FOUNDERS ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

TFVA president, Rita Daniel, is very pleased to announce that this year’s Founders Achievement Award goes to Father Daniel Donovan, professor emeritus of the Faculty of Theology, University of St. Michael’s College, in the University of Toronto.

The Founders Achievement Award of $15,000 acknowledges a person or group who, over time, has made an exceptional contribution to the visual arts community in the greater Toronto area.

In choosing the candidate, the Founders Achievement Award Committee researches suitable candidates and solicits the expertise of the TFVA membership by asking for nominations. The candidates are considered on their positive contribution to the arts community and also on a “subtractive” basis—if a candidate’s work was removed from the visual arts community, what would the impact be? The influence of the recipient’s contribution may be local to Toronto and/or may serve to position Toronto within national and international art contexts.

Father Donovan has spent over 40 years collecting contemporary Canadian art. He has assembled a collection of over 400 works of art, almost exclusively by Canadian contemporary artists. Among some 200 artists in the collection are works by Meryl McMaster, Robert Mapplethorpe, Angela Grauerholtz, Barbara Steinman, and Denyse Thomasos. In 1996, he donated his collection to St. Michael’s and the works now hang in buildings throughout the campus. 

Thousands of visitors from Toronto and beyond have come to see the collection. Father Donovan has conducted, on average, fifty tours of the collection a year, both for students and for the broader public, including TFVA. In recent years, U of T has formed a committee to continue supporting the Donovan Collection.

Click on these 3 blue areas to:

• watch an interview with him, related to this award, by Alex Bowron, a freelance writer/researcher and Past Director of Galerie Nicholas Robert
• view Father Donovan’s collection
• discover his background in an older interview as he walks around his collection