesserae are arranged in coloured patterns to produce images and designs on floors, ceilings, and walls. The earliest examples were stones; later glass, ceramic, and other materials became common.

A multi-media artist, filmmaker, and educator, Thauberger considers complex power relations in social, political, and institutional life in her art, and her practice involves research-intensive and collaborative projects with different communities. An assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, Thauberger was a participant in the Canadian Forces Artists Program in 2009, travelling to Kandahar, Afghanistan.

This commercial gallery was established in 1991 in Washington, DC. After closing its storefront operation, it continued as an online gallery until its owner passed away.

The European Iceberg: Creativity in Germany and Italy Today was a 1985 exhibition of contemporary German and Italian art mounted by the invited curator, Germano Celant, at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The exhibit included Lothar Baumgarten’s Monument for the Native People of Ontario, a Eurocentric criticism of colonial rule. Artists such as Carl Beam and Robert Houle responded with work that highlighted issues of self-determination and representation in contemporary Indigenous art.

A philosophical, theoretical, and art historical concept that refers to both how we look at a subject and how figures represented within artworks perform looking or being looked at. In the 1970s the notion of “the male gaze,” wherein men objectify women, rose to prominence. The term has been central to film, feminist, queer, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial theory.

For the Russian Constructivists, European modernists like Piet Mondrian, and some conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s, the grid was an important structuring element that carried with it ideological associations with rationalism and, according to Rosalind Krauss, a mythic form of modernism, becoming a formal trope of the American Minimalists and a major feature of the work of artists including Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt.

An exhibition and research institution dedicated to photography, affiliated with Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). The Image Centre also houses a permanent photography collection and several artist archives at its Peter Higdon Research Centre, including, most notably, the Black Star Collection of twentieth-century photo-reportage.

The principal statute through which Canada’s federal government administers “Indian status,” local First Nations governments, and reserve land and communal monies. The Act consolidated previous colonial ordinances that aimed to eradicate First Nations culture in favour of assimilation into Euro-Canadian society. The Act has been amended several times, most significantly in 1951 and 1985, with changes mainly focusing on the removal of particularly discriminatory sections. The Indian Act pertains only to First Nations peoples, not to the Métis or Inuit. It is an evolving, paradoxical document that has enabled trauma, human rights violations, and social and cultural disruption for generations of First Nations peoples. The Act also outlines governmental obligations to First Nations peoples and determines “status”—a legal recognition of a person’s First Nations heritage, which affords certain rights such as the right to live on reserve land.

A Toronto-based gallery operated by the art dealer Thomas Jenkins on Grenville Street in the early decades of the twentieth century. It exhibited both Canadian and international artists. In 1920 it held a major exhibition and sale of paintings by Homer Watson.

Formed in 1931 by a group of Native coastal villages with fishery issues in mind, the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia (NBBC) came to take as its purpose the advancement of the social, spiritual, economic, and physical conditions of its members, including higher standards of education, health, and living conditions. It became a powerful voice on many fronts. Among its many achievements was winning the right for Natives to vote without losing “Indian status” in 1960.

Roger Fry established this Bloomsbury-based company in 1913 and co-directed it with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. The company employed fine artists, and fine art principles, in the production of furniture, textiles, ceramics, and other household objects, seeking to remove the distinction between the fine and decorative arts. The Omega Workshops closed in 1919.

Founded in 1987, The Power Plant is located in Toronto, Ontario. Initially established as the Art Gallery at Harbourfront in 1976, the gallery changed its name when it moved into its current premises, the power plant that provided heating and refrigeration for Toronto Terminal Warehouse from 1926 until 1980. A non-collecting public gallery, The Power Plant shows contemporary work by artists from Canada and around the world.

A Toronto theatre founded in 1968 out of Rochdale College with a mandate to develop new Canadian plays. Passe Muraille remains an integral part of the city’s theatre scene, producing experimental and eclectic work by a wide range of artists from diverse communities and disciplinary backgrounds.

