Christine Boyanoski

Christine Boyanoski is an independent curator and art historian based in Toronto, Canada. In her former capacity as a curator of Canadian art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and independently since 1996, she has curated many exhibitions and written extensively on Canadian art. The recipient of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship, Christine completed her PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2002, and she is working on a publication that contextualizes Canadian art of the 1920s and 1930s through the British imperial network (Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa). She has contributed to the Oxford Art Journaland to Making History Memorable: Past and Present in “Settler” Colonialism, edited by Annie E. Coombes (2006), among other publications. Christine is currently curating an exhibition for the Art Gallery of Hamilton on the theme of Water and Creativity.

The author was interested in how Paraskeva Clark adapted to life in a foreign country while keeping her authentic self alive. Her art embodies two coexisting worlds—her interior world filled with vivid memories of Leningrad, and the real world as she came to know it in Canada—making it joyful, sad, or critical of society, but always full of humanity.