The Embassy Cultural House is deeply saddened to learn of the death of the remarkable painter Susanna Heller, who passed away on May 5, 2021.

Many of Susanna’s paintings involved elaborate installations made up of assemblages of smaller paintings on paper and were based on her walks around the city.  Her love of painting and her love of walking were intricately connected. Her sketch books were the notes that reflected her curiosity and intense observation of her surroundings, whether walking around the metropolis of NYC or the cities of Europe.

ECH co-founder Jamelie Hassan first met Susanna in 1984 when they were both living at La Cité internationale des arts in Paris through the Canada Council for the Arts. Jamelie remembers her time with Susanna:

"Over the months that we overlapped, we enjoyed many conversations about culture and numerous wanderings around the city, so conscious of the way the city and its abundant museums and galleries, parks and gardens, kept us outside walking, rather than working inside our respective studios.

"Our group in Paris at the time included my young son Tariq, age 11, Ron Benner, Wyn Geleynse and his daughter Mara, age 11. The Paris Vision ECH tabloid issue from Sept./Oct./ Nov. 1984 records this unusal collection of creative people in dialogue with Susanna over that period.  In 1986, Susanna came to London to present a solo exhibition of her recent works at the Embassy Cultural House. Her connections with the London community of artists, writers and curators deepened at that time.

"Recently, in October 2020, she reconnected with us and the ECH, presenting one of her startling paintings, Eyes in a Bleak World, 2020 for the open call online exhibition Hiding in Plain Sight coordinated by Ron Benner. In her communications to us she expressed her pleasure to be involved with our reinvigorated collective.

Susanna was an inspiring artist, a generous colleague, and a warm and supportive friend. Her death leaves an enormous gap in the arts community both in Canada and the United States, where she had made her home and studio in Brooklyn, NYC."
 
Here is a revealing conversation from Feb. 6, 2020 with her longtime friend Medrie MacPhee that conveys the genuine spirit, humour, intelligence and beauty of our friend and artist Susanna. May she rest in peace. Her website is  online here.

The Embassy Cultural House  is saddened to learn of the sudden passing of Steve Mavers, their colleague and friend at Museum London. We extend our sincere condolences to his family, friends and numerous colleagues in the cultural and educational community. He will be greatly missed by all who had the pleasure of knowing and working with him.

The last exhibit that Steve curated at Museum London is on display and is an exhibit of public and high school student art on the environment titled Our World of Nature: A Student Exhibition which opened on March 13, 2021. Please see Museum London's tribute to Steve Mavers here. 

​The international arts community mourns the passing of UK curator and writer Guy Brett, who contributed important exhibitions and publications on key Latin American and Asian artists. Guy Brett died at the aged of 78. Among his many writings was the groundbreaking book Through Our Own Eyes: Popular Art and Modern History published in 1986. The book profiled art as overt political action with a focus on resistance to Chilean fascism, support for decolonization in Africa, and the nuclear weapons disarmament movement. All important themes that were also concerns of the ECH community's programming between 1983 and 1990. 

Jamelie Hassan met Guy Brett through Mona Hatoum during a visit to London, UK in 1989. After that meeting, Jamelie and Ron Benner began a correspondence with Guy that resulted in his visit to London, Ontario in the spring of 1992 where he presented a lecture at Western University's Visual Art Department. Guy's interest in indigenious cultural production in Canada aligned with Jamelie and Ron's commitments and after he read the publication Council  Fire by Tom Hill, he especially appreciated his meeting with Tom Hill and a visit to the Six Nations' Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford, Ontario. At this time,  Jamelie and Ron worked with curator, Peter White, to organize for Guy a tour of other cultural centres in Canada, including  Banff, Alberta, Vancouver, BC, and Saskatoon, SK.

UK-based Palestinian artist, and long time friend  of ECH co-founders Ron Benner and Jamelie Hassan, Mona Hatoum shared this tribute to Guy. "It is very sad to say goodbye to the sensitive and insightful critic, curator and friend, Guy Brett who always championed artists outside the mainstream and focused on experimental and precarious forms from the margins, internationally and specially Latin American and Asian art. A very humble person who was never conscious of his own importance, he was nevertheless highly appreciated and has been referred to as ‘a hidden national treasure’. His quiet, graceful presence and unpretentious intelligence will be greatly missed."

Please read  recent obituaries on Guy Brett:
Constantly curious, uninterested in the market-led view': pioneering curator and writer Guy Brett has died, aged 78

• Guy Brett, Influential Curator and Critic Who Expanded Art History, Has Died at 78

Sylvie passed away on October 8, 2020. As many of us know, Sylvie was (it feels strange to write about her in the past tense) a respected artist and a committed educator. But for me, she was a friend. I’ve known her for 20 years, so my memory might be less than accurate but this is how I remember meeting her for the first time at her exhibition at YYZ in Toronto. I went to the gallery to introduce myself as I had recently found out that I had been accepted into the MFA program at the University of Windsor where she was teaching. I knew her work, spent time reading about her installations but had never seen her work in person. I am a shy person. So instead of talking to anyone, I stayed in a darkened room with her work Le regard du silence. The work was so quiet. I felt I may disturb the image if I were to walk around. I sat and watched the slow turning page in the projected image as the face in the video slowly dissolves and disappears. I was so moved by her work, I decided to be courageous and ask her to be on my committee. Many years later she told me how she made the work to look so natural, which I won’t reveal because there was a little trick to it. She was always ingenious when it came to solving problems.

Working with Sylvie could be painstakingly intense, but this is how I learned that there is no problem that can’t be solved. When I was helping her with Fragments d’une histoire, we went around collecting the “perfect” fallen red maple leaves in the park. This was only the beginning of her pursuing to make the video with leaves falling as natural as possible. It was a contradicted effort to mimic nature through recording leaves falling in a studio. But in the end, she found the way to make it work. Similar to the steady slowness in Le regard du silence, the leaves fell in her video with ease, paired with the slow stride of Didier walking into the forest on the other side of the work. The calming pace in her work is effortless; at the same time, it is perfectly measured.   

We hung out a lot at her Toronto studio. Many times, I would stay late into the evening because our conversations often went on for an indefinite time. Rick always made wonderful meals. It was a given that there would be an extra plate for me at their dinner table. Over the years, she taught me many things. One of them is her love for animals, particularly dogs. She was always with her dogs, all the way to the end. She taught her classes with her dog next to her. We often joked about how Dismal (her Poodle) was our TA. I think my love of dogs solidified because of her, and now they are and will always be in my life. Sylvie was undeniably generous with her time, sharing of knowledge and ideas; she was honestly critical; she was overwhelmingly filled with empathy; she was passionate, especially towards art. She wanted to talk about art and her new project to the very end. 

So, I was wrong. She was never just a friend. She was and always will be an artist I admire and a mentor I love and respect. I am honoured that she was a part of my life. I think the only way to end this tribute is with her own words. Thank you, Sylvie and I will miss you. We all will.

“Art is social because it resuscitates again and again, fears, desires, hopes, anxieties, beliefs and the struggle of being at once in relationships to each other and in a world that has its own relationships. 

"L’art est social parce qu’il ressuscite constamment: craintes, désires, inquiétudes, convictions ainsi que la lutte du fait d’être en relation avec les autres et en même temps d’être dans un monde qui a ses propres relations”.                                                                                                      Sylvie Bélanger, 1985

June Pak, October 13, 2020, Toronto

Sylvie Bélanger's work is represented by Birch Contemporary You can read her full obituary here.