A painter and engraver who spent the latter half of his life in the United States and Canada. Thielcke produced history paintings and portrait miniatures in addition to the large-scale painted portraits fashionable in early nineteenth-century England, which he helped popularize in Lower Canada.

Ronald James Thom trained as a painter at the Vancouver School of Art before apprenticing to the Vancouver architecture firm Sharp and Thompson (later Thompson, Berwick, Pratt and Partners). After designing Toronto’s Massey College in 1963, he moved to Toronto and set up his eponymous practice. Over the course of his career, Thom designed the Trent University campus in Peterborough, Ontario (1969), and the Metropolitan Toronto Zoo (1974), as well as over one hundred houses in the Vancouver area.

A Parry Sound, Ontario-born painter and printmaker currently based in Barrie, Ontario. Thomas is known for her abstract, gestural paintings exploring psychological states and the nature of existence. She was educated at York University, where she received a bachelor and master of fine arts.

A painter, printmaker, and arts educator. Thomas began painting in the Regionalist style but later met and was highly influenced by the German American abstract artist Carl Holty. Although he taught at the University of Georgia until his retirement, he had continued influence in his hometown as a member of the Wisconsin Painters & Sculptors Association.

Photographer and curator whose work is informed by the absent identity of the “urban Iroquois.” Thomas seeks to create an image archive of his experiences as an Iroquois man living in cities and to place Indigenous peoples in contemporary urban contexts, sometimes with a wry tone. His series Indians on Tour adopts a street photography aesthetic to capture plastic Indigenous figurines within city scenes.

Associated with the Woodland School, Thomas painted representations of the teachings he inherited from his ancestors and that he saw in visions. His work is known for its strong design and bold use of colour and lines. The Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinberg, Ontario, house his work.

A seminal figure in the creation of a national school of painting, Thomson is known for a bold vision of Algonquin Park—aligned stylistically with Post-Impressionism and Art Nouveau—that has come to symbolize both the Canadian landscape and Canadian landscape painting. Thomson and the members of what would in 1920 become the Group of Seven profoundly influenced one another’s work. (See Tom Thomson: Life & Work by David P. Silcox.) 

A form of linear perspective, three-point perspective uses a horizon line and three vanishing points—two positioned on the horizon line and one either above or below—to represent three-dimensional objects seen from above or below.

An artist and educator, Eliza W. Thresher lived and worked in Philadelphia, Montreal, Halifax, Charlottetown, and Pictou, Nova Scotia. Like many female artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, she established a reputation as a teacher, instructing young women in the arts of drawing and painting at private academies she ran both alone and with her husband, fellow artist George Godsell Thresher.

Established in 1976 as the Thunder Bay National Exhibition Centre and Centre for Indian Art, the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, as it is known today, is one of Canada’s largest public galleries dedicated to contemporary Indigenous art. Its permanent collection is made up of over sixteen hundred works and includes celebrated artists such as Norval Morrisseau, Carl Beam, and Shelley Niro.

Considered one of the highest spirits (manitous) in Ojibway culture, and taken as a symbol for the culture itself, this supernatural bird is said to produce thunder and lightning and tend to the health and well-being of the Earth.

A successful grocery wholesaler in New York City, Francis Beatty Thurber was the husband of classical music patron Jeanette Thurber. With his sister, the textile designer Candace Wheeler, he established the summer artist colony the Onteora Club in the Catskill Mountains.

An eighteenth-century Venetian painter and printmaker renowned for his decorative frescoes. Tiepolo’s monumental and dramatic ceiling frescoes, such as those depicting the four continents in the Würzburg palace in Germany, utilize perspective techniques derived from theatre design. In addition to allegorical subjects, Tiepolo painted mythological, historical, literary, and religious scenes in his distinctive Rococo style.

Son of Tiffany and Company founder Charles Lewis Tiffany, Louis Comfort Tiffany was an important Art Nouveau designer. He is especially known for his innovations in stained glass design. Tiffany made extensive use of coloured glass in his windows, lamps, and decorative objects, and developed a unique kind of opalescent glass.

