We interrupt seasonal pictures for some relatively new news: the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, based in the Art History Department at Concordia University in Montreal, appears to have officially started.

It is a collaborative effort to bring resources and researchers together to build and build upon scholarship on women artists in Canada. Its focus is on the period before 1967, and includes Canadian women artists born before 1925 (1965 for those in architecture) and working across a broad range of media.

I learned about the plans for this effort when I interviewed Dr. Janice Anderson (PhD), curator of visual resources in Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts, in June, but I just happened upon the group’s Web site yesterday. I interviewed Janice in connection with the biography I’m writing of Toronto sculptor Merle Foster (1897-1986). The picture above is a figure from a fountain she sculpted.