Born in Vancouver in 1952, Bruce Hugh Russell studied at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University) and at Concordia University. An independent curator and art historian, he has written extensively on both contemporary art and art history, publishing in numerous journals including Canadian Art, Studies in Visual Communications, and Parachute, and has written for the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Belkin Gallery at the University of British Columbia, The Ottawa Art Gallery, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, among others.
Mr. Russell has enjoyed a long and varied relationship with the National Gallery of Canada, as a scholar, curator, and donor. In 1993-1994 he received the prestigious Resident Research Fellowship in Canadian Art History, at National Gallery of Canada, for research on the life and work of patron, collector and craftsman Douglas Duncan 1902-1968. He was a Contributor to the catalogue of the Gallery’s exhibition, The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy in 1996, and more recently he was a co-curator of the exhibition Artists, Architects and Artisans: Canadian Art 1890–1918. In this exhibition he was able to draw on his long-term interest in the Arts & Crafts movement and in the decorative arts and architecture of the Anglican tradition.
His present projects include a major biography of Montreal cultural philanthropist F. Cleveland Morgan and a study of Saskatchewan-born abstract painter Agnes Martin’s Canadian associations, (2018-2019 at the Esker Foundation, Calgary, and the MacKenzie Gallery, Regina.) Mr. Russell now lives in Regina, and has recently retired from teaching in the northern community of La Ronge where he taught art history to aboriginal under-graduate students.
An anthology of three decades of his writing on the visual arts can be found on the web site brucehughrussell.com