A sculptor of kinetic, monumental, and self-destructing works, such as Homage to New York, 1960, which ignited outside of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Tinguely was one of the founders of Nouveau réalisme and produced many collaborative works over the course of his career.

Born in Saskatoon, Campbell Tinning moved to Montreal in 1939 to work as an artist, illustrator, and graphic designer. An official Canadian war artist during the Second World War, he later turned toward abstraction.

Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto, was a Venetian Mannerist painter of the late Italian Renaissance. Art historians point to a variety of influences in his work, especially Titian and Michelangelo, but it is not known where and with whom he learned to paint. He created numerous decorative projects and oil paintings during his lifetime, and his paintings are notable for the drama of the narrative scenes depicted.

Sometimes referred to as “ferrotypes,” tintypes were made in a variety of sizes on black-lacquered sheets of iron. Tintypes were popular during the second half of the nineteenth century, as they could be produced quickly and inexpensively by professional and amateur photographers alike, not only within the studio but also at open-air markets and carnivals.

A painter, etcher, and illustrator trained in the 1850s at the École des beaux-arts in Paris alongside James McNeill Whistler and Edgar Degas. Tissot participated in the Paris Commune and had to flee the city after its suppression in 1870, only returning thirteen years later. His best-known paintings depict scenes of contemporary Parisian life.

Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian in English, was one of the greatest painters of the Venetian Renaissance, whose formal innovations in brushwork and colour signalled the rise of a new aesthetic in Western art. Patronized by royalty, Titian enjoyed a formidable reputation throughout much of Europe. His work influenced later painters, including Diego Velázquez and Peter Paul Rubens.

An abstract painter whose work was influenced by Cubism and Chinese calligraphy and frequently evoked his Baha’i faith. Tobey’s all-over “white writing” paintings of the 1930s to the 1950s were developed independently of Abstract Expressionism. He lived in Seattle for many years and was associated with the Northwest School.

An interdisciplinary artist, Todd creates politically and socially engaged fibre art, such as her notable series Security Blankets, 1992–95, that connects Cold War technological warfare with everyday patriarchal structures. Born in Ontario, Todd divides her time between Montreal and Troy, New York.

Emerging in the work of American landscape painters in the 1880s and following the influence of the French Barbizon school, Tonalism favoured an expression of a spiritual relationship to the landscape through dark, muted tones and hues. Associated with the work of artists including George Inness and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Tonalism emphasized the mood and atmosphere of a scene.

A circular painting or carving, which emerged as a distinct art form in fifteenth-century Florence. During the Renaissance, tondi were principally created to decorate domestic settings and as gifts for new mothers. The form has been regularly taken up by artists since then, from Caravaggio and Ingres to Picasso and Pollock.

A surgeon, draftsman, and influential British Impressionist painter and teacher, Tonks worked with various Red Cross factions and hospitals during the First World War to create striking pastel and pen-and-ink portraits of injured soldiers. Tonks taught at the Slade School of Fine Art beginning in 1892, working with pupils like Augustus John, Gwen John, Wyndham Lewis, and Dorothy Stevens.

A painter whose mysterious images of twentieth-century urban life brim with anxiety and foreboding. Committed to figurative art during a time when American modernism was defined by abstraction, Tooker existed at the margins of the art world for much of his career. Paul Cadmus and Jared French were important early influences on his style and artistic sensibility.

A carver and one of the first generation of Inuit artists to sell work to southern markets, Toonoo was also the father of the artists Oviloo Tunnillie, Jutai Toonoo, and Samonie Toonoo. His work is held in the collections of institutions, including the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

A carver, graphic artist, and printmaker, Jutai Toonoo rejected traditional subjects and themes in favour of a range of subject matter, including contemporary Inuit life and social issues in his community. Known for incorporating spiritual themes and text into his graphic work, Jutai created sculptures that tended toward abstraction. The brother of artists Oviloo Tunnillie and Samonie Toonoo, he was the subject of the Radio Canada International documentary The Rebel in 2010.

