18 Facts About Rita Letendre

Rita Letendre was an Officer of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Governor General's Award.

Rita Letendre began showing with the Automatistes in store windows and on fences in St-Louis Square in Montreal.

Rita Letendre was struck by the work of the Abstract Expressionists in New York and in particular, impressed by the work of Franz Kline.

Rita Letendre's production began to increase and Letendre began to come into her own, winning first prize in the Concours de la Jeune Peinture in 1959 and the Prix Rodolphe-de-Repentigny in 1960.

Rita Letendre's compositions were intensely personal, more carefully planned; she began anchoring masses with carefully visualized gestures which would often take hours to visualize and execute.

Rita Letendre travelled to Paris for three months and ended her relationship with Ulysse Comtois; by the end of the year she was in a new relationship with Kosso Eloul.

When he took a teaching position at California State College at Long Beach in March 1964, Rita Letendre went with him.

Rita Letendre found that airbrush brought her something new, something that neither oil, nor acrylic, nor the millions of lines she had made in the 1970s had succeeded in bringing her.

Rita Letendre was commissioned to design a huge coloured skylight for the ceiling of Glencairn subway station in Toronto entitled Joy; it was eventually removed at Letendre's request because the panels had faded after being exposed to many years of sunlight.

Rita Letendre began experimenting with pastels in 1980 and produced a series in 1982 inspired by the nearby Nevada landscape while staying with her husband in Beverly Hills as he recovered from heart surgery.

Rita Letendre went on to be awarded the Order of Canada in 2005, an honorary Ph.

At 87, Rita Letendre has continued to produce and show works created as recently as 2014.

Rita Letendre has had many solo shows, both nationally and internationally.

Rita Letendre's work is in many public collections in Canada such as the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ontario; the City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection; and many museums in the United States.

At school, Rita Letendre was fascinated, this being her first opportunity to be stimulated intellectually.

In 1941, the family moved back to Drummondville where she enrolled in her first year of high school but before she could return for a second year, the family moved to downtown Montreal and Rita Letendre had to stay home to take care of her five younger siblings while both of her parents took jobs for the war effort.

Wanda Nanibush writes of Rita Letendre who said that she had "an overwhelming rage that nothing could hold back" that inspired her with the desire to be a great painter - that Rita Letendre's rage could have been inspired by the discrimination she experienced for being Abenaki and for being a woman in the "ridiculous world".

On November 20,2021, Rita Letendre died of blood cancer.