Beth Stuart

Beth Stuart works in an expanding range of media including writing, painting, ceramic, performance, textiles, and sculptural installation. Picking up on overlooked historical moments, characters, and material techniques, she creates alternative plot points in the narrative of modernist abstraction in order to examine the physical and metaphysical implications of dissolving the figure-ground relationship. Recent material research has convened bizarre Victorian bathing customs, interstitial meiofauna, the politics of stretch, time travel, melting rock with her bare hands, pizza, and contemporary art as a site of ritual sublimation.

She holds a graduate degree from the University of Guelph, an undergraduate degree from Concordia in Montreal, and was a 2019 alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Notable exhibitions include a solo project at the Power Plant (Toronto 2018), the Esker Foundation (Calgary 2014), The Painting Project UQUAM (Montreal 2013), and An Assembly of Shapes, Oakville Galleries (2018). She is the recipient of numerous residencies, grants, and awards including the RBC Painting Prize, and the Canada Council for the Arts Paris Residency and the Canada Council’s Long-Term Grant for Visual Artists. Her work has been written about in Frieze Magazine, Mousse Magazine, Canadian Art, and Border Crossings. Among her critical writings are published texts in C Magazine and Canadian Art, and exhibition texts for artists Sandra Meigs and Sameer Farooq. 

Stuart has been a post-secondary teacher for over a decade; at the University of Guelph, the University of Toronto Mississauga, and most prominently at OCAD University. Her teaching portfolio includes traditional and non-traditional approaches to painting, the juncture of two and three-dimensional construction, intersectional feminist practice, writing, and visual theory. Her approach to teaching is characterized by flexibility - to materials, learning styles, politics, sensibilities, and cultural difference. She views the classroom as a collaborative space in which curiosity on the part of both teacher and student is the major driver of learning.