Betty Goodwin

Few artists address grief and mourning as powerfully as Betty Goodwin (1923?2008). One of the giants of contemporary art in Canada, she emerged as a singular talent in the 1970s. Born in Montreal, where she remained a dominant artistic presence over a six-decade career, Goodwin was mentored in the post-war years by a group of Jewish painters committed to social justice. By the 1960s, she was searching for a more personal artistic voice. Always attuned to the ills of the world, she went on to create a diverse body of work encompassing painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking.In Betty Goodwin: Life & Work, author Jessica Bradley tells the story of this visionary creator's remarkable career, highlighting how, in 1968, Goodwin began putting pieces of clothing through a printing press. Her resulting Vest series?now celebrated as one of the major breakthroughs in contemporary printmaking?resonated with Goodwin's early loss of her father, a vest maker. In the years that followed, she earned critical acclaim for her contributions to the art of drawing, participated in the Venice Biennale in 1995, and received both a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts and the Order of Canada in 2003.Although Goodwin was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions during and after her lifetime, Betty Goodwin: Life & Work is the first comprehensive English-language overview of the artist's career since her death.