We are pleased to welcome Marie-Lise Poirier (PhD, UQAM) and Victoria MacBeath (PhD, Concordia) for the second conference of the season. They invite us to reflect on Canadian trajectories in art history through the practices of Augustine Bourassa and Albénie Arsenault. The conference will be moderated by Laurier Lacroix.
November 18, 2026, 17 h 30
CIRCA art actuel
372 Sainte-Catherine Street West, #444
“‘I have longed to see so many things that I will never see’: The Travel Writings of Augustine Bourassa”, by Marie-Lise Poirier
From 1884 to 1912, Augustine Bourassa (1858–1941) undertook several trips to Europe, taking her to England, France, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. Like the traditional Grand Tour, these journeys were intended to complete her intellectual and cultural education. Having learned to draw from her father, the painter and architect Napoléon Bourassa (1827–1916), Augustine took advantage of her stays in Italy to study with Roman and Florentine masters, producing numerous plaster studies and portraits drawn from life. In Germany, she turned her attention to religious architecture, as evidenced by one of her notebooks, filled with sketches, annotated with her impressions, and supplemented with reading notes that attest both to her intellectual curiosity and to her keen appreciation of art. Offering valuable insights into the central role that travel still played in Canadian artistic life at the end of the long nineteenth century, Augustine’s travel notebooks and correspondence also served as creative and strategic spaces for self-expression and identity construction. Through a close examination of this unique writing practice, this paper seeks to portray an artist in the making.
“Albénie Arsenault was an Acadian rug hooker from New Brunswick” , by Victoria MacBeath
Albénie Arsenault (1903-1985) was an Acadian rug hooker from New Brunswick, Canada. He spent much of his life working for the Canadian National Railway and as a cook for a logging company. After retirement he began hooking rugs. In 1981, these rugs were exhibited in the newly created Galerie Sans Sous, a free exhibition space for emerging Acadian artists in Moncton, New Brunswick.
While other modes of Acadian identity formation during this period saw a shift from a top-down Acadian cultural elite to a seemingly bottom-up student movement, identity in relation to artistic production was an increasingly professionalized and systematized arena wherein “Acadian Art” became defined by figures associated with fine arts education at the new French-language University of Moncton.
Beginning after Acadia’s own quiet revolution, this presentation considers how artists exhibiting in Acadian spaces in Moncton navigated changes during this period: of an increasingly urban population and of an increasingly agential and confrontational political core. Through this exploration I argue that the exhibition of Arsenault’s hooked rugs at Galerie Sans Sous offers a more nuanced vision of Acadian identity in the 1980s, one that challenges clear divides between urban and rural spaces as well as folk and contemporary art.
Biography of the Moderator, Laurier Lacroix
Laurier Lacroix is Professor Emeritus at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where he taught art history and museology. His research interests focus on public collections and art in Quebec and Canada before 1940. His achievements include exhibitions and catalogues such as François Baillairgé (1985, at the Concordia University Art Gallery), Peindre à Montréal entre 1915 et 1930 (1996, at the Galerie de l’UQAM, with a travelling exhibition across Canada), retrospectives devoted to Ozias Leduc (1978, at the Concordia University Art Gallery, with a travelling exhibition across Canada; 1996, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ), and the Art Gallery of Ontario) and Suzor-Coté (1986, in Arthabaska; 2002, at the MMFA and the National Gallery of Canada), as well as Les arts en Nouvelle-France (2012, at the MNBAQ).
He is also interested in contemporary art and has served, among other roles, as curator of exhibitions featuring the work of Irene F. Whittome (1990, at the Musée d’art de Joliette; 1998, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; 2004, at Bishop’s University), Pierre Dorion (2002, at the Université de Sherbrooke Art Gallery, with a travelling exhibition across Canada), Guy Pellerin (2004, at the Musée d’art de Joliette), Robert Wolfe (2006, at BAnQ), Micheline Beauchemin (2009, at the MNBAQ), and Lisette Lemieux (2016, at the Musée de Lachine).
A recipient of the Société des musées québécois Career Award (1997) and the Gérard-Morisset Award (2008), Laurier Lacroix is a member of the Société des Dix (2005) and the Académie des lettres du Québec (2012).