Ray Cronin

Ray Cronin is a writer and curator living in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In 2023 he was named the Curator of Canadian Art at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. From 2001 to 2015 he worked at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia as Curator and as Director and CEO. He is the founding curator of the Sobey Art Award and the author of thirteen books on Canadian art, including Our Maud: The Life, Art and Legacy of Maud Lewis and Halifax Art & Artists: An Illustrated History.

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Maud Lewis: Creating an Icon
Ray Cronin

2020 / Canadian Art Biography, Biography, Artists / $21.95
9781554472062 / Trade paper / 64 pp


A Gaspereau Field Guide to Canadian Artists: No. 5

More than any other Canadian artist, Nova Scotian folk artist Maud Lewis (1901–70) is defined as much by her life as by her art. While her story was one of poverty, hardship, physical disability, and chronic pain, it was also one of triumph of character and creativity over circumstance. Catering primarily to the tourists who drove past her tiny house each summer, Lewis’s bright, primitive paintings of oxen, cats, boats, and rural scenes were both a response and an invitation to nostalgia. In this essay, Ray Cronin explores how Lewis’s style and imagery became iconic, synonymous both with the way Nova Scotians’s viewed themselves and the way the province would promote itself to the world.



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Other Books by this Author

Herménégilde Chiasson: In Acadie
Ray Cronin

2024 / Canadian Art, Biography, Artists / $22.95 CAN
9781554472604 / Trade paper / 64 pp
Alan Syliboy: Culture is Our Medicine
Ray Cronin

2022 / Canadian Art Biography, Biography, Artists / $22.95 CAN
9781554472468 / Trade paper / 64 pp
Colleen Wolstenholme: Complications
Ray Cronin

2021 / Canadian Art, Biography, Artists / $21.95 CAN
9781554472147 / Trade paper / 64 pp
John Greer: Hard Thought
Ray Cronin

2019 / Canadian Art Biography, Biography, Artists / $21.95 CAN
9781554471980 / Trade paper / 64 pp
Alex Colville: A Rebellious Mind
Ray Cronin

2019 / Canadian Art Biography, Biography, Artists / $21.95 CAN
9781554471881 / Trade paper / 64 pp
Gerald Ferguson: Thinking of Painting
Ray Cronin

2018 / Canadian Art Biography, Biography, Artists / $21.95 CAN
9781554471874 / Trade paper / 64 pp
Mary Pratt: Still Light
Ray Cronin

2018 / Canadian Art Biography, Biography, Artists / $21.95 CAN
9781554471805 / Trade paper / 64 pp

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