OTTAWA, ON.- Five visual arts researchers have each been awarded a fellowship by the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) as part of its Research Fellowships Program. This program encourages and supports advanced research on the NGC’s collections, including those in the Library and Archives. For the 2009–10 academic year, two fellowships in Canadian art and three in European and international art have been given.

“As a national arts institution and leader in visual arts research, the NGC has the important mandate of ensuring progress in scholarship on the history of art,” noted the director of the National Gallery of Canada, Marc Mayer. “We are therefore very proud to provide financial support to advanced research through our fellowship program. The recipients will make a great contribution to broadening the horizons of knowledge cultivated by the Gallery, and everyone interested in the visual arts will benefit – students, teachers, and art lovers alike.”

The 2009–10 NGC Research Fellowship recipients are:

Canadian Art
Fern Bayer, of Toronto, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and was previously chief curator of the Government of Ontario Art Collection. She is now an independent researcher, curator and consultant with extensive publication and exhibition experience. Bayer will use her fellowship in order to complete a catalogue raisonné of the works of the artist collaborative General Idea and to write an essay on their production.

Virginia Solomon, of Brooklyn, New York, is a graduate of Stanford University, with a master’s degree from the University of Southern California, where she is now a doctoral candidate. Solomon’s research will explore how the projects of General Idea enumerate a different way of understanding being, meaning-making and the political potential of art.

European and International Art
Dr. Lisa Banner, of Pelham, New York, graduated from Princeton and holds a doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She was previously Samuel H. Kress Curatorial Fellow at the Hispanic Society of America, New York, and has published on the religious patronage of the Duke of Lerma. Dr. Banner’s research will focus on the painting of Saint John the Baptist by Spanish painter Jusepe Leonardo (1601-1652?) in the Gallery’s permanent collection.

Anke Kausch, of Ottawa, holds a master’s degree in the study of the art history of China from the University of Hamburg and has published several guides to China where she has lived and travelled. More recently she has been a provenance research intern at the National Gallery of Canada. Kausch will be researching the National Gallery of Canada’s collection of Chinese paintings from the 12th to the 18th century, which have received little attention from scholars in the past.

Luke Nicholson, of Montreal, is a graduate of the University of Toronto with a master’s degree from Concordia University, where he is now a doctoral candidate focusing on Anthony Blunt and Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). Nicholson will use his fellowship to study the networks of patronage and cultural authority existing between the National Gallery of Canada and English art experts, with particular reference to the role of Anthony Blunt as advisor between 1948 and 1955.