Bruce’s work is available through the Wallace Galleries in Calgary, Alberta wallacegalleries.com
and through Warehouse Artworks in Winnipeg www.warehouseartworks.net/
private collection, Toronto
available
Governor General’s Office,
Ottawa, Ontario
The University of Manitoba Archives houses Bruce’s files at https://umlarchives.lib.umanitoba.ca/bruce-head-fonds.
Almost a hundred examples of his work are stored online at The Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art’s online database http://ccca.concordia.ca/artists/Bruce_Head.
For a complete catalogue of work, go to his Studio Collection.
Nationally-renowned Canadian artist Bruce Head began drawing and sketching as an elementary school student in central Winnipeg, where his principal noted his talent and sent him to study at the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Saturday morning classes for students.
He graduated from the University of Manitoba’s School of Art in 1953, one of a handful of young Manitoba artists whose work sparked a dramatic surge in interest in contemporary art in Western Canada, and who came to represent a unique, Prairie-based visual movement.
Head’s insistence on the integrity of the creative process permeated his professional life. As a graphic designer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, he brought uniquely recognizable energy and bold strength to his work– energy that reflects consistently in his canvasses and sculptures.
He exhibited in almost every province in Canada in both group and one-man shows, and his work is housed in corporate collections across the country.
Elected to the Royal Canadian Academy in the early seventies (at the time the youngest Manitoban to be elected), he took early retirement from the CBC in the late eighties, building a large studio onto his home in south Winnipeg where he worked constantly, exhibiting frequently in galleries primarily in Western Canada, and accepting occasional commissions.
Today, his work is represented in hundreds of private and public collections, ranging from small, select personal collections to the National Gallery of Canada. Major pieces hang in public spaces in his home province, from corporate head offices, country clubs, government of Manitoba lobbies, to the unique circular concrete wall in the underground concourse below Canada’s windiest corner at Portage and Main. More than four hundred feet in circumference, the piece is the largest concrete form created by an artist in Canada.
The University of Manitoba, St. John’s College, the University of Manitoba School of Art, St. Boniface Hospital, University of Manitoba School of Medicine, province of Manitoba Art Bank, and the City of Winnipeg all shelter substantive collections of his work, many of the pieces on display in public spaces across Winnipeg.
Aside from the concourse wall, perhaps his most easily-spotted public works can be seen in the lobby of the Woodsworth Building and the Manitoba Hydro lobby in downtown Winnipeg.
His one-man fifty-year retrospective, a three-month solo exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery mounted in the last year of his life, remains the largest solo show the Gallery has ever curated, covering five decades of his art, with a simultaneously-published book analyzing and documenting the exhibition.
Bruce Head died at the age of 78 on December 30th, 2009 in the intensive care unit at St. Boniface Hospital, the same hospital where he was born on February 14th, 1931.
For additional information, contact Bruce’s executor, Judy Waytiuk, at waytiuk@gmail.com.
Bruce Head, R.C.A. 