The fonds consists of the personal and professional records of the artist Jennifer Dickson. They include the following series: personal material and correspondence; exhibition and other projects files; professional records; Royal Academy of Arts records; business files; travel records; and publicity and promotional material (including two photographs in a scrapbook).
In addition to the manuscript records, the fonds includes a substantial amount of art and photographic material which have been described in the following series: art records and photographic records.
Dickson, Jennifer, 1936- : Jennifer Dickson was born in South Africa in 1936 and went to England to study art, at Goldsmiths' College, in 1954. After graduating in 1959, she taught first at the Eastbourne School of Art and then, from 1962 to 1968, at the Brighton School of Art, while continuing her own studies in Paris under the renowned printmaker Stanley William Hayter, at Atelier 17, from 1960 to 1965. Dickson emigrated to Canada in 1969, settling initially in Montreal, where her first Canadian solo exhibition was held at the Saidye Bronfman Centre, and then in Ottawa, where she began a long association with Wallack Galleries.
Jennifer Dickson is perhaps best-known as a printmaker, although she is also a painter, photographer, collagist, sculptor, and historian. During the course of her career, she has produced some 31 portfolios or suites of original etchings, often preoccupied with gardens (usually sites in England or Europe but including some Canadian) and largely consisting of hand-coloured etchings based on her own photographic images. She has also worked with images of nudes and has produced three-dimensional "shadow boxes". Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Nickle Arts Museum (Calgary), Ottawa Art Gallery, Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston) and Il Centro Culturale Canadese (Rome), and is represented in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, among other institutions. She regularly exhibits with the Royal Academy of Arts in England, to which she was elected an Associate Member in 1970 and an Academician in 1976. She is also a member of the Royal Society of Painters, Etchers and Engravers (1965) and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (1978). She lectures widely on the subject of art and gardens, and is an activist for the preservation of historic gardens and archaeological sites.
Dickson has also been an activist promoting the work of Canadian artists in Canada, particularly that of women. She was involved in an exhibition of women artists in Montreal, Artfemme '75, and organized Artfemme 1 in Ottawa in 1982. A founding member of the Print and Drawing Council of Canada, she co-ordinated its Imprint '76 exhibition. She has been associated with the Canadian Artists Representation, a lobby organization which champions the rights of Canadian artists, for which she conducted a study of the acquisitions practices of the National Gallery of Canada in the late 1970s and again in the early 1980s. She is the author of a book of photographs, poems and meditations, "The Hospital for Wounded Angels" (1987).
Dickson has received many honours and awards for her work, among them the Prix des Jeunes Artistes pour Gravure, Paris Biennale (1963); the George A. Reid Award, Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers (1973); a Special Edition Purchase Award, World Print Competition, San Francisco Museum of Art (1973); the Walter Moos Award at the First Canadian Biennale of Prints and Drawings (1978); a Biennale Prize at the 5th Norwegian International Print Biennale (1980); and the Victor Tolgesy Arts Award from the Council for the Arts in Ottawa (2002). She received an honorary degree from the University of Alberta in 1988 and was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 1995.
Jennifer Dickson married Ronald Sweetman, an accountant and jazz historian, in 1962 and they had a son, William (Bill), in 1965. Bill Sweetman is a filmmaker, who collaborated with Dickson on her projects "Looking for Bianca Capello", 1989, and "The Last Silence", 1993.
