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At one time, the art of Rita Letendre covered Toronto. In the 1970s and ’80s, public art boomed alongside construction. But as the city continued to grow up, many of the trailblazing painter’s murals came down. Roughly a dozen examples of Letendre’s high-energy abstraction, once found in public spaces, have been demolished, removed or concealed.
Painted on the exterior wall of Toronto’s Neill-Wycik building, the late Abenaki artist’s first Canadian mural was also her largest. Sunrise, from 1971, shows a cobalt blue streak speeding across a field of brilliant gold, green and orange. The work still stands today; however, it has been hidden.
Not even eight years after it was finished, the mural was obscured by a 25-storey high-rise built next door. Peering from the sidewalk into the small gap between buildings — as this CBC Arts writer has done — you can no longer glimpse a single beam of Letendre’s luminous Sunrise. The masterpiece of Canadian art has been eclipsed behind a condo tower.
The experience got me thinking about all of the other works of Canadian art that once delighted, bewildered and in some cases maddened visitors that have also since disappeared. Over the years, there have been a number of projects I’ve felt grateful to see before they departed — as well as many more I can only ever dream of experiencing.
Some research on “lost Canadian art” revealed a trove of these forgotten treasures. A casual callout on social media netted dozens more from artists, curators and enthusiasts who shared similar feelings about other works (including enough examples, like Mariette Rousseau-Vermette’s tapestry for the Toronto Star lobby, the art-modded bungalows of Leona Drive and a 50-foot Frank Stella from David Mirvish Books, for a dedicated feature on vanished Toronto).
There are too many fantastic examples of lost artwork to list them all, but I have selected 10 notable projects from across the country. They include a marvel of Jet Age modernism that once hung above the YWG baggage claim, an absurdist highway that rose out of the sea and a sculpture by the revered Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta carved directly into the side of the Scarborough Bluffs. Each is an incredible work of art, once found in Canada, that has expired, been demolished or for other reasons, can no longer be seen — though you’ll wish you could.
Northern Lights by John Graham
With the introduction of jet airliners in the 1950s, commercial aviation took off, and the Canadian government embarked on a nationwide airport construction program, building stylish modernist facilities in places like Gander, N.L.; Montreal; and Winnipeg.
The Winnipeg International Airport Terminal opened in 1964 in a grand, International Style building with modish furnishings and public art to match. On the north wall of the concourse, travellers were greeted by University of Manitoba professor John Graham’s Northern Lights — a 45-metre-long 3D mural made of aluminum, plexiglass and mosaic tiles arranged in a grid of geometric shapes.
The tinted plexi would catch the sun streaming in, causing coloured light to dance across the wall, just like its namesake, recalls Winnipeg artist Simon Hughes. He remembers when he was young, Northern Lights “was something big, colourful and beautiful” that made the airport feel like an exciting place. “It threw back to the heyday of air travel. It was very optimistic.”
Replaced with a new terminal in 2011, the mid-century building was closed (and later demolished), and Northern Lights found a new home at the Ingenium Centre in Ottawa, where it sits disassembled on wooden pallets.
In 2017, Hughes created a print in homage to Northern Lights. It is a meticulously accurate illustration of the sculpture that, at 1.5 metres long, is quite large for a print, but “comically small,” the artist says, compared to Graham’s “colossal and awe-inspiring” work.
The Anarchitecture of Richard Greaves
From 1989 to 2009, the artist Richard Greaves built a fantastical village on a remote piece of land he owned with some friends in the Beauce region of Quebec, just south of the province’s capital. He festooned the grounds with sculptural works made using materials he’d salvaged from the dump and from neighbours’ curbs. Most remarkably, the site included 20 improvised buildings assembled using wood and hardware Greaves stripped from abandoned barns, sheds and farmhouses in the area.
He did not believe in using nails (which “wound the material,” he once explained). Instead, his elaborate constructions were fastened with recycled rope, nylon twine and simple joinery techniques. Indulging asymmetry as a kind of principle, he avoided using right angles, which contributed to the twisted, dreamlike appearance of the cabins. The structures were nevertheless strong, withstanding harsh Quebec winters for decades.
