The next Artist You Need To know is John A. Schweitzer.
Schweitzer is a Canadian artist, gallerist and collector who has worked in a variety of media, but is best known for his mixed-media collage where text is a major component. He often worked in thematic series, drawing upon such diverse inspirations as Virgil’s Aeneid, socio-political events like 9/11, the artworks of Robert Motherwell, and writers such as T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust or Goethe. Literature, architecture and art are all re imagined by Schweitzer through a “plethora of coloured paper, torn posters, newspaper fragments, envelopes, stickers, postage stamps, cardboard boxes, shopping bags, straw, bits of metal, shards of pottery and other objets trouvés.” (from here)
He was also an early and significant proponent of AIDS activism : this manifested in many forms but most notably in his founding of The John A. Schweitzer Foundation, a private trust in support of visual artists with AIDS in 1994.
“Throughout my career as a visual artist, I have utilized the medium of collage to investigate the paragone of text and image. My formative explorations of the “process of making” have subsequently led to my ongoing strategy of seriation, juxtaposing found objects with text-based ephemera, to revivify and subvert the modernist canon.”
Born in Simcoe, ON, in 1952, he grew up in Delhi, ON (a rural community) : Schweitzer had hoped to be a writer when he began studies at The University of Western Ontario (in London) in 1971. But his career took another path, inspired by art history courses he took and later he would study with (previously featured Artist You Need To Know) Paterson Ewen, Roly Fenwick, and Duncan de Kergommeaux. He earned a BFA in 1974, as well as being awarded a Gold Medal in Visual Arts from Western. At York University in Toronto, Schweitzer would obtain an MFA : important teachers included Tim Whiten and Vera Frenkel.
Schweitzer would travel frequently to NYC and Europe post graduate studies. In 1984 he relocated to Montreal and founded Galerie John A. Schweitzer which platformed both important international artists but also contemporary artists in the city, such as Richard-Max Tremblay. He presented the first solo exhibitions in Canada by such notable artists as Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Micheals, Robert Motherwell and David Hockney, and showcased artwroks by Frank Gehry, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Hans Hofmann, Andy Warhol, Helen Frankenthaler, Keith Haring, and Gerhard Richter.
He has exhibited his own work in a number of spaces including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Goethe Institute (Toronto), the University of Western Ontario (London, ON), and at the Visual Arts Centre and Galerie Christiane Chassay (both in Montreal).
Schweitzer was also an art critic and published frequently, in terms of both reviews and theories. He was also an adjunct professor at McGill University’s School of Architecture in Montreal.
In 2004 he closed his gallery to focus more on his own art practice. He represented Canada at Schrift und Bild in der modernen Kunst (Hanover, Germany) where he was awarded First Place (Erster Stelle) that same year. Schweitzer also won a number of public art commissions over his career : these included for the Montreal General Hospital, Jewish Public Library of Montreal and Astral Media in Montreal, Baycrest Health Sciences, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto and North York General Hospital in Toronto, and the Paul Davenport Theatre in London, Ontario.
In 2014, he was celebrated with a solo exhibition at the University of Western, making four decades since his graduation from that school.
He was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002, an Honorary Doctor of Laws from The University of Western Ontario in 2011, was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) in 2003 and to the Ontario Society of Artists (OAS) in 2006.
“In his [Schweitzer’s] work each collage fragment is the bearer of meaning, and [when] placed in proximity to another fragment, will alter meaning by various degrees.” (the words of Melanie Reinblatt)
Henry Lehmann writing for the Montreal Gazette in 2005 asserted that “Schweitzer comes off as one of Canada’s most unusual talents, a supreme master of contradiction, illusion and disillusion.”
John A. Schweitzer’s artworks are in the collections of a number of significant galleries and institutions, includiing the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa ON), Canadian Museum of History (Gatineau QC), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto ON), Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Quebec QC), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Glenbow Museum (Calgary AB), Winnipeg Art Gallery, Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton NB), The Rooms Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John’s NL), and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum (New York NY).
A more detailed profile of his career and legacy can be seen here.