Mary Reid never met Caroline Dukes.
Dukes, a revered Winnipeg artist, died in June 2003 at age 74, and Reid joined the Winnipeg Art Gallery as its curator of contemporary art and photography in September 2004. She was just 32.
Curator Mary Reid spent three years getting to know Caroline Dukes and her art.
But after inheriting the job of assembling a Dukes retrospective, instigated by the WAG's then-director Pat Bovey, Reid spent three years getting to know the woman and her art.
"These are gutsy works," says Reid of the 30 paintings and two sculptures that comprise Caroline Dukes: Concealed Memories, which has its public opening tonight at 7:30.
"They move through different styles. Many are huge. They deal with personal and gut-wrenching subjects."
Reid has organized the exhibition in loose chronological order, starting with the European-style portraits Dukes made in the late '50s and early '60s.
The show, hung with quiet assurance by WAG preparator and printmaker Dan Dell'Agnese, moves on to the more austere modernist paintings Dukes produced in the '70s.
Self-portrait
In the '80s, her paintings became radically more expressionistic and colourful. And she also began working on a much larger scale.
By the '90s, her work had again turned darker, as she explored her childhood memories of war-torn Europe and her long battle with the cancer that eventually took her life.
"She could have played it safe," Reid says. "But she kept pushing herself."
Dukes's husband of 52 years, Alfred, calls his late wife "a true artist."
"When I met her at 17, she was reading Kant and Schopenhauer, not love stories," says Alfred, 83.
"Her work was philosophical. It showed both the good and ills of society."
Landscape #1
Hungarian Jews by birth, the couple immigrated to Toronto in 1958 with two young sons and a third on the way.
They moved to Winnipeg in the late '60s because Alfred, a mechanical designer in the textile industry, was offered a good job with Knit Rite Mills.
Dukes enrolled in fine arts at the University of Manitoba, studying painting under Winnipeg art legend Ivan Eyre, and graduated in 1972.
She found a studio in the Exchange District and soon established a reputation as one of her generation's most talented and ambitious artists.
"Many people saw her work as faith-based, but I think she was a philosopher," says Winnipeg artist Bev Pike, who was her studio neighbour for many years.
"She saw her religion as part of the world's texture of philosophies."
She exhibited widely at commercial and parallel galleries in Winnipeg and beyond. She was one of four female painters included in a 1981 WAG exhibition called Occurrences.
"She was intrepid in seeking out opportunities for herself, and she was generous in sharing those opportunities with me," Pike, 54, recalls. "She loved her family to bits, but if she didn't have them, she would have kept on making art."
The WAG gave her a solo show, At the Focus of Forces, in 1991. (Her work appeared in 31 WAG shows altogether.) The curator of Occurrences was art historian Elizabeth Legge, who later moved on to teach at the University of Toronto.
Reid was a 19-year-old economics student when she enrolled in an elective course in art history, Picasso in His Time, from Legge at 8 a.m. Saturdays.
"I had to get up at 6 a.m. to schlep to class by bus and subway," Reid recalls. "But she was so passionate about the subject. She is why I became an art historian."
After discovering Legge's connection to Dukes, Reid asked her former professor to write an essay for the Concealed Memories catalogue. Reid herself has written a piece, too.
"It was intimidating for me because she is such an excellent writer," says Reid, who recently curated the WAG exhibition of the work of famed Canadian photographer Edward Burtinsky.
"But it's an honour that we share a publication credit."
Concealed Memories is the first major WAG show of a Winnipeg-based artist under its new director, Stephen Borys, who started last month and replaces Pierre Arpin.
Coming up this fall are two more local solo exhibitions, by Bruce Head (curated by Amy Karlinsky) and Sheila Spence (curated by Reid).
Reid had help with the Dukes project from the WAG's new associate curator of historical art, Andrew Kear, and Manitoba curator Jenny Western. Alfred, of course, was also deeply involved.
"We catalogued and referenced 311 works from all part of her career," he says. "It was a true labour of love."
morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca
Exhibit facts
Caroline Dukes: Concealed Memories runs through Oct. 19 in Gallery 4 of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Blvd.
The public opening, with free admission, is tonight from 7:30 to 10.
Regular WAG admission is $6 for adults and $4 for seniors and students.
Gallery hours are 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday and 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday. The gallery is closed Mondays.
A panel discussion on Dukes' work is slated for 7 p.m. Sept. 25 at the WAG.
Kent Monkman: The Triumph of Mischief is still on view at the WAG through Aug. 17.
Aba Bayefsky: Paintings, Drawings and Graphics opens Aug. 9.
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