“It’s the best artwork in the world,” says Valérie Rousseau, a senior curator at the American Folk Art Museum who has curated multiple exhibitions on Greaves. “It’s a living organism.” She regards his work as “anarchitecture” — a “masterfully orchestrated chaos” where “materials and nature conversed in growing and unpredictable ways.”
Rousseau remembers the first time she visited Greaves’ art. “We had the feeling that we were getting into the brain of someone,” she says. Navigating the strange and disorienting spaces, she found herself completely immersed in the act of discovery.
According to an archive entry from SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments), sometime after Greaves left the site in 2009, a neighbour toppled the structures. It is a small mercy that the work was extensively photographed by Swiss photographer Mario del Curto and documented in the catalogue Anarchitect by Rousseau.
El Laberinto de Venus by Ana Mendieta
Guild Park and Gardens in the Toronto community of Scarborough was once home to an influential arts and crafts co-op called the Guild of All Arts. For its 50th anniversary in 1982, the Guild held an ambitious outdoor sculpture exhibition curated by artist Sorel Etrog (whose own sculptures can be found all over Toronto, including at Guild Park).
Ana Mendieta — a pioneering feminist artist, known for her earthworks — was one of the 35 participants. Others included Canadian talents like Bill Vazan, Armand Vaillancourt and Joyce Wieland, as well as American minimalist Carl Andre, who was Mendieta’s partner.
For her contribution, Mendieta produced a carving in the face of the Scarborough Bluffs. A sequence of two round forms and an almond shape created an abstract figure. On a handwritten note found in the Art Gallery of Ontario archives, the artist sketched her design for Etrog. “The work’s title is El Laberinto de Venus,” she wrote.
Few photographs of the artwork exist, though a black-and-white picture was printed in the exhibition catalogue. (The location of the work, however, was omitted from a map also included.)
The natural erosion of the bluffs meant the carving would not be permanent.
Beginning in 2011, Toronto-based artist Alize Zorlutuna began a suite of research- and performance-based artworks in search of the Scarborough Mendieta. They almost couldn’t believe this legend of 20th-century art had been there, making work in their own backyard. “Right down the street from me,” Zorlunta says, “this artist who is iconic for so many and whose work has influenced and informed generations of artists? To find out that [her work] was there, and maybe I could find it?”
In the archives of the Guild co-founders, Zorlutuna discovered a map drawn on the back of a napkin that recorded the site of El Laberinto de Venus. (They also found correspondence that suggested Mendieta was the only participating artist who was not compensated for their work.)
Zorlutuna’s project, The Presence of Absence: Searching For Mendieta, included performances, sculptures, an archival installation and an audio walk to the suspected site of El Laberinto de Venus. Although the artist found no trace of the original carving, what they did find — inspired by Mendieta — was a “very deep connection with place” that they could feel in their body.
MacLaren Against the Grain: The Fafard Field Project by Joe Fafard
In 1997, the International Plowing Match (IPM), North America’s largest outdoor agricultural expo, was held in the hamlet of Ivy, Ont. As a centrepiece of the event, the MacLaren Art Centre in nearby Barrie partnered with the IPM and acclaimed Saskatchewan sculptor Joe Fafard on an immense work of land art. For MacLaren Against the Grain: The Fafard Field Project, the artist collaborated with a curator and local farmers to “draw” an image across a 50-acre crop field.
Fafard, whose celebrated depictions of rural life can be found grazing at Toronto’s TD Centre or running outside the National Gallery of Canada, designed a draft horse from plots of wheat, corn, canola, soybeans and alfalfa. During the growing season, regular aerial photography documented the progress. After a full year, the artwork was complete, and the crops were harvested and donated to the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, raising more than $59,000 for international food aid.
The work has been called “Canada’s largest environmental art project.”
Before Demolition: Tides by Emily Neufeld
North Vancouver artist Emily Neufeld is known for her work with houses. The daughter of a building contractor, her art routinely investigates how people use their homes, as well as the traces of life that are left behind.
Since 2014, the artist estimates she’s visited more than 100 dwellings that were either abandoned or slated for demolition, and she’s made interventions in roughly three dozen.
