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Depicting Canada’s Children offers range of views 

By Karen Herland

When Loren Lerner began seeking out depictions of children in Canadian art, she found a wealth of material she had not anticipated and a wealth of expertise within her own department.

Lerner, the chair of the Department of Art History, has just released Depicting Canada’s Children, a volume of essays that was published as part of the Wilfrid Laurier University Press series on studies in childhood and family in Canada.

The essays trace changes in how childhood is represented, sometimes quite literally, sometimes symbolically. “We idealize our children, we also blame them for the woes we experience in our everyday lives.”

With funding from the FQRSC, Lerner embarked on developing an inventory of images of children in Canadian museum and gallery collections. “The McCord Museum had an impressive collection of paintings, photographs and prints.”

It turned out the museum also had space available for a show and Lerner curated Picturing Her: Images of Girlhood in 2005 (see Journal, Dec. 8, 2005). The show complemented another exhibition already at the museum, Growing Up in Montreal, which focused more on objects and documentary artifacts.

A symposium Lerner organized as part of Picturing Her led to plans for the book, and she solicited essays both from her colleagues, and online. She realized that although few of her colleagues would identify themselves as experts on depictions of childhood, they actually had a fairly strong body of material to work with. “For instance, Sandra Paikowsky is an expert on the works of James William Morrice, who has done some paintings featuring children.”

Lerner was keen to include different points of view, including architecture, film studies and communications, along with sociological and educational perspectives. The essays reflect a range of portrayals of childhood experiences; from Sherry Farrell Racette’s analysis of images of children in residential schools to the threat implicit in depictions of squeegee kids as analysed by Derek Foster.

Some of the essays incorporate a personal perspective. Doctoral student Sharon Murray analyses an 1890s photo album she inherited from a distant relative full of images of Indian girls her relative had adopted while working as a missionary. “The girls are wearing western dresses, but they are also barefoot and bangled,” said Lerner.

Similarly, Margaret McNay had a connection to the images of home children she studied: Over 100 000 children were taken from the slums of London to work on farms or in service in Canada. The intention to offer these children a better life than the one they were born into often became an experience of isolation and servitude for the children involved.

McNay, an education professor at the University of Western Ontario, is also the daughter of a home child. “I think only she could recognize the pain, shame and hurt in the eyes of the children in the images, because of her own father”.

The book shifts to the present day and both Johanne Sloan and Martha Langford look at more recent images of youth by Canadian artists. Sloan looks at memory and what these images express about the dynamics of family life and popular culture. Langford is interested in the photographic representation of childhood in relation to personal experiences, temporality and the imaginary process.

The book was launched on Nov. 19, with many of the essays’ authors in attendance. Lerner credits contributors, Annmarie Adams and Langford, with helping to guide the project from inception to publication.

She is also grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts for funding specifically to ensure high quality image reproduction in the hefty volume.

The project does not end with publication. Lerner recently guided an undergraduate seminar class in identifying the 40 images of childhood in the collection of the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery.