With Bloore | After Bloore

Iain Baxter, Ronald Bloore, Brian Fisher, Yves Gaucher, Gerald Gladstone, Ted Godwin, Donald Harvey, Kenneth Lochhead, Roy Kiyooka, Arthur McKay, Ted Rettig and Gordon Smith

The Art Gallery of Peterborough has ninety works by Ronald Bloore. The majority of those were gifts from the artist following a major solo exhibition in 1986. Bloore also made donations of works by his peers and contemporaries. Those have laid the basis for a contextual study of Bloore’s practice and influence.

In 1961, as director of the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Ronald Bloore mounted an exhibition of works by Kenneth Lochhead, Ted Godwin, Arthur McKay, Douglas Morton and himself. The exhibition was remounted at the National Gallery of Canada under the name Five Painters from Regina. The show toured to Hamilton, Sackville, Kingston, Winnipeg, and St. Catharines, establishing the group as the Regina Five. Not long after that, Bloore “joined York’s fledgling Department of Visual Arts – and fellow Regina Five artist Doug Morton – and played a role in creating the Faculty of Fine Arts, the first of its kind in Canada.”1

Many of the works in this exhibition are by artists from the Regina Five, others are peers, and others are his students. With Bloore | After Bloore not only reveals the impact that Ron Bloore had on Canadian painting, it exemplifies how a Collection builds to tell the stories of Canadian culture.

1.“Regina Five painter Ronald Bloore influenced many at York,” “Regina Five painter Ronald Bloore influenced many at York,” yFile, September 17, 2009, Ronald Bloore Obituary, York University.

Photography by Lesli Michaelis Onusko