Eltuek Arts Centre exhibition Miners’ Houses, Glace Bay featured in Globe and Mail

An unusual Canadian Painting has made a sentimental journey to Cape Breton this spring, 100 years after the dramatic events that inspired it.

Miners’ Houses, Glace Bay, painted by Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris during the bitter 1925 miners’ strike, is showing at the Eltuek Arts Centre, an artist-run cultural centre and gallery in Sydney, N.S., down the road from the mines.

The painting is important to both Nova Scotia labour history and Canadian art history. It represents the last time Harris, renowned for his northern landscapes, painted an urban industrial scene.

The Sydney exhibition is timed to the centenary of Davis Day, Nova Scotia’s commemoration of miners who have died on the job. The day, marked annually on June 11 since 1925, is named for William Davis, a Cape Breton miner shot by company police during the strike.

Read the full article by the Globe’s visual art critic and cultural columnist, Kate Taylor, here.