2025 Stonecroft Lecture — “Suzy Lake: Distilled Resistance”
Oct 30, 2025 — 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Please join us on Thursday, October 30, at 6 p.m. in the National Gallery of Canada Auditorium. If you prefer to attend virtually, a livestream of the lecture will be available via Zoom.
"Suzy Lake: Distilled Resistance"
The 糵 Department of Visual Arts, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Canada (NGC), is honoured to present Suzy Lake as the speaker for the 11th annual Stonecroft Foundation Visiting Artist Lecture. The event will take place on Thursday, October 30, 2025, at 6 p.m. in the Auditorium of the National Gallery of Canada. The University of Ottawa acknowledges that it is located on the unceded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation, who are the traditional custodians of this land.
This lecture series is made possible through the generous support of the Stonecroft Foundation for the Arts, an organization dedicated to advancing contemporary art discourse. The annual Stonecroft Foundation Visiting Artist Lecture offers 糵 students and the general public a unique opportunity to engage with the practices of prominent Canadian artists. We warmly invite you to attend this talk by Suzy Lake, either in person at the NGC Auditorium or online via our Zoom livestream.
Suzy Lake
Conceptual photographer, performance artist and video maker
Suzy Lake immigrated to Montreal from Detroit, Michigan, in 1968. She is known for her large-scale photography examining the body as both subject and device. Although classically trained, she adopted performance, video and photography as tools to explore the politics of the body, identity and power relations. Lake’s later work probes deeper into these issues of resistance to include the politics and poetics of the aging body. Her work is represented by Michèle Didier in Paris and Bradley Ertaskiran in Montreal. She will have a solo show at the latter gallery in September.
Lake was one of 13 co-founders of Véhicule Art Inc., an artist-run centre, in 1972. In addition, her teaching career spanned 40 years, beginning with the Montreal Museum School. She retired from teaching as a professor emerita at the University of Guelph in 2008. The Art Gallery of Ontario presented Introducing Suzy Lake, a full career retrospective, in 2014. In 2016, Lake received both the Scotiabank Photography Award and a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Last year, she was presented the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Chicago.
Her work is in the collections of major museums in Canada, as well as significant international institutions such as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York; Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Germany; the Centre national des arts plastiques in Paris, France; the Detroit Institute of Arts in Detroit, Michigan; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, New York; the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, New York; the Museum of the City of Łódź in Łódź, Poland; and the Verbund Collection in Vienna, Austria.