A sculptor who began carving realistic animals and traditional themes in his twenties, Samonie Toonoo went on to produce more abstract work that frequently addressed social issues. His sculptures depict Christianity, residential schools, suicide, and alcoholism, and his subjects range from spirits and wildlife to pop culture and technology. Frequently his imagery incorporates haunting, even frightening skulls instead of human heads. His pieces incorporate various materials, often using white antler for faces and dark serpentinite for the bodies of his human figures. He was the brother of the artists Oviloo Tunnillie and Jutai Toonoo.

The daughter of artists Mary Qayuaryuk (Kudjuakjuk) and stepdaughter of artist Kopapik “A” and mother of artists Oviloo Tunnillie, Jutai Toonoo, and Samonie Toonoo, Sheokjuke became a graphic artist and printmaker in the 1960s. Although her artistic career was intermittent, she consistently produced work from 2000 until the end of her life, demonstrating her versatility in the techniques of woodcut, stencil, and etching. 

An English immigrant to Montreal in 1911, Topham served in the 1st Canadian Siege Battery during the First World War, where he produced drawings and watercolours on the front lines. His sketches are considered some of the first to depict tanks in action and to record the 1916 Battle of the Somme as it happened.

A prominent photographic portraitist, Topley partnered with photographer and entrepreneur William Notman to establish a Notman Studio in Ottawa in 1868. In 1875 he launched his own portrait business, Topley Studio, which he operated for nearly five decades. Topley produced portraits of politicians and Ottawa’s elite. Library and Archives Canada holds a comprehensive collection of Topley Studio’s glass plates and other records.

Refers to a long-standing British painting tradition, most popular in the eighteenth century, which was centered on realistic depictions of landscapes that captured the physical and geographic features of an area and its environment.

Founded in 1886, the Toronto Art Students’ League initially operated as a form of sketching club, but also organized drawing classes, exhibitions, and publications. From 1893 until 1904, the year it disbanded, members produced an annual calendar, a series now seen as an important milestone in the history of graphic art in Canada.

An artist-run centre founded in 1977 by Hamilton-based photographer Jim Chambers. Originally named the Toronto Photographers’ Co-operative, the Toronto Photographers Workshop (TPW) is dedicated to exhibiting contemporary still and time-based images that push lens-based art in new directions.

Trained at the University of Saskatchewan, the Alberta College of Art and Design (now the Alberta University of the Arts), and the University of Calgary (MFA), Tosh has spent two decades portraying Canadian war brides in a variety of media. The daughter of a New Zealand air force pilot and a Canadian war bride, Tosh has created over 200 war bride portraits.

A painter and printmaker best known for his depictions of Parisian nightlife, who created a vast body of work despite physical and psychological hardships. Toulouse-Lautrec was celebrated by both the avant-garde and the general public, and the distinctive aesthetic of his turn-of-the-century posters influenced commercial art well into the twentieth century.

A painter and founding member of the Plasticiens. Like the others in this group of avant-garde artists—Jauran (Rodolphe de Repentigny), Louis Belzile, and Jean-Paul Jérôme—Toupin was interested in formalist abstraction and the two-dimensionality of painting. He achieved early critical success with his “shaped,” or non-rectangular, canvases.

An Ottawa-based artist, author, and activist who famously addressed the 1970 October Crisis in his work. The Crisis had a profound effect on Tourbin, who saw it as launching the nation into “the media age.” He incorporated news headlines and press clippings into his bright, collage-inspired work and performance pieces. Tourbin was active in artist-run centres across southwestern Ontario.

A painter and sculptor whose large, flat, stark painting contributed to laying the ground rules for Plasticien painting in Montreal. During the 1960s he painted large round canvases of brightly coloured concentric circles that produce dynamic optical effects. His later work, often monochromatic, increasingly emphasizes the objectness of painting.

