Tony (Anthony) Morse Urquhart

Saskatchewan NAC Auction House Biography and Notes

Anthony Urquhart was born in Niagara Falls, Ontario in 1934. Between 1954 and 1958 he studied at the Albright Art School and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He was recognized in the late 1950s and early 1960s as one of Canada's pioneering abstractionists. In 1967 with Jack Chamber and Kim Ondaatje, he helped found CAR/FAC (Canadian Artists Representation/Frontes des Artistes Canadiens), the artists' 'union' that first established a fee schedule for public museum and gallery exhibitions of contemporary artists. Urquhart was at the University of Western Ontario in a teaching capacity until 1972 when he joined the faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo, where he remained until retiring in 1999. Urquhart's work is in the collections of such institutions as New York's Museum of Modern Art; the Victoria and Albert in London; the Hirshhorn Collection of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. and the Bibliotheque National de France in Paris. Tony Urquhart was named to the Order of Canada in 1995. He received the 2009 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.