Saturday, November 29, 2025, 2–4 pm
Book Launch of Tim Whiten: Elemental, 2025
Published by:
the McMaster Museum of Art,
The Robert McLaughlin Gallery,
the Art Gallery of Peterborough,
and The Goldfarb Gallery
Offsite at Olga Korper Gallery (17 Morrow Ave, Toronto)
Artist and curators in attendance.
The Goldfarb Gallery, along with the McMaster Museum of Art, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Peterborough, first came together in 2022 and 2023 in presenting a series of four distinct but thematically linked exhibitions of the work of Tim Whiten. These four exhibitions functioned as a retrospective of Whiten’s career, and we are collectively more than pleased to be launching the collaborative publication which marks the closing chapter in this ambitious venture.
Whiten has been a key member of the arts ecology in Toronto for over half a century. He has been dedicated to a sustained inquiry into the human condition through transformative engagements with material and spirit. Whiten has built a practice that defies easy categorization, bridging sculpture, drawing, installation, and performance with a metaphysical lens rooted in ritual, spirituality, and ancestral epistemologies.
The four curators, Pamela Edmonds, Liz Ikiriko, Chiedza Pasipanodya, and Leila Timmins, have collectively written and edited this publication. The catalogue is heavily weighted towards documenting Whiten’s work, with the essays touching on the elemental cores of his practice and of the curator’s individual understandings of this practice as gained through a full and intimate engagement. The key task of bringing the raw materials to finished form was entrusted to Cristian Ordóñez, whose deft work has resulted in a book that entices and encourages the reader to sense fully Whiten’s trajectory.
Tim Whiten: Elemental, ISBN 978-0-921972-86-0, $34. Design: Cristian Ordóñez.
Tim Whiten was born in Inkster, Michigan, in 1941. Self-described as an image maker and creator of cultural objects, Whiten’s practice spans five decades. After receiving his MFA from the University of Oregon in 1966, he served military duty from 1966 to 1968. Immigrating to Toronto, he began his teaching career in the Division of Humanities in the Faculty of Arts at York University. For 39 years, Whiten inspired thousands of students in their creative pursuits; as an award-winning educator and Chair of York University’s Department of Visual Arts, he has contributed to generations of the Toronto arts ecology. His work has been exhibited across North America, from MOCA, Toronto, to ICA, Boston, and the Colorado University Art Museum, with his work in public collections at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Hamilton, York University, and de Young Museum in San Francisco, among others. Of his many accolades and awards, he is the recent recipient of the 2022 Gershon Iskowitz prize at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the 2023 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for Artistic Achievement.
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