Carel Moiseiwitsch

Carel Moiseiwitsch (born 1941) is a London-born artist based in Fraser Canyon and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her practice is based on activism and working outside of established academy and market spaces. This includes working in mediums and forms resistant to commodification, such as large-scale drawings and print, and an explicit focus on topics of social injustice and protest.

Biography Moiseiwitsch was born in London, England in 1941 during the Blitz and grew up in a girls' boarding school from the age of four. In the vulnerable Vancouver community of the Downtown Eastside, she founded and ran a visual arts workshop for residents struggling with mental health and addiction. This workshop culminated in the Revelations exhibition at Interurban, where Portland Hotel Society residents contributed 41 artworks. In response, she filed a class-action lawsuit in 2021 against Canadian National and Canadian Pacific railways, alleging that the fire was caused by heat or sparks from railway operations on a day of record-breaking heat. The lawsuit was certified in 2025.

Practice Moiseiwitsch is well known for her print-based and graphic art practice, creating politically charged illustrations, prints, and alternative comics. One example of this graphic practice is the alternative comic O Canada Our Home and Native Land (1985), which highlights the history of Japanese-Canadian internment during and after World War II, detailing the violence and human rights violations of internment and the failure of the Canadian government to acknowledge this history or compensate Japanese-Canadians in the aftermath.

Moiseiwitsch employed print-based media and graphic art as a form of witnessing and documenting what she saw while visiting Occupied Palestinian Territories, which she exhibited in the 2003 Life in Occupied Palestine exhibition at grunt gallery. She and her partner Gordon Murray were sued by Canwest in 2007 for creating a parody of The Vancouver Sun that aimed to highlight anti-Palestinian biased reporting in Canwest's papers.

Moiseiwitsch also works in painting, employing an expressionistic style and touching on subjects of gender politics and environmental degradation. Her practice often pushes back against the dominance of conceptualism in the local and global art scene, with the goal of highlighting other functions of art such as communicating the artist's felt or emotional experience of the world.