The Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Announces the 2026 Founders Achievement Award

Each year the TFVA acknowledges a person or group who, over time, has made an exceptional contribution to the visual arts community in the greater Toronto area.

The Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts (TFVA) is pleased to announce this year’s Founders Achievement Award goes to Peggy Gale, whose central role spans five decades as a pioneering curator, art critic, writer, and cultural worker. Her work has played an important role in establishing time-based and media art as a legitimate art form and have become artistic benchmarks. The 2026 Award honours Peggy Gale for her demonstrated high level of accomplishment over many years in the field of the visual arts.

Peggy Gale. Photo: Mani Mazinani

More About Peggy Gale

Peggy Gale’s early impact on the Toronto arts scene began with Videoscape (1974) at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), which was one of the first museum exhibitions to recognize video as a formal artistic practice. Her writing on art has provided important context for artists’ work in museums and galleries. She was also a regular contributor to Canadian Art and Parachute magazines. Internationally she has represented Canadian excellence in several important events and has been a long-time member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the Writers Union of Canada. She’s been a board member of the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation since 2012 and President since 2018.

Born in Guyana in 1944, Gale studied at the University of Toronto and the Università degli Studi in Florence. She worked at the AGO and Canada Council for the Arts, then with artist-run Art Metropole and A Space, two important artist-run centres in their formative years, before turning to independent curatorial projects.

Gale was co-curator for Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection, Ryerson Image Centre (2012); La Biennale de Montréal, Tout le temps / Every time, 2000; and L’avenir (looking forward), 2014–2015. Her earlier projects include the aforementioned Videoscape (Art Gallery of Ontario, 1974-1975); Canadian participation in XIV Bienal Internacional de São Paulo (1977) and XII Biennale des Jeunes, Paris (1982), and performance commissions for OKanada at Akademie der Künste (Berlin 1982-83) as well as Northern Lights (Canadian Embassy, Tokyo, 1991) and Electronic Landscapes (National Gallery of Canada, 1989).

Image courtesy of Peggy Gale

Gale has published extensively, with essays in Video By Artists (Art Metropole), Mirror Machine: Video and Identity (YYZBOOKS), Lectures obliques (Centre d’art contemporain de Basse-Normandie), and many museum catalogues. Among other titles, she was editor for Museums by Artists (with AA Bronson, Art Metropole), Video re/View: The (best) Source for Critical Writings on Canadian Artists’ Video (with Lisa Steele) and Artists Talk 1969–1977 (The Press, NSCAD). Videotexts, on narrative in artists’ video, was published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1995. A selection of her essays 1974-2020 is currently in preparation with Lisa Steele as editor. Honours include the Toronto Arts Award (Visual Arts, 2000), the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2006) and Alumni of Influence, University College, University of Toronto, 2020. The Peggy Gale fonds (1963-2016) are held at the Edward P. Taylor Library & Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario.

Images courtesy of Peggy Gale

Thanks to the Founders Achievement Committee for their hard work researching and selecting this year’s recipient. The TFVA is thrilled to celebrate Peggy Gale as a wonderful contributor to the arts.

Founded in 1998, The Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts is an independent, membership based, non-profit organization that promotes knowledge of the visual arts to its members through an extensive education program and provides support and recognition of artistic achievement to artists, arts professionals and arts organizations in Toronto and the GTA.

Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts
Contact: Charlotte Durand, externalrelations@tfva.ca
Website: tfva.ca | Instagram: @tfva.ca