A Montreal-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice has focused on photographic experimentation since the early 1970s. Tousignant co-founded the avant-garde artist-run gallery Véhicule Art in 1972 and was a crucial figure in the development of Montreal’s Conceptual art movement. His photography-based work is largely concerned with light, perspective, optical illusions, and geometric abstraction.

Town was a founding member of Painters Eleven and a leader in Toronto’s art scene in the 1950s and 1960s. An internationally recognized abstract artist, he created paintings, collages, sculptures, and prints with brilliant effect and developed a unique form of monotype, “single autographic prints.” (See Harold Town: Life & Work by Gerta Moray.)

The author of The Backwoods of Canada, an account of her first years in Canada, Catharine Parr Traill was a British-born writer. Her depiction of the Canadian wilderness, with its attention to the details of the environment, shaped the way later writers represented the landscape. Parr Traill’s later work focused on botanical studies of the local flora, while her extensive letters provide an important record of nineteenth-century Canada. She was the sister of fellow writer Susanna Moodie.

Transcendentalism is a literary and philosophical movement that originated in the northeastern United States in the 1820s and emphasized the importance of independence and personal insight in uncovering truth and spiritual experience. Developed from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, among others, the movement had a significant impact on artists including Lawren S. Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald.

A term referring to that which crosses or exceeds national boundaries. It was popularized by American writer Randolph Bourne in the early twentieth century. Bourne proposed it as a way to consider relationships among different cultures. Transnationalism is a growing research field linked to globalization, migration, and diaspora studies.

A painter, video artist, and performance artist interested in networks of artistic exchange. Trasov’s work is often collaborative and media-based; he co-founded the Image Bank with Michael Morris in 1969 and also collaborated with several artists (including Morris) to found the Western Front Society, a Vancouver artist-run centre, in 1973. The following year he ran for mayor of Vancouver as his alter ego, Mr. Peanut.

A Jewish resident of Prague in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Trier relocated to Berlin, then to England in 1936, and later to Canada. He produced anti-Nazi caricatures and, as a commercial artist, he illustrated for Lilliput magazine and drew many covers for The New Yorker. He was also a book illustrator and designer.

Curator of the Notman Photographic Archives at the McCord Museum, Montreal, from 1965 to 1993.

The Triple K Cooperative Inc. was a Canadian Indigenous-run silkscreen company in Red Lake, Ontario, that produced quality limited editions of work by several artists within the Woodland School of art from 1973 until the early 1980s. The name Triple K relates to the surname of its three founders, brothers Joshim Kakegamic, Henry Kakegamic, and Goyce Kakegamic. They made editions for their brother-in-law Norval Morrisseau.

A triptych is an artistic work in three panels or parts. It may refer to a suite of relief carvings or paintings, or to a series of three literary or musical works meant to be considered together as reflections on a single theme.

French for “deceives the eye,” trompe l’oeil refers to visual illusion in art, especially images and painted objects that appear to exist in three dimensions and even aim to trick the viewer into thinking that they are real. Common examples are the painted insects that appear to sit on the surface of Renaissance paintings, and murals that make flat walls appear to open into spaces beyond.

An Ottawa-based painter, printmaker, and educator who drew inspiration from medieval art and integrated its spiritual subjects into his distinctly modern style. Trottier studied in New York and Europe before returning to Canada to work as a designer at the CBC in Ottawa. He is recognized for his largescale mosaic mural on the Carleton University campus. Trottier represented Canada at the 1965 São Paulo Biennial.

A landscape painter of the Barbizon school who gained more recognition for his turn toward animal painting after 1846, especially his scenes of cattle in rural and forest settings. Troyon won first-class medals at the Paris Salon in 1846 and 1848, and was elected to the Legion of Honour in 1849.

A commission formed in 2008 with the mandate of documenting and shedding light on the abuses of Canada’s Indian residential school system. It was disbanded in 2015, after releasing a six-volume report of its years-long investigation, as well as ninety-four calls to action to address this harmful legacy.

