Events & Gatherings

About the Artist

One of the finest painters to emerge in the 1990s, Denyse Thomasos (1964-2012) left an indelible, yet frequently overlooked, mark on contemporary painting. 

Thomasos challenged the limits of abstraction, infusing personal and political content onto her canvases through the innovative use of pattern, scale and repetition. Thomasos conveys the vastness of events such as the transatlantic slave trade without exploiting the images of those who were most affected. 

Curators

Renée van der Avoird

Prior to joining the AGO in 2018, Renée van der Avoird held positions as Associate Curator/Registrar at the MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie; Assistant Director of Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto; and Curatorial Mentor at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. She holds an Honours Bachelors of Arts Degree in Fine Arts and French Language & Literature from Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, and a Master’s Degree in Museum Studies from the University of Toronto. Van der Avoird’s area of specialty is modern and contemporary Canadian women artists. 

Sally Frater

Sally Frater is a curator and arts administrator. In her practice she is interested in decolonization, space and place, Black and Caribbean diasporas, photography, art of the everyday, and issues of equity and representation in museological spaces. She has curated solo and group exhibitions for institutions such as the Art Gallery of Guelph; the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; the McColl Center for Art and Innovation, Charlotte; Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto; Project Row Houses, Houston; and Centre[3] for Artistic and Social Practice, Hamiton. A former resident in the Core Critical Studies fellowship at the Glassell School at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, she has also completed fellowships and residencies at the UT Dallas Centraltrak; Southern Methodist University, Dallas; Project Row Houses and Art21.  

The recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Frater is a member of the Association of Art Museum Curators and is an alumna of Independent Curators International. She is currently the curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Guelph and is the co-director of Artistic Programs at Emerging Curators Institute. 

Michelle Jacques

Curator and writer Michelle Jacques was born in Toronto to parents of Caribbean origin who immigrated to Canada in the 1960s. She was raised on Dish With One Spoon Territory, and began working in art museums shortly after completing her graduate work at York University, where her research focused on thinking about Canadian Modernism through the lenses of feminism and critical race theory. 

In 2012, she moved to Lekwungen Territory, to take up the post of Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV). While at the AGGV, she facilitated projects with numerous contemporary artists; co-curated major retrospectives of the work of Canadian artists Anna Banana and Jock Macdonald; created exhibitions that offered critical entry into the work of local legend Emily Carr; and developed installations that used the AGGV’s collection to evoke cross-temporal and cross-cultural conversations. 

Prior to moving west, Jacques held various roles in the Contemporary and Canadian departments of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; was the Director of Programming at the Centre for Art Tapes in Halifax; and taught courses in writing, art history and curatorial studies at NSCAD University, University of Toronto Mississauga and OCAD University.