Gerald Ferguson

Gerald Ferguson (b. 1937, Cincinnati, OH – d. 2009) was a conceptual artist and painter who lived and taught in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In the late 1960s, Ferguson traded in New York’s conceptual art scene for the chance to transform a provincial art college in Nova Scotia. Over the next decades, Ferguson worked to turn NSCAD (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) into a conceptual hub. Over his almost forty-year career, Ferguson made conceptual works and frottage paintings, for which he is well known in Canada. In his frottage pieces, he treated folk and decorative elements with a post-minimalist approach, rubbing black house paint over canvas purchased at the local sail-making shop, repeating patterns of mostly quotidian objects such as Victorian fireplace panels, chains, ropes, and rods, which leave the viewer with a sense of hard-earned humanity.