“I would go into the house and look for what made it special,” she says, “and then try to find a way to highlight that.” She might cut the carpeting to emphasize its wear pattern or plug a hole in the wall with a well-shaped rock found nearby.
Often, Neufeld’s work can only be seen after-the-fact, documented with video or photography before the building is razed. But a 2019 project in Cheticamp, N.S., allowed for a different experience, where visitors were invited onto the site to witness her installation.
Working with Eyelevel Gallery in Halifax, Neufeld was granted access to a fisherman’s shack, which had been condemned after a fire. There, the artist cut through the envelope of the building, carving a design that charted local tidal patterns and lunar phases. The openings exposed the fishing shack to the busy wharf outside, revealing how the natural rhythms of the Atlantic influence people’s lives and livelihoods in the region.
At dusk, the artwork glowed like a jack-o-lantern.
Of course, working with houses marked for removal, impermanence is part of Neufeld’s project. Artworks such as this were always destined to become lost. “We are all here temporarily,” the artist says. “Temporariness is a part of the human experience that we try to not think about.”
The Cheticamp house was set for demolition after the exhibition, but as of 2022, it remains intact. Neufeld’s interventions, on the other hand, have been boarded over.
You Have Left the American Sector by Ron Terada
In 2005, Vancouver artist Ron Terada installed a road sign along the riverfront walkway in Windsor, Ont., facing the Canada-U.S. border. In the green and white scheme of highway signage, it read, “You have left the American sector,” with the French translation printed beneath.
The artwork referenced the notices posted at Checkpoint Charlie, the famous Cold War crossing between East and West Berlin. Terada’s rendition, issued in the post-9/11 era of the Global War on Terrorism, brought a reminder to the friendly Windsor-Detroit crossing that the U.S. is an imperial power highly concerned with who and what may cross its border (a matter with a new and urgent relevance for Canadians today).
Though the original can no longer be seen in its intended setting, Terada has made subsequent editions, featuring other languages for various sites. One lives in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada and another was exhibited by Terada’s Vancouver gallerist Catriona Jeffries this past summer.
Highway 86 by SITE
Transportation and communication were the themes of Expo 86, the 1986 world’s fair held in Vancouver. For many visitors, one of the highlights was a fantastical expressway, covered in all manners of vehicles, that rose out of False Creek, billowed like a ribbon over a quarter kilometre of fairgrounds, then shot dramatically into the air between two viaducts.
Liberace was photographed astride one of the artwork’s motorcycles; even the Archie gang visited for an October 1986 issue.
Titled Highway 86, the installation was an open-air pavilion celebrating the history of 20th-century land, air and sea travel. It was designed by the New York architecture and environmental art studio SITE (best known for post-modern projects like fashion impresario Laurie Mallet’s “House of Memories” and the Best Products Houston showroom, which is said to have appeared in more books on 20th-century architecture than any other modern structure).
Highway 86 included more than 200 examples of transportation, from sneakers, bicycles and wheelchairs to catamarans, a Bell helicopter and a lunar rover. Visitors were permitted to walk on the roadway and climb into the vehicles. SITE co-founder Alison Sky, one of the project leads, remembers a 1969 Cadillac convertible was a crowd favourite. All of the vehicles were painted a flat gray to match the concrete highway, transforming the disparate pieces into a unified sculptural form.
Standing atop one of Highway 86‘s hills on opening day, Sky recalls watching as the gates opened and throngs of people swept into the artwork and began to play. The sense of discovery and joy was palpable, she says. “That was, for me, one of the most thrilling experiences as an artist who has chosen to work publicly.”
Once the fair closed, there was a campaign to preserve Highway 86 as a legacy of the expo. Instead, the vehicles were auctioned off and the roadway was bulldozed for development. Every once in a while, Sky still hears from someone who’s just spotted one of the work’s iconic monochrome machines parked in somebody’s yard.
Sunrise by Rita Letendre
Although her mural Sunrise was only visible for a short time before it was shrouded by a condo tower, it is recognized as a key work in Letendre’s storied career.
Born in Drummondville, Que., the painter was closely associated with two prominent avant-garde movements in Canadian art, the Automatistes and the Plasticiens. She was one of relatively few women — and often the only Indigenous artist — to exhibit alongside either.
