The OJCE committee wishes to thank our Web Designer Leif Norman and our financial donors.

We extend heartfelt thanks to our generous donors for their financial support.

Without their funding, the 2024 year would not have been possible.

Additional support in kind has been generously provided by Manitoba businesses and galleries. We also gratefully acknowledge our faithful donors who have contributed in kind: 

Several awards have been provided by families in memory of long-time MSA members, and we gratefully recognize the support from families of: Jean Wiens, William J. Birtles,  W. Cliff Packer, Brian J. Hyslop, Lynn Sissons, Barbara Cook Endres, and Bev Morton. 

An enormous thank you to our generous donors one and all.

Canada Life
Artists Emporium

and the

Hilton Lee Foundation for Kindness

ABOUT THE MANITOBA SOCIETY OF ARTISTS
Winnipeg in 1902. The corner of Portage and Main. Photograph.

The Manitoba Society of Artists was established in 1902 originally as an organization to recognize the merits of Manitoba’s outstanding artists,  to promote and encourage visual artists in Manitoba and to provide a western equivalent to the Ontario Society of Artists. In addition to showing work by its members, the society campaigned for an art gallery and art school in the province and arranged for touring exhibits from institutions outside Winnipeg such as the Chicago Art Institute.

Today, the purpose of the Society is to promote and encourage Manitoba’s emerging and professional visual artists. Members of the Society exhibit together, enjoy social events and participate in educational ventures, such as lectures, slide presentations and workshops.

Main Street, Winnipeg, Looking South. Jefferys, C.W. 1902

However, the important event of each year is the Provincial Annual Open Juried Competition and Exhibition, which allows both emerging and professional artists an equal opportunity to participate in a major exhibition.

“The Manitoba Society of Artists, from its inception in 1903, had held “the encouragement and fostering of original and native art in the Province of Manitoba” as its primary objective. Its membership was comprised of “painters, sculptors, architects, artistic engravers, draughtsmen and designers, residing in Manitoba or temporarily residing elsewhere, and membership was determined by a selection committee which judged submitted work of prospective members. 

Cartoon of Alfred Joseph Andrews, by Hay Stead

The first executive officers of the Society, H. S. Stead, Frank Armington and E. J. Ransom, were all working artists. Hay Stead was, at the time of the founding of the Society, a cartoonist and writer on the staff of the Manitoba Free Press,  while Frank Armington was a highly trained Ontario-born painter who came from Paris to Winnipeg in 1900 to start his own teaching studio.  He lived in Winnipeg for only five years, but his interest in western Canadian art was obviously sufficient for him to support such a venture as the Society of Artists.

The third member of the founding executive of the Society, E. J. Ransom, was an artist-engraver and a businessman. He was “internationally known as engraver, art critic, bookman, lecturer and craftsman” and in the early years of the century had founded his own engraving company.  

Peniches sur la Seine, Paris – Frank Milton Armington 
Lithograph

Until 1913, when the Ontario firm of Brigden’s opened its first western branch, the Ransom Engraving Company produced much of the promotional material for the city of Winnipeg.  However, Stead and Ransom were commercial artists and possibly reflect, along with the women, a further bias of the early writers on Canadian art. As J. E. Middleton said in his biography of the artist F. H. Brigden, Victorian values existed well into the 1930s: artists were not admitted to the Royal Canadian Academy, for example, if they were practising commercial artists.” from the Manitoba Historical Society.