Rita Letendre

Critically acclaimed Rita Letendre is one of the most eminent living abstract artists. Her painting career began in Montreal in the 1950s, when she associated with Quebec's Automatistes and Plasticiens. Often the sole female artist in their group shows, she broke away from their approach to painting. Seeking to express the full energy of life and harness in her powerful gestures an intense spiritual force, Letendre worked with oils, pastels, and acrylics, using her hands, palette knife, brushes and uniquely the airbrush. Born of Abenaki and Quebecois parents, Letendre lived in Quebec until 1969, when she moved to Toronto. She has received the Order of Canada, completed commissions across Canada and the United States, and participated in national and international exhibitions. ?Rita Letendre: Fire & Light features thirty large-scale paintings and an essay by Wanda Nanibush, curator of Canadian and Indigenous Art at the AGO.

... Highlights the artistic achievements of seven prominent Canadian women artists: Marcelle Ferron, Anne Kahane, Rita Letendre, Gathie Falk, Joyce Wieland, Jerry Grey, and Colette Whiten ... who received most of the commissions awarded to women between 1958 and 1988.

A moving portrait of a father and daughter relationship and a case for late-stage creativity from Emily Urquhart, the bestselling author of Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family, and the Mystery of Our Hidden Genes. “The fundamental misunderstanding of our time is that we belong to one age group or another. We all grow old. There is no us and them. There was only ever an us.” — from The Age of Creativity It has long been thought that artistic output declines in old age. When Emily Urquhart and her family celebrated the eightieth birthday of her father, the illustrious painter Tony Urquhart, she found it remarkable that, although his pace had slowed, he was continuing his daily art practice of drawing, painting, and constructing large-scale sculptures, and was even innovating his style. Was he defying the odds, or is it possible that some assumptions about the elderly are flat-out wrong? After all, many well-known visual artists completed their best work in the last decade of their lives, Turner, Monet, and Cézanne among them. With the eye of a memoirist and the curiosity of a journalist, Urquhart began an investigation into late-stage creativity, asking: Is it possible that our best work is ahead of us? Is there an expiry date on creativity? Do we ever really know when we’ve done anything for the last time? The Age of Creativity is a graceful, intimate blend of research on ageing and creativity, including on progressive senior-led organizations, such as a home for elderly theatre performers and a gallery in New York City that only represents artists over sixty, and her experiences living and travelling with her father. Emily Urquhart reveals how creative work, both amateur and professional, sustains people in the third act of their lives, and tells a new story about the possibilities of elder-hood.