With an interest in “[uncovering] those histories and [making] them present on the land again,” the sustainable city-building nonprofit Evergreen saw the opportunity to literally uncover Letendre’s work, says Evergreen public art curator Charlene K. Lau. The organization couldn’t move the mural from behind a high-rise, but it could help bring the artwork back into the public’s view.
Fifty years after Sunrise was unveiled, artist Tannis Nielsen was commissioned to reproduce the painting and to make a new artwork in response. Both are on display at Evergreen Brick Works. Scaled down from Letendre’s giant 18-by-18-metre composition and installed at ground level, Sunrise (1971/2021) may not be the original, but it allows art lovers up close to bask in the warmth of an icon.
1/4 Mile Landscape by N.E. Thing Co.
Another lost artwork, another road sign. This one, a seminal piece of conceptual art in Canada. N.E. Thing Co. was the Vancouver-based art collective of Iain and Ingrid Baxter. The pair made their first 1/4 Mile Landscape in Newport Beach, Calif., in 1968. A highway sign, erected roadside, notified cars, “You will soon pass by a 1/4 Mile N.E. Thing Co. Landscape.” A second sign instructed passersby to “start viewing,” while a third told them when to stop.
“It was my way to tell you, ‘Here’s an interesting landscape that I’ve liked,'” explains Iain Baxter& (who legally changed his surname in 2005). “We live in a landscape, and I think our whole lives are just a work of art.”
The gesture was a cheeky act of appropriation, claiming whole vistas as N.E. Thing Co.’s artistic authorship. At the same time, it elevated the simple pleasure of “enjoying the view” to an aesthetic experience equivalent to perusing an art gallery.
In 1969, the pair made their second 1/4 Mile Landscape, this time on Prince Edward Island. “It was somewhere along one of those coastal roads,” Baxter& recalls. “A nice kind of landscape where you’d have the water on one side and then trees and farm fields [on the other].”
They were never certain how long the signs remained in place or how many passersby partook in the experience — but what strange magic the artwork must have been to happen upon. Over the course of its career, N.E. Thing Co. made about a half dozen 1/4 Mile Landscapes, Baxter& recalls.
Arc en Ciel by Michael Hayden
Artist Michael Hayden has been told that, once upon a time, pilots landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport would tip their aircraft to give passengers a better view of his spectacular neon installation, Arc en Ciel. Installed in the atrium ceiling of the Yorkdale subway station in 1978, the light sculpture was recognized as an exemplary work of art integrated with public transit.
Hayden describes Arc en Ciel as a “600-foot-long neon cigar on the landscape.” The ribs of glass neon tubing, painted in 79 different colours, ran the length of the platform, creating a brilliant rainbow when illuminated. The lights would flash in the direction of trains entering or leaving the station and pulse as cars waited on the tracks. The artwork was designed with 90-hours of programming, so no one would see the same display twice, Hayden explains.
The Vancouver-born artist went on to create well-known light installations around the globe, including Chicago O’Hare International Airport’s emblematic “disco tunnel,” Sky’s the Limit. But many of these other artworks wouldn’t have been possible without Arc en Ciel, he says.
Unfortunately, the Yorkdale Station sculpture was unceremoniously scrapped sometime in the 1990s, after a handful of transformers blew and the Toronto Transit Commission decided it did not have the budget to maintain the work.
“It was very depressing to have another one of my fabulous offerings to the populace put in storage or in the trash,” Hayden says.
That wasn’t the end of the line for Arc en Ciel, however. In 2016, it was announced that Hayden’s seminal light sculpture would return to Yorkdale Station. The artist designed and delivered an updated LED version. But reinstallation lagged through COVID.
Around the same time as this planned revival, the TTC determined that the ceiling of the Arthur-Erickson-designed station needed significant repair. With that work recently complete, the transit commission has re-engaged the artist to discuss the future of Arc en Ciel and its potential reinstallation, a TTC spokesperson told CBC Arts.
“I have had a very fortunate life, and I would love to have my good fortune continue by seeing Arc en Ciel back up, beautifying an elegant train station,” says Hayden.
For this lost artwork, there’s some light at the end of the tunnel — and it’s all the colours of the rainbow.
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