Education

BFA (Concordia), MPhil (Glasgow), MA, PhD (Toronto)

Biography

Anna Hudson is an art historian, curator, writer and educator specializing in Canadian and contemporary Indigenous circumpolar art, curation and activism. Formerly Associate Curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Hudson is now a professor in the Graduate Program in Art History, Department of Visual Art & Art History at York University.

In 2022, Hudson co-edited Qummut Qukiria! Art, Culture, and Sovereignty Across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi: Mobilizing the Circumpolar North with Dr. Heather Igloliorte and Jan-Erik Lundström. The book is the final outcome of Hudson’s SSHRC Partnership Grant, Mobilizing Inuit Cultural Heritage: A Multi-media/Multi-platform Re-engagement of Voice in Visual Art and Performance (2012-2019).  Hudson’s current SSHRC Partnership Grant, led with an Indigenous Governance Committee, is Curating Indigenous Circumpolar Cultural Sovereignty: advancing Inuit and Sámi homelands, food, art, archives and worldviews (2023-2029). CICCS explores the potential of curation on local, national, and global scales to address the importance of cultural sovereignty for Inuit, Sámi and Alaska Native decolonization.

Hudson’s collaborative curatorial credits include Tunirrusiangit Revisited, a virtual reality reimagining of Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak (2018, with Koomuatuk Curley, Taqralik Partridge, Jocelyn Piirainen, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, and Georgiana Uhlyarik for the Art Gallery of Ontario), the international touring show Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven  (2011, with Ian Dejardin and Katerina Atanassova, for the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, UK);  inVisibility: Indigenous in the City, part of INVISIBILITY: An Urban Aboriginal Education Connections Project (with Susan Dion and Carla Rice for the John B. Aird Gallery, Toronto, 2013);  The Nude in Modern Canadian Art, 1920-1950  (with Michèle Grandbois, for the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec); and the Art Gallery of Ontario exhibitions  Woman as Goddess: Liberated Nudes by Robert Markle and Joyce Wieland; and Inuit Art in Motion (co-curated with Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory). Selected publications include: “Courageous Declaration of Life in the Art of Frederick Hagan and Ted Fullerton” (2023); “Tunirrusiangit Revisited: Curating Inuit Art in Virtual Reality” (2022); “The ‘New Woman’ of Canadian Impressionism” (2018); “The F word is back: The Feminist Futures of Joyce Wieland (2017); “Frances Anne Hopkins –  The Red River Expedition at Kakabeka Falls , 1877” (2015); “Jock Macdonald’s Weave of Reality” (2014); “Time and Image: Picturing Consciousness in Modern Canadian Painting” (2013); “Stepping into the Light of Clark McDougall’s Landscapes” (2011); and “Landscape Atomysticism: A Revelation of Tom Thomson” (2011).

Hudson also continues to research and publish in the area of her doctoral dissertation,  Art and Social Progress: The Toronto community of Painters (1933–1950), exploring the influence of scientific humanism on art, criticism, and cultural advocacy and activism in the interwar years.