Salut les Filles! Images that go beyond sugar and spice

Miss Sheila MacFarlane, Montreal, William Notman & Son, 1898. At right: Painted photograph - vintage print, oil paint on cardboard. Images courtesy of the McCord Museum.

Loren Lerner, who chairs Concordia’s Department of Art History, is curator of the latest exhibition at the McCord Museum of Canadian History.

Picturing Her: Images of Girlhood (Salut les Filles! La jeune fille en images) runs from Nov. 25 to April 9, and presents a multi-faceted picture of what it has meant to grow up female in Canada from 1860 onward.

The exhibition includes paintings, prints, drawings and photographs from the renowned Notman Photographic Archives, such as the one above.

In that era, photographs were commonly painted over to produce a more luxurious picture.

Girls were expected to be models of virtue and innocence. As such, they would often be depicted in gardens or, in this case, a bucolic winter setting.

The exhibition includes Confederation-era political cartoons that “show girls personifying the hopes and struggles of the newly crerated Canada — strong and capable of growth, but also vulnerable,” according to the McCord.

Works by contemporary women artists round out the exhibition.

Picturing Her / Salut les Filles! will be launched with a symposium on Dec. 1 featuring presentations by the curator and other scholars, many with Concordia connections. They include Catherine Wild, Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Kristina Huneault, Martha Langford, and Leah Sherman.

The keynote speaker will be Anne Higonnet, from Columbia University.

Aterwards, there will be a vernissage attended by President Claude Lajeunesse.

For more on the symposium, please go to the McCord web site, at www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/.