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Canadian Art, fall 1990 cover, featuring David Hlynsky |
“The problem is this can be misunderstood as lightening the level of discourse, or people would criticize it as being Vanity Fair–like. But these weren’t personality pieces. These were pieces about the imagination and the kind of intellectual palette that each artist had that the writers could decipher. The glamour was not in the lifestyle of the artist, the glamour was in the intelligence of the artist: we could bring that intelligence to life and try to describe it in a way the reader could understand.”
Like Susan and I, Sarah was also keen to use writers who weren’t necessarily, as she puts it, “conversant with critical theory,” such as fiction writer Katherine Govier, who wrote an astute and insightful take on Louise Bourgeois.
She also brought in writers new to the magazine but not to the arts-writing profession, including highly respected editors/writers/cultural critics Robert Fulford and Carol Off (why I failed to take advantage of their expertise, I no longer remember, but I still kick myself for the oversight), while continuing to call on writers who had earned their place (and then some) in the pages of Canadian Art: Robert Enright, Georges Bogardi, the late Stephen Godfrey, Scott Watson (who stepped outside the boundaries of curatorial writing to great effect), John Bentley Mays, Gerald Hannon and, of course, Nancy Tousley, who had contributed to the magazine from the beginning and still does. Sarah also commissioned a moving and brilliantly written story on Paterson Ewen from the experienced and talented writer Ron Graham.
Sarah’s vision worked. “In 1994, we won Magazine of the Year at the National Magazine Awards. That was a total thrill for me. I was beside myself I was so excited for all of us—not just the writers but the extraordinary photographers who worked with us under the direction of John Ormsby, our art director.”
Meanwhile, Sarah must have sat in a lot of chairs in the old Canadian Art offices, because she had a second child in 1991 and a third in 1993 when she was editor of the magazine. During her maternity leave, she asked writer/editor Gillian MacKay to guest-edit the magazine. Gillian had a long and lauded career in magazines, had written for Canadian Art—“She wrote some of the most spectacular pieces that we produced during my tenure,” Sarah says—and was committed to and knowledgeable about the visual arts.
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Canadian Art, fall 1999 cover, featuring Martha Fleming and the magazine’s 15th anniversary |
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