Margaret Priest

Margaret Priest (born 1944) is a Toronto based artist, educator and arts advocate.

Priest's artistic practice of 50 years includes painting, print-making, sculpture and public art projects, and she is known and recognized for drawing the interiors and exteriors of the modern, urban built environment.

In an interview with Rozsika Parker she articulated her awareness of the still male-dominated art world as a student in the 1960s and into the 1970s, and also remained conscious of her working-class background.

Griselda Pollock has noted Priest's choice of drawing as a medium as a conscious decision to embrace a typically feminine art form on her own terms.

Modern and aspirational architecture of the international style has been a primary interest for Priest as well as the democratic aspect of public housing in the British reconstruction phase after World War II.

Priest studied at the South West Essex Technical College and School of Art in 1963 and 1964 before entering Maidstone College of Art.

From 1967 she attended the Royal College of Art in London and graduated with a master's degree in 1970.

In the same year, her photolithograph Picture Palace III, 1969, was included in Studio International magazine's Prints and Lithographs supplement.

Her work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally in solo and group exhibitions since 1970.

Priest’s first solo exhibition was at the Arnolfini in Bristol in 1970, which hosted a second show in 1974.

Priest was a lecturer at Saint Martin's School of Art in London from 1972 to 1976, when she moved to Canada.

Priest has been living and working in Toronto since 1976, after relocating from England with her husband, the Canadian-born painter Tony Scherman.

They have three children, Leo, Georgia and Claudia.

Priest was born at Tyringham Hall, England, then a war-time maternity hospital for people evacuated from the bombing of London in World War II.

She grew up in the family council house in Becontree, Dagenham.

Her father Arthur was a railway employee; her mother Gertrude Tommason was the daughter of a stonemason.

Priest is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph, where she taught in the School of Fine Art and Music from 1983 to 2001, and has guest lectured extensively in Canada, England and the United States.

Priest was Professor in the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph from 1983 to 2001, and is now professor emeritus.

She has been included in exhibitions with an architectural focus, such as Viewpoints (1989) and Toronto/Roma (1991).

Architect Marc Baraness has noted that Priest's depictions of architecture by Richard Neutra, Adolf Loos and Eileen Gray distills the architects' original ideas and the emotional content of their work.

Critic and art historian Bernard Denvir has observed that Priest's drawings of architecture are resonant with the human aspects of the built environment.

Priest often uses research-selected photographs as a source and starting point for her architectural drawings, through which alterations and refinements are made.

British writer Deanna Petherbridge and critic E.C. Woodley have described the long creative process of the artist, building on painstakingly observed photographs combined with her own memories, and making interventions into the architectural space through the eventual drawing.

The Construction Series: Building Materials (1990-1995) were a hybrid of precise drawings and actual building materials such as granite, aluminum and limestone, which were used to frame the drawings.

Art historian Linda Norden observed the tactile aspects of these works, which she saw as reflecting the importance of materiality and place.

Priest’s earliest sculptural work is related to her Toronto public art commission, The Monument to Construction Workers, which was completed in 1993.

In 1996, the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre co-organized a two-site career survey exhibition including drawing, painting, printwork and sculpture.

Between 1996 and 2000, Priest created three fully dimensional sculptures each titled The Critic’s Armchair.

They are meant to resemble furniture and made with materials that are also associated with modern architecture and design, such as chrome, steel, terrazzo and marble.

Each armchair includes an insert in which a material drawing is positioned.

One writer remarked on the absence of the implied human figure as being central to the effect of these works.

Priest’s sculptural work in 2011 returned to recollections of her life in England.

The centre piece incorporates a well-crafted shipping crate that serves as a plinth for a variety of objects made from cherry wood.

One of these is a doll-house like model of Tyringham Hall.

Another is a locomotive, a homage to the site of her father’s war injury.

Each object has a steel engraved label with poetic phrases on both sides.

For Tyringham Hall, one side is engraved with “where I didn’t belong but I came from”; the other side with “On Chance and Charity.”

Priest’s on-going interest in architecture has led her to conceptualize and devise integrated permanent public art projects.

In October 2019, the Art Gallery of Ontario mounted an exhibition of her work focused around the recently acquired suite of prints for The Monument to Construction Workers.

Priest’s work is not overtly feminist or political, but issues of gender and social class have had a critical role in her approach and thinking.