Join us on June 20th at 1pm at the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art for a curatorial tour led by Andrea Valentine-Lewis. Reception at 12:30pm.
This tour offers an intimate look at the historical works of Bill Reid, Jack Shadbolt, and Gordon Smith alongside the contemporary responses they inspired. The eight featured artists are Corey Bulpitt, Andrew Dadson, Alex Gibson, Chantal Gibson, Tiziana La Melia, veto monteiro, Manuel Axel Strain, and Isabel Wynn.

In One Hundred Artists Deep, eight local artists were invited to create new work in response to artworks from the Artists for Kids Permanent Collection by founders Bill Reid (1920–1998), Jack Shadbolt (1909–1998), and Gordon Smith (1919–2020). Each of these founding artists left an enduring legacy, not only through their artistic practices but through their deep commitment to arts education.

Over the course of their lives, Reid, Shadbolt, and Smith taught and mentored thousands of young artists and apprentices. Their ideas, values, and approaches to making continue to circulate—sometimes visibly, sometimes quietly—through subsequent generations of artists.

The eight participating artists were selected for the strength and diversity of their practices, as well as for their sensitive and intuitive approaches to art-making. They were invited to respond to works by Reid, Shadbolt, and Smith from the Artists For Kids Collection, with full freedom in how that response took shape. The historical works and the contemporary responses are presented together in the gallery, creating a space for conversation across time.

The exhibition’s title is drawn from a phrase that Smith often used, saying he was “a hundred artists deep” and stood “on the shoulders” of artists past and present. Every artist emerges from a layered history of influence—artistic, personal, familial, educational, and cultural. One Hundred Artists Deep reflects on this accumulated inheritance and the many ways artistic knowledge is carried forward.