Ethel Bruneau : Miss Swing Interview conducted with Ethel Bruneau, April 15, 2021 by telephone during a confinement period of the pandemic. Ethel Bruneau was a Canadian dance legend who performed and taught in Montreal from 1953 to 2019. Born in 1936 in New York City to a Barbadian father and Jamaican mother, Bruneau sadly passed away in July of 2023 at age 87. From 1953 to the 1980s, Bruneau

The New Penelope Café and its era! Call for memories! Open for just a few years in the late 1960s, the New Penelope Café is legendary in the history of Montreal music and nightlife. It was the first independent concert venue in Montreal to feature important names in 1960s rock, blues, folk and jazz, from Muddy Waters and Frank Zappa to Joni Mitchell and Jesse Winchester. It was also a

LOGOS and Montreal counter-culture When one considers the earliest days of Montreal’s counter-culture and underground arts and activist scenes, it’s hard to exaggerate the importance and influence of LOGOS magazine. It was our city’s own contribution to the independent press that was emerging across North America, such as the Village Voice and the Georgia Straight. This entirely new publishing milieu gave a voice to the mid 1960s generation of youth

This is a transcript of a conversation with John Heward and Louis Rastelli in the summer of 2016 at Café Résonance on Park Avenue in Montreal. RIP John Heward, 1934-2018, Montreal. JH: I’m from here, from the so-called Golden Mile, Redpath Street. They were row houses built in the 1920’s, and when we were there in the beginning, there were still a lot of large houses, just around Sherbrooke. It

Freda Guttman is a veteran artist and activist, still screenprinting and self-publishing, still a regular at fairs such as Expozine or the Anarchist Book Fair. We spoke about her time growing up in a Montreal that had changed drastically by the time she joined the nascent artist-run centre movement in the late 1960s. We didn’t speak much about her first claim to fame as an artist: her illustrations for fellow

On the occasion of the theatrical run of a new NFB documentary film, Ninth Floor , Archive Montreal digitized a number of student newspapers and images from its archives published during the infamous Computer Riots (otherwise widely known in its era as the Sir George Williams Affair), which played out in January and February 1969 at what is now the Hall Building of Concordia University in downtown Montreal. The film

Endre Farkas came to Montreal as a child after he and his parents (Holocaust survivors) escaped during the 1956 Hungarian uprising. He is a well-known and highly regarded figure in Montreal’s literary scene, coming to the city’s attention as one of the Véhicule poets—the group of poets who held regular poetry readings at the Véhicule Art artist-run gallery in the mid 1970s. He also taught literature at John Abbott College

Allan Bealy grew up and studied art in Montreal. In 1975, he moved to New York. While in Montreal, he published Davinci, and later in New York City, Benzene, both of which were ‘downtown’ art and literary magazines. Davinci was published out of the Véhicule Art artist-run gallery and performance space in Montreal between 1972-1974. Davinci was also, briefly, an imprint for some artists’ publications. It ultimately served to create

ARCMTL is proud to be a part of the Contre-Culture : Existences et persistances conference. Image: davinci Vol. 1 no. 3 autumn 1974, © Allan Bealy / © Suzy Lake   Montreal’s davinci magazine, Counter-Culture and the Visual Arts 1975 / 2015 Saturday, October 17 at Artexte ( 2 Sainte-Catherine E., suite 301 ) From 15h – 16h: One Hour, One Book: davinci magazine (Montréal 1973-75) by Louis Rastelli, Director,

BLUE METROPOLIS: MONTREAL 1975 / 2015, A different imaginary A round-table discussion organized by Arcmtl for its Montreal Underground Origins project, held on April 24, 2015 at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal. The discussion explored two Montreals: the city that local writers wrote about in 1975 and the entirely new city in 2015. Featuring the authors Endre Farkas, Anna Leventhal and Ralph Elawani and moderated by Bryan