1. Leading Canadian Art Journalist Wins Prestigious Fellowship

Murray Whyte, the Toronto Star’s visual arts writer, has won a prestigious journalism fellowship from Massey College. Whyte was awarded the Kierans-Janigan Fellowship at the 15th annual Canadian Journalism Foundation awards gala in Toronto, June 7. It is one of six fellowships handed out Thursday for a year of post-secondary study at the University of Toronto to members of Canadian media. The Kierans-Janigan award is funded in honor of one of Canada’s greatest arts journalists, the late Val Ross of the Globe and Mail.

2. MACM Re-Opens After Massive Storm Flooded “Zoo” Exhibit, ‘Noah’s Arc’ Jokes Come to an End

It took two weeks for the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal to clean and decontaminate its flooded basement, and every available floor and surface at its disposal – including its recently-opened group show of artists lending image to the animal kingdom. The museum shuddered its doors after a significant late-May storm, with specialized maintenance teams working night and day in the 50,000-square-foot space affected, and archival and restoration staff members on hand to speed-up the artwork restoration process. The museum community spontaneously came to the MACM’s aid, with a large restoration teams provided from Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, along with a number of private conservators. While no pieces were irretrievably lost, a multitude of cleaning, drying, and decontamination operations were performed - especially for artwork executed on paper.

3. New-Generation Regionalist Inducted into the National Gallery of Canada’s Collection

London, Ont.-based artist Jason McLean, who has been pegged the next Greg Curnoe (though it’s a title he resists; look for the ARTINFO interview this week), has recently been bought by the NGC. “I sold two drawings, one of them a major work, and one more mid-sized,” reports the artist, now 42. Is the regionalist agenda making a long overdue comeback? More soon.

4. Another one Bites the Dust: TPW Confirms Exit from Ossington Space to Dundas West

TPW, the longstanding artist-run center for photography (established in the 1980s as the Toronto Photographers Workshop), has officially announced its move from 56 Ossington to 1256 Dundas W., part of a larger gallery exodus from the one locale to the other. In the interim, it will launch TPW R&D, “a transitional and flexible storefront space for temporary research, and writing, screenings, discussions, workshops, and fluid exhibition strategies,” says curator Kim Simon.

5. Art Gallery of Windsor Invites the City into its Lobby, Off-Loads Financial Strain

In a somewhat surprising move of “partisanship,” the AGW has agreed to rent its first floor to the city library, thereby reducing its financial strain as it brokers a deal to sell the building back to the city, and go forward as a tenent. “It’s a rare museum that owns its building, outright,” director Catharine Mastin observes. “We’re making the necessary moves to ease the strain while we accommodate new solutions.”