By Zandra Juarez
As I enter the coziest coffee shop (with very short hours) in downtown Guelph, I realize she’s already there, not just on time, but early. She smiles, gets up from her seat, and gives me a hug. She says she’s ready to order a cup of coffee and a sweet treat. By the way she refers to the staff, I can tell she’s a regular and that they love having her over… My heart and my hands warm up with a steaming cup of coffee on one of the first cold days announcing winter 2025 as we start the interview.
Zandra Juarez: What was it like going back to McMaster on November 20th to receive your award?
Judith Nasby: It was very exciting and memorable, but we actually didn’t go directly to the campus because the ceremony was held at First Ontario Place Concert Hall, which is in downtown Hamilton. It was the 634th convocation for McMaster. I asked the Chancellor how there could possibly be six hundred and thirty four convocations, and she said they used to hold them on campus in smaller locations for the different disciplines. The one I was at was for the Arts, Social Sciences, and Business. The really interesting thing was that there was a banquet dinner afterwards hosted by the President and the Chancellor and I sat at the table with the Alumni Director and my husband David. Across the table I met Jean Ramsey, a retired physician, who is this year’s Recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award for the Sciences. Jean is eighty four years old and I’m in my eightieth year. Jean received hers at the June convocation. There are only two awards in the whole year: one for Sciences and one for the Arts. So, I finally got the picture of what this whole thing means.
ZJ: What does this recognition mean to you, especially after all this time?
JN: I was hired at age twenty-two in 1968 to be the first University of Guelph curator before I graduated in Fine Art from McMaster. I never needed to go for a Masters degree and my career just evolved over those forty-five years. To be recognized by my alma mater was very significant for me because you’d think that they are always going to nominate someone who has a PhD or someone famous like Margaret Atwood. It was a total surprise, of course, and very memorable. To think that they would recognize someone who essentially devoted her entire career to establishing a new institution, a public art gallery for Guelph and the region. My ambition was to create a significant art collection for the campus and for teaching elementary and high school students and to create a vibrant temporary exhibition program because there was no public art gallery in Guelph. And of course I was supported in my ambition by President Winegard and by the Dean of Arts, Murdo MacKinnon.
ZJ: What’s most memorable from your years studying Studio Art and Art History at MacMaster?
JN: When I arrived in Guelph my first job was to organize a temporary exhibition program showing contemporary and historical art. At McMaster I did my SUMA (studio art thesis) in the practice and history of etching. My knowledge of media was very useful. The job of a curator is not just to organize exhibitions, but to write about them, based on interviews with the artists, so that you are not reinterpreting the artist’s work, but presenting it correctly. I had very good professors at McMaster. My main Art History professor, Paul Walton was a Harvard graduate and my main Art Studio teacher, George Wallace, was an intellectual and an artist trained at Trinity College, Dublin. They brought an international approach to my studies that benefited me greatly. I’m completely self-taught as an academic. My first book Irene Avaalaaqiaq: Myth and Reality, I just decided I would send it into McGill-Queen’s University Press and they accepted it, so that just started the whole thing.
ZJ: When did you come to Guelph and did you study at the University of Guelph at all?
JN: I came to Guelph in 1968 but I didn’t take any classes at the U of G. The University was looking for a curator of art, and my name was put forward to Professor Gordon Couling, who was the new Chair of Fine Arts. I guess I sufficiently impressed him, Gordon hired me in March when I was twenty two and before I finished my degree at Mac. I had an office on the first floor of what was then called ‘the arts building’. I was given a half-time secretary who I shared with concertmaster Edith Kidd. Edith was about sixty years of age. So, the interesting thing is that even though I came from a business family, I never paid too much attention to administration, so the first day I needed to write a business letter, I think I dwelt over it for most of the afternoon and then I delivered it to my secretary Sheila and she typed it for me, so that sort of got things started. And then, immediately, I had to form a temporary exhibition program to be shown on the main floor of the arts building, now known as the MacKinnon building, which is the main corridor with brick walls and a glass wall on one side, and not really a gallery at all. I started calling it the University of Guelph Art Gallery, thinking (and wishing) that no one from the Canada Council or the Ontario Arts Council, where I received grants, would ever come to see how bad the space was; but they never did. It just unfolded that way…
That’s how it all started. In 1973, Chief Librarian Florence Partridge let me use part of the main floor of the library for exhibitions until we moved into the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre in 1980.
ZJ: It sounds like you ‘made it happen’, just by calling it by that name.
JN: I was invited to be on the Ontario Association of Art Galleries Board of Directors, all of this helped establish this idea across the province that there was a University of Guelph Art Gallery, even though the space was not very good.
The Royal Canadian Academy of Arts presented the Charles 111 Coronation Medal to Guelph author Judith Nasby for exemplary service to the Arts in Canada. Judith recently received the 2024 McMaster University Distinguished Alumni Award for the Arts.
*This interview has been edited and condensed.
Zandra Juarez is a Guelph based writer and literary critic. She’s Vocamus Writers Community Director of Communications
This article will be released in three installments. Part two will be released in our February Arts E-newsletter.
