Overview
Roald Nasgaard (born October 14, 1941) is a champion of abstract art in Canada.
Career
Roald Nasgaard received his B.A. from the University of British Columbia in 1965; his M.A. from the University of British Columbia in 1967; and his Ph.D. from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. He began his career as a lecturer and assistant professor at the University of Guelph (1971–1975), then served as the curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto (1975–1978), chief curator (1978–1989), and deputy director and chief curator (1989–1993). In his role as chief curator, he oversaw the expansion of the gallery's permanent collection, as well as organizing many exhibitions, often of Canadian abstract art He was co-organizer of the programming of the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Art, Calgary, Canada; visiting lecturer, University of Guelph, and York University and visiting lecturer, adjunct professor at the University of Toronto.
He was also a research fellow at the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives (summer 2002). was exhibited at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo in 2009. In 2016, he was one of the curators of Mystical Landscapes: Masterpieces from Monet, Van Gogh and More (AGO and Musée d'Orsay) and in 2017 curated Higher States: Lawren Harris and his American Contemporaries (McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Glenbow Museum).
Awards and honours
Nasgaard won an Ontario Art Galleries Association Curatorial Writing Award in 1991 for his essay in Individualités: 14 Contemporary Artists from France. He has held several Canada Council fellowships (1967–1968), (1970–1971) and grants as well as a Research Fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives (2002) and a Cornerstone (AHPEG) Grant, FSU (2006–2007). He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2012. He also has been a member of the Toronto Public Art Commission and of the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Exhibition Catalogues
Nasgaard has been the author of many exhibition catalogues, including, among others: Yves Gaucher: A Fifteen-Year Perspective (1979), Structures for Behaviour: New Sculptures by Robert Morris, David Rabinowitch, Richard Serra and George Trakas (1978), and The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890-1940 (1984) which Artforum magazine called a "sweeping survey of Symbolist landscape painting in Northern Europe and North America", adding the catalogue was "fine". It said that Nasgaard had located a "European ancestry for early Modern Canadian painting". In 2001 the Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts published his Pleasures of Sight and States of Being: Radical Abstract Painting Since 1990.
Books
* * * * * * * Higher States was reviewed favorably with reservations, with a reviewer saying, "Both essays are lucidly written, profusely illustrated, and logically argued. Unfortunately, many important parts of the plot are missing".