Diane Pugen LIFE IN ART
Faculty Artist talk
Tuesday, November 15th, 6:30 pm
Room 230
Second Floor 100 McCaul
DRPT Faculty Retirement Reception to Follow
--- Diane Pugen Biography ---
Diane Pugen is a prolific artist whose long career has included multiple roles within the arts community. Through a socio-cultural and political lens, her works examine her own and society’s relationships with the lands they inhabit. She began exhibiting her work in 1965 with exhibitions locally and across Canada, receiving many Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council awards for her studio practice. She has exhibited internationally in various locations, including Havana, Cuba, Mexico City, Mexico, Santiago, Chile, Berlin, Germany, and the United States. Pugen was educated at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students' League of New York.
Additionally, she has contributed to the arts and culture community through her important curatorial work organizing impactful shows such as Inaugural Exhibition, A National Survey of Contemporary Women Artists, at Toronto’s Pauline McGibbon Women’s Cultural Centre, Bonnie Devine: Stories from the Shield, for the Woodlands Cultural Centre and Art Gallery of Algoma. Most notably, she curated ‘Hokusai Revisited, featuring the work of Nobuo Kubota, which garnered him a Governor-General Award for Visual art in 2009.
Throughout her career, she has worked tirelessly as an activist for artists' rights through her advocacy work on various boards in the culture sector. Pugen served on the board of the Toronto Arts Council, where she helped to develop the committee structure for their adjudication of community arts grants. While in this role, she was also a key organizer in initiating individual artists' grants and establishing Artscape, the city’s space agency. While on the board at CARFAC, she helped develop the seminal book “Information for Artists” and worked on the passage and implementation of the new copyright law and the TAC exhibition rights, which guarantees that artists must be paid fees for public exhibitions. Additionally, her valued board contributions at The Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts included curating, lobbying, and promoting opportunities for Indigenous artists at The Centre for Indigenous Theatre. These immense efforts resulted in her receiving The City of Toronto Medal of Honour for Service to the Non-profit Cultural Sector in 1992
In addition to her artistic and advocacy work, Pugen is an Associate professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University, where she has taught for 31 years. She has contributed to service on integral committees across the university in such roles as co-chairing the First Year program with Nobuo Kubota, sitting on University Senate, CICOF, and as a faculty advisor with Robert Houle to the OCA First Nations Group and the Provost’s Task Force on Indigenization. Her pedagogical expertise includes printmaking, figure drawing and landscape in both drawing and painting. She has contributed significantly to the decolonizing efforts across the university, working to develop courses on the land and the relationship to the human body and by bringing in esteemed guest speakers and elders from Indigenous communities to inform the coursework.
Most recently, Pugen was profiled as one of the featured artists in a new 2018 publication, At Home Talks with Canadian Artists, by Lezli Rubin-Kunda. In 2019 Diane Pugen was invited to write the forward to the new book From Bear Rock Mountain by Antoine Mountain, a Dene painter and writer.