Alumni Hall Art Tells Vic U Stories Through Generations
Gerrie Loveys, Victoria University’s art curator, stands in Alumni Hall surrounded by newly refreshed displays that highlight alumni connections through artworks spanning generations. (Photo by Neil Gaikwad)
By Leslie Shepherd
Look closely at the walls of Alumni Hall and you’ll see more than artwork. You’ll now find stories of people, places and ideas that have shaped Victoria University across generations.
A professor quietly practicing his golf swing in an attic. Northrop Frye in the clouds. Four versions of a Margaret Atwood portrait in different media. Two new works by Indigenous women artists.
The university used the opportunity of a recent refresh to not just repaint the room and replace the floor, but to rethink what the hall could represent. The result is a carefully curated new art display in which every work honours alumni in some way.
“Either the artists are alumni, the people represented are alumni, the works were commissioned to mark Vic milestones, or they entered the collection through alumni gifts,” said Gerrie Loveys, Victoria University’s art curator. “Everything here has some connection back to Vic U alumni.”
Near the entrance is one of the most immediately recognizable alumni connections: a group of four studies of Margaret Atwood Vic 6T1. The works, created by artist Christian Corbet, include a drawing, a painting, a linocut print and the linoleum plate used to produce the print. Together, they were preparatory studies for a larger portrait now at Western University and were gifted to Vic U by the artist.
“Seeing them together lets you follow the artist’s thinking,” Loveys said. “You don’t usually get that window into process and pairing that with such a well-known Vic alumna makes it a natural entry point for the space.”
One of the largest artworks is a monumental mixed-media collage by alumna Mary-Lou (M.L.) Knight Vic 4T9, The Truth Shall Make You Free. It was commissioned in 1992 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Old Vic building and takes its title from the motto over the front entrance.
Constructed from more than 100 materials, including fabric, cardboard, dowels, glass, beads and paper, it’s a richly layered visual history of the university.
Knight spent months researching Vic’s past, assembling not only official milestones but stories, rumours and everyday moments of campus life. A procession of students from different eras moves across the foreground, led by Nellie Greenwood Vic 1884, the first woman to complete her entire undergraduate degree at Victoria College.
Above the procession, Northrop Frye appears mid-lecture, tipping back in his chair, teaching a class on Blake, flanked by cherubs and trees drawn from the poet’s imagery. In one corner, a robed professor practices his golf swing in the attic.
“That story about the professor had been around forever,” Loveys said. “Mary-Lou gave it a home. She wanted to tell as much of the building’s first hundred years as she could. It’s not just the big names, it’s the spaces, the staff, the atmosphere of the place.”
Frye appears again nearby in Douglas Martin’s 1972 portrait commonly known as Frye in the Sky, as it shows the critic floating above the clouds. There are prints by Claire Pratt Vic 4T4, daughter of poet E.J. Pratt, and watercolours by geologist and explorer A.P. Coleman Vic1880.
Recent acquisitions of contemporary Inuit art by Eva Aittauq Qirniq Noah and Nicotye Samayualie were made possible through an endowed gift from alumna Shelly Jameson Vic 8T0. Loveys said the Samayualie work extends Vic’s long landscape tradition, offering a northern perspective that reshapes how land has historically been represented in the collection.
“It’s important that alumni impact isn’t only something in the past,” Loveys said.
“This is very much a living collection.”
Originally published in the Spring 2026 issue of Vic Report. This edition features Kathleen Wynne reflecting on teaching at Victoria College, a Q&A with Professor Ira Wells on his role as president of PEN Canada, and Bob Rae’s return to Vic One after his UN tenure.
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