Dr. Anne Dymond
Chair – Department of Art; Associate Professor
Specialty
Museum studies, gender and diversity in museums, late 19th and early 20th century French art
About
Dr. Anne Dymond (Ph.D. Queen's University) is Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies and Chair of the Department of Art, at the University of Lethbridge. Her book Diversity Counts: Gender, Race, and Representation in Canadian Art Galleries (MQUP 2019) was the first large-scale quantitative assessment of gender and ethnicity representation in Canadian art galleries. Earlier research projects examined the role of institutions in the construction of regional identities in France; her current research examines the role non-national art museums play in cultural diplomacy. She is an Editor at RACAR: Revue d'Art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review; and has been a Governor of the University of Lethbridge, and a Teaching Chair. In 2019, she was awarded both the YWCA Woman of Distinction Award and the University's Senate Volunteer Award for her ongoing work with refugees. In 2025, she was Distinguished Woman Scholar at the University of Victoria.
Research and Publications
Professor Dymond's research investigates how art and exhibition practices intersect with broader cultural and political frameworks, such as feminist and inclusive curatorial strategies, and Canadian cultural policy. Her book, Diversity Counts: Gender, Race, and Representation in Canadian Art Galleries (MQUP 2019) was reviewed as and was reviewed as "a path-breaking study and an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the contemporary art scene in Canada."
Book
Diversity Counts: Gender, Race and Representation in Canadian Art Galleries. June 2019, McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters
“When you expose a problem,” catalogue essay for exhibition catalogue, Lynda Gammon, Latent, University of Victoria, Summer 2025
“A Special Report: Gender Counts: A statistical look at gender equity in Canadian art institutions,” in MAWA Newsletter, Fall 2014, 9-11. In print and online, http://mawa.ca/category/newsletters/
“Valiant, Independent and Harmonious: Paul Signac and Neo-Impressionism after 1900” (July 2012) in “New Directions in Neo-Impressionism,” Special Issue of the Journal of the International Association of the Research Institutes in the History of Art (RIHA), edited by Tania Woloshyn and Anne Dymond, available here: http://www.riha-journal.org/announcement-special-issue-neo-impressionism
with Tania Woloshyn, “Introduction” in “New Directions in Neo-Impressionism,” Special Issue of the Journal of the International Association of the Research Institutes in the History of Art (RIHA), edited by Tania Woloshyn and Anne Dymond, available here: http://www.riha-journal.org/articles/2012/2012-jul-sep/special-issue-neo-impressionism/woloshyn-dymond-introduction
“Displaying the Arlésienne: Museums, Folklife, and Regional Identity in France,” in Folklore and Nationalism in Europe During the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin, Brill, 2012, 137-159.
"Embodying the Nation: Art, Fashion, and Allegorical Women at the 1900 Exposition Universelle," RACAR, v. 36, no. 2 (2011): 1-14, available here: http://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/racar/article/view/10307 .
"Advertising Provence: Tourism, the PLM, and the Regionalist Movement," Nottingham French Studies, vol. 50 no. 1 (2011): 44-56, available here: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/nfs.2011.005
"The Texture of Memory: Dagmar Dahle's Search for Van Gogh," Exhibition catalogue essay, Stride Gallery, Calgary, 2009; available here: http://www.stride.ab.ca/arc/archive_2009/dahle_dagmar_main/dagmar_dahle_main.html#text
“Another Form of Writing: The Sculpture of Lethbridge’s Nicholas Wade,” Canadian Art 23, no. 2 (summer 2006): 74-6.
“A Politicized Pastoral: Signac and the Cultural Geography of Mediterranean France,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 2 (June 2003), 355-370. Revised and reprinted in Modern Art and the Idea of the Mediterranean, edited by Vojtěch Jirat-Wasiutyński with the assistance of Anne Dymond (University of Toronto Press, 2007).
“Marketing Provence: Selling the View and Viewing the South,” The Commercialization of European Identities in the 19th Century section of Conference Proceedings of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas Biannual conference, Bergen, Norway, August 2000, published on CD-Rom.
“L’Arlésienne exposée à Paris et à Marseille.” In L’Arlésienne: Le Mythe?, ed. Pascale Picard-Cajan, 199-210. Arles: Museon Arlaten, 1999.
Current Major Projects
Anne is currently researching a book-length study exploring art exhibitions as key instruments in Canada’s cultural diplomacy with the People’s Republic of China in the 1970s. At the intersection of museum studies and Cold War cultural politics, the project examines how institutions like the National Gallery of Canada and the Royal Ontario Museum navigated ideological pressures, differeing artistic traditions, and diplomatic aims to project Canadian national identity abroad. It also examines how these institutions received and re-framed exhibitions from China, which was emerging from the Cultural Revolution, and similarly using exhibitions to reshape its international image. A central case is the establishment of the Norman Bethune Memorial House, which the study situates as a strategic act of museum diplomacy—one that allowed Canada to express support for the PRC while carefully distancing itself from communism. By highlighting exhibitions as sites of negotiation, performance, and soft power, the book offers a critical lens on the entanglement of curatorial practice and foreign policy in a transformative moment for global museology.
