Françoise Sullivan

Françoise Sullivan was admired for her avant-garde choreographies in the 1940s and 1950s and became one of the pioneers of post-modern dance in Québec and Canada. She was one of the founding members of the Automatistes group, along with painters Paul-Émile Borduas and Jean-Paul Riopelle, and she co-signed the Refus global manifesto with them in 1948. Beginning in the 1960s, her work expanded to include sculpture, photography, installations, performance and painting, which became her preferred mode of expression.

During her career, Françoise Sullivan presented over 500 exhibitions across Canada, Europe and the United States. Since 1980s, her remarkable body of work has been the subject of several retrospectives, including at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.

In addition to being the focus of studies and analyses in a variety of academic works, her artwork is part of many museum and private collections. A number of her pieces grace public spaces in Montréal, such as the spectacular granite mural in the President-Kennedy pavilion of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and the series of frescoes at the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal.

In 2011, her work was featured with the most prestigious American artists of the 20^th century at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In early 2017, the Galerie de l’UQAM also paid homage to her with a retrospective of her works called Trajectoires resplendissantes.

Françoise Sullivan has received many honours throughout her career, including the Prix du Québec Paul-Émile-Borduas, in 1987, the Governor-General of Canada award for visual and media arts, in 2006, the Academy of the Arts and Humanities medal from the Royal Society of Canada, in 2008, and the Gershon-Iskowitz award from the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, in 2014. She was also appointed an officer of the Royal Society of Canada, in 1998, a fellow of the Order of Canada, in 2002, and a knight of the Ordre national du Québec, in 2005.

Françoise Sullivan completed her studies at the École des Beaux-arts de Montréal in 1944 and went on to study modern dance in New York. She has two honorary doctorates, one from York University in Toronto and the other from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM).