Artist to Artist

Artist to Artist is a current AGO installation that exhibits Loring and Wyle works with Ursula Johnson and Caroline Gould works. The 10 baskets from Ursula Johnson’s O’pltek series presented in this exhibition were purchased with the support of The Sculpture Fund. The Caroline Gould basket, "This should get you to Venice”, is on loan from the collection of Ursula Johnson. 

Ursula Johnson (b. 1980) is a multidisciplinary Mi’kmaq artist from Eskasoni First Nation, Nova Scotia. Johnson was taught basketry by her great-grandmother, renowned basket weaver Caroline Gould (1919– 2011). Gould’s baskets ranged from miniature works known as “trinket” or “five cent” baskets, to much more complex weaving such as a basket she presented to Queen Elizabeth II during a Royal Tour in 2010. Johnson combines weaving and performance, as with the work Cultural Cocoon, in which she weaves an enclosed basket around herself over the span of many hours. Johnson reflected on how her great-grandmother and teacher said simply: “I’m just glad you’re weaving.”

Loring and Wyle were keenly aware of the impact that acquisitions into museum and gallery collections had on the career of an artist. It was something that they worked towards for themselves, but never had. They experienced very few institutional sales and lived in poverty.

Sculptor, friend and Loring and Wyle executor tried to fulfill this wish and create The Sculpture Fund after their deaths by, as the Will directs, selling all off their works and the estate. In spite of trying and Loring and Wyle’s illustrious careers, the dispersion of the estate passed between the hands of friends and foe and The Sculpture Fund was not formalized during Gage’s lifetime. 

In 1985 the AGO was given 180 works, photographs, documents and a sum of money, secured by Gage, to establish a purchase fund for contemporary sculpture by the Loring and Wyle Estate. This money went into the AGO Foundation and the AGO collections committee purchased Liz Magor’s Four Boys and a Girl, 1979. In 1987 there was an exhibition Sculptors Legacy to display the Loring and Wyle estate gift and to "expose Loring and Wyle’s relevant contribution to Canadian historical art". The Magor acquisition was shown in tandem with the exhibition. In looking back, indeed, this was the AGO's first Sculpture Fund acquisition and the first Artist to Artist exhibition.