When the doors of the Ontario Art School opened in 1876, just nine years after Confederation, Canada was still figuring out what kind of country it wanted to be.
As artists themselves, the founders understood that a country becomes real not only through its laws and borders, but also through the images, objects and ideas that make it visible to itself. Every new nation has to learn what it looks like, what it values and what it hopes to become.
As Canada evolved, OCAD University evolved with it. And as the University changed, its artists and designers helped shape the country’s identity in return. Sometimes they reflected Canada as it was. Sometimes they challenged it. Often, they helped Canadians imagine what the country could become.
Consider the Group of Seven, whose artists helped establish a distinctly Canadian visual mythology through their depictions of the Canadian Shield, boreal forest and
granite coast. OCAD University has a significant connection to the group: Frank (Franz) Johnston, Franklin Carmichael, A.J. Casson, Frederick Varley, J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer and A.Y. Jackson all studied or taught here.
Of course, Canada’s artistic story was never theirs alone. Quebec, the Prairies, the West Coast, the North and Indigenous communities all had and were developing distinct artistic traditions of their own. But OCAD U became one of the country’s most influential creative institutions: a place where Canadian art was taught, debated, refined and shared with the wider public.
That influence began before the Group of Seven.
Florence Helena McGillivray, an early student, became one of Canada’s first women to paint the landscapes of Northern Ontario and Quebec in a post-impressionist style. One of her contemporaries, writer and painter Harriet Mary Ford, pushed the conversation in a different direction. Having travelled extensively, she argued that depicting Canadian subjects was not essential to being part of a Canadian school of art.
Even then, OCAD U wasn’t simply defining Canadian identity — it was questioning what that identity should be. The debate itself became part of the country’s cultural evolution. Even then, debating our identity was as necessary as affirming it.
As Canada matured, so did OCAD U.
GROWING DESIGN PROGRAMS
The University’s growing design programs trained generations of typographers, illustrators, industrial designers and creative directors whose work became part of everyday Canadian life.
The iconic maple leaf of Canada’s Centennial emblem was designed by graduate Stuart Ash. Alums Jim Donoahue designed the Government of Canada’s wordmark, and Glenn Fretz designed the classic Ontario trillium symbol. Faculty member Allan Fleming created the iconic Canadian National Railway (CN) logo, while Burton Kramer, another longtime faculty member, developed CBC’s enduring visual identity. Hans Kleefeld, a designer who taught corporate identity design for more than 40 years, much of it at OCA, designed the Air Canada logo, which remains mostly unchanged with only minor refreshes.
The influence extended well beyond public institutions. OCAD U graduates helped shape the identities of many of Canada’s best-known brands, including No Name, President’s Choice, Home Depot, three of Canada’s largest banks and the Tim Hortons logo. Millions of Canadians encounter these designs every day, often without realizing they share a common origin.
This explosion of Canadian design reflected the country itself.
After the Second World War, Canada was building new public institutions, expanding transportation networks, opening universities and museums, and investing in a stronger national identity. Those institutions needed a visual language people could immediately recognize and trust.
Design helped build that language.
Even postage stamps and coins became miniature canvases for telling Canada’s story. Will Davies, who both studied and taught at OCAD U, designed nine Canadian stamps — so many that Canada Post later honoured him with one of his own. Robert-Ralph Carmichael designed the iconic $1 coin, the loonie, while Emanuel Hahn designed the timeless caribou quarter and Bluenose dime. Together, their work placed Canadian design into the hands of millions of people every day.
FROM CANVAS TO SCREEN
Canada was also moving from canvas to screen.
In the 1940s, National Film Board innovator Norman McLaren began recruiting artists directly from OCAD U. Those graduates became part of the generation that established Canada as a global leader in animation.
National Film Board filmmaker Grant Munro, who studied under Franklin Carmichael, became one of the country’s leading filmmakers. Evelyn Lambart, often called the “First Lady of Animation,” helped create some of the NFB’s most celebrated experimental films, crediting her childhood hearing loss with sharpening her visual imagination. George Dunning, another OCAD U graduate, went on to direct the Beatles’ groundbreaking 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine.
Whether designing stamps, logos, currency or films, these artists were doing more than creating beautiful work. They were helping Canadians see themselves and helping the world recognize Canada.
Canada’s creative ambitions didn’t stop with print or graphic design. As the country embraced new technologies and new industries, OCAD U graduates were already helping define what Canadian innovation could look like.
Sometimes that meant changing how Canadians moved through their cities. Mimi Vandermolen, the first woman to study Industrial Design at OCAD U, became one of the American automotive industry’s first female designers, helping shape a profession long dominated by men. Claude Gidman, former chair of Industrial Design at OCAD U, worked on the design of Toronto’s iconic Red Rocket streetcars, which would become as recognizable to Torontonians as the skyline itself.
