Director, Graduate Program in Art History & Visual Culture
Anna Hudson is an art historian, curator, writer and educator specializing in Canadian Art, Curatorial and Indigenous Studies. Formerly Associate Curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, she brings to her teaching extensive hands-on experience in institutional curatorial practice.
Dr. Hudson is currently leading Mobilizing Inuit Cultural Heritage (MICH), a six-year (2012-2018), $3.5 million SSSHRC-supported research-creation collaboration aimed at recovering, preserving, documenting, facilitating and disseminating Inuit knowledge, culture and creativity. This multi-media, multi-platform project brings together 10 academic researchers and nine partner organizations, and employs a dozen Inuit and non-Inuit community members, graduate students and artists. Partner organizations include Qaggiavuut (https://www.qaggiavuut.ca), the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the National Gallery of Canada, Nunavut Arctic College, the Nunavut Department of Education, the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), the Nunavut software start-up, Pinnguaq, the International Sámi Film Institute, and the Sami Centre for Contemporary Art.
MICH was an active partner in launching SakKijâjuk, the first Inuit Fine Art and Craft Exhibition from Nunatsiavut, launched in 2015 as part of To Light the Fire, Newfoundland and Labrador’s first indigenous arts symposium and now touring nationally. MICH was also behind the Pan Am @ York initiative to create Ahqahizu, a monumental granite sculpture by Inuit carvers Ruben Komangapik and Koomuatuk (Kuzy) Curley on York University’s Keele campus (read the news story).
Dr. Hudson’s curatorial credits include Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak (with Koomuatuk Curley, Taqralik Partridge, Jocelyn Piirainen, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, and Georgiana Uhlyarik for the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2018), the international touring show ~ Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven (with Ian Dejardin and Katerina Atanassova, for the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, UK, 2011); inVisibility: Indigenous in the City, part of INVISIBILITY: An Urban Aboriginal Education Connections Project (with Dr. Susan Dion and Dr. 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)
Professor Hudson continues to pursue research in the area of her doctoral dissertation, Art and Social Progress: the Toronto community of Painters (1933-1950). Her most recent publications include: “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).