Painter and conceptual artist Gerald Ferguson (1937-2009) played a central role in transforming Halifax's Nova Scotia College of Art and Design into one of North America's leading art schools in the 1970s. Skirting easy categorization, his work pursued a conflicted, anti-romantic, 'tough' school of high modernism, one that directly challenged the historical context within which paintings had been made, collected and discussed for centuries. Internationally...