Catharine Mastin

Catharine Margaret Mastin (born August 1, 1963) is a Canadian curator.

Early life and education Mastin grew up in Toronto and went to York University for both her Bachelor of Fine Arts and her master's degree in art history and architecture. In 2012, the University of Alberta awarded her a PhD in women’s history with the dissertation Beyond ‘the Artist's Wife’: Women in Artist-Couple Marriage and the Exhibition Experience in Postwar Canada. Her doctoral writing was included in Mary Pratt (2013, 2nd edition 2016).

From 1995 until 2006, needing a broader field of vision, she worked at the Glenbow Museum, Calgary as senior art curator and twice interim vice-president (exhibitions and collections). In 1996, she co-founded the Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art which she co-curated in 1996 and 1998. She also curated exhibitions of Franklin Carmichael, including one for the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, (2001) which toured Canada through 2003, and the Art Gallery of Sudbury (2005). In 2002, she curated the major travelling exhibition, The Group of Seven in Western Canada, accompanied by the first comprehensive book on the subject which she edited and for which she wrote the introductory essay. In 2022, she wrote Marion Nicoll: Life and Work for the Art Canada Institute, available online. In 2023, she guest-curated Cobalt: A Mining Town and the Canadian Imagination, featuring the work of Canadian modern artists who visited the town between the First and Second World Wars, for the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

Since 2014 she has served as an advisor for the Gail and Stephen Jarislowsky Institute for Canadian Art as well as serving on the jury for Canada’s national portrait competition, the Kingston Prize in 2017 and in 2019.

Honours and awards In 1993 and 1995 her writing projects on Wyndham Lewis and colonial narratives in public art collections earned her curatorial writing awards from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. In 1998, she was a two-time nominee for Canada’s Top 40 under 40 Award for outstanding professionals in all sectors. Her book on The Group of Seven in Western Canada was the first multi-authored volume on an important Canadian art movement and the also one of the first volumes on the Group of Seven to include female writers; it remained on the Canadian best-seller list through the summer of 2002 and was released in a second edition in 2007.