A calligrapher, book designer, and typographer who was influential in the development of twentieth-century graphic design. He is recognized for introducing principles of modernism into typography and graphic design, eventually spear-heading the redesign of hundreds of titles published by Penguin Books.

A Hong Kong-born American performance artist and photographer whose playful East Meets West series features Tseng posing like a Chinese statesman in a “Mao suit” in front of iconic tourist sites in the United States and Europe such as the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower. A close friend of artist Keith Haring, Tseng documented Haring’s work in more than 40,000 photographs.

An oil painter known for her portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes, Tully studied extensively with numerous leading painters at the Central Ontario School of Art (now OCAD University), Slade School of Fine Art, Académie Julian, Académie Colarossi, and Long Island School of Art. Tully’s The Twilight of Life became the first painting by a Canadian artist acquired by the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) in 1911.

A printmaker and graphic artist who sold work through the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative (now Kinngait Studios), Ikayukta Tunnillie lived on the land before settling in Cape Dorset (Kinngait) in 1970. Her children include the artists Qabaroak (Kabubuwa) Tunnillie and Kakulu Sagiatuk.

Born in Kangia, on the southern coast of Baffin Island, Tunnillie was an Inuit sculptor who lived and worked in Kinngait (Cape Dorset). While her early stone carvings featured realistic animals and human figures, she moved on to address taboo subjects, including residential schools and female sexuality, often carving scenes and figures from her own life. A woman working in stone at a time when the medium was dominated by men, Tunnillie broke ground for later Inuit artists with her personal subjects, abstracted forms, and innovative use of materials. (See Oviloo Tunnillie: Life & Work by Darlene Coward Wight.)

A carver noted for his focus on questions of form and composition, Qabaroak (Kabubuwa) Tunnillie created work depicting human and animal subjects that often showed two or more figures entwined. He was the son of the artist Ikayukta Tunnillie and the husband of the artist Tayaraq Tunnillie.

A carver and graphic artist, Tayaraq Tunnillie participated in some of the earliest experiments in drawing at the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative (now Kinngait Studios) in the 1950s. Her husband was the artist Qabaroak (Kabubuwa) Tunnillie.

An accomplished maker of ceramic moulds, Tupy was cofounder of Blue Mountain Pottery, a Canadian pottery brand collected internationally and renowned for its unique glazing process. In 1960 Tupy formed Canadian Ceramic Craft, which created moulds similar to those used in Blue Mountain Pottery.

Widely considered the foremost British landscape painter of the nineteenth century, Turner imbued his paintings with an expressive romanticism. His subject matter ranged from local landscapes to otherworldly natural events. He has been heralded as a precursor to both Impressionism and modernist abstract art.

A multimedia abstract artist who uses vibrant colours and plywood in his paintings to convey a sculptural feeling. Turner studied art at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, and worked for many years as a studio assistant for Paterson Ewen. His abstractions and sense of colour are influenced by the Automatistes.

Used to refer to the lands that we now know as the Americas, the term comes from Indigenous creation stories, such as those held by the Ojibwe, which tell of the earth as being formed on the shell of a large turtle.

A contemporary conceptual artist who has had a prolific output since the 1960s, working at the intersection of sculpture, painting, assemblage, and poetry. Tuttle’s pieces explore the volume, colour, lines, textures, and shapes of humble materials. The artist lives and works in Maine, New Mexico, and New York City.

Born Samuel Rosenstock, Tzara was a founder of the nihilistic revolutionary art movement Dada, as well as a poet and essayist. He was the author of the first Dadaist writings and the movement’s manifestos. Around 1930 his aesthetic and intellectual interests shifted from Dada’s destruction to the more productive mode of Surrealism. His poetry evolved from the anarchic to the lyrical, although he remained interested in the free association of imagery and linguistic experimentation. Tzara was a member of the French Communist party, and his politics are evident in his poetry and in his work with the French Resistance during the Second World War.