Other graduates changed how Canadians saw the world.
Michael Snow arrived at OCAD U as a musician before becoming one of the most influential experimental artists of the 20th century. His work crossed photography, sculpture, film and music, demonstrating that Canadian artists didn’t need to choose between disciplines or between national and international audiences. They could excel in both.
ENTERING THE DIGITAL AGE
As Canada entered the digital age, OCAD U once again evolved alongside it.
By the early 1970s, only a handful of art schools around the world were exploring the creative possibilities of computers, electronics and interactive technologies. OCAD U was a leader among them.
By 1978, Norman White introduced Mechanics for Real-Time Sculpture, the first course of its kind in Canada. Students weren’t simply learning to build objects, they were learning to create artworks that could sense, respond and interact with people in real time.
Among those students was David Rokeby. In 1982, Rokeby began developing Very Nervous System, an installation that transformed the movement of the human body into sound. Long before motion-controlled gaming, gesture recognition or AI-powered interfaces became commonplace, Rokeby had shown that technology could respond intuitively to human behaviour.
Very Nervous System was presented at the Venice Biennale in 1986 and received the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction for Interactive Art in 1991.
Rokeby’s work has since been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Canada.
Rokeby wasn’t an exception.
Around him, other OCAD U artists were experimenting with Telidon, Canada’s pre-internet videotex system, creating networked digital artworks nearly a decade before the World Wide Web existed. They weren’t waiting for the future to arrive, they were helping invent it.
Just as importantly, Canada itself was changing.
The Toronto that surrounded the Ontario School of Art in 1876 was a city of roughly
70,000 people, predominantly British and Protestant, and shaped by its British colonial history. Today’s Toronto is one of the most diverse cities in the world. More than half its residents were born outside Canada. More than 180 languages are now spoken in this city of over three million people. The idea of a single Canadian identity has given way to something richer and more complex: a country shaped by many histories, cultures and perspectives.
OCAD U changed alongside that city.
As Canada and Toronto became more diverse, the University broadened whose stories were told and whose voices shaped Canadian culture. It increasingly became a place where artists and designers reflected our changing society. They also challenged it, questioned it and imagined new possibilities for it.
By the late 20th century, OCAD U’s role in Canadian culture had begun to change.
For much of its history, the University had helped define a distinctly Canadian visual language. Now the question was becoming something different: who gets to shape that language?
Artists and designers increasingly challenged long-held assumptions about identity, belonging and power.
Photographer Suzy Lake used her own body to question expectations placed on women. Professor Emerit Richard Fung brought queer, Asian Canadian and post-colonial experiences into public view through groundbreaking video work. Rirkrit Tiravanija, who arrived at OCAD U from Thailand, transformed contemporary art by making human interaction itself the artwork, with pieces now held by the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim.
Others expanded Canada’s cultural conversation in equally powerful ways. Artis Lane created a sculpture of former slave, abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth, the first memorial to a Black woman in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Esmaa Mohamoud has explored race, sport and fashion to examine identity and representation. Floria Sigismondi has moved effortlessly between music videos, feature films and gallery exhibitions, demonstrating once again that Canadian artists could thrive across disciplines and around the world.
REFLECTING A CHANGING CANADA
Together, these artist and designers have reflected a changing Canada. The country’s creative conversation has become richer, broader and more representative of the many communities that call Canada home.
That evolution has required OCAD U to confront its own history.
The land on which the University is situated on the ancestral territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat. Yet for much of its first century, OCAD U largely reflected the colonial assumptions of the society around it. European artistic traditions were treated as the norm, while Indigenous knowledge, perspectives and creative practices were too often overlooked or excluded.
The story of Alex Janvier illustrates that history.
Accepted to OCAD U in the 1950s, Janvier was prevented by Government of Canada policy from leaving his reserve to attend.
The University would later recognize his extraordinary achievements with an honorary doctorate, but Canada, and OCAD U, lost the opportunity to learn from him decades earlier.
Today, that story continues to change.
The creation of the Indigenous Visual Culture program (INVC) program in 2013, along with the leadership and influence of artists such as INVC Founding Chair, Professor Emerit Bonnie Devine, and alums Michael Belmore, Shelley Niro and many others, reflects a University that continues to broaden whose voices are heard and
whose knowledge is valued. The work is ongoing but represents a genuine, if belated and incomplete shift, in how we understand art, design and education.
That progress is visible well beyond the campus.
In our 150th anniversary year, Professor Emerit Devine, Rajni Perera and Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka were among the artists representing Canada at the 2026 Venice Biennale, one of the world’s most important contemporary art exhibitions. At the same time, Shelley Niro, Melissa General and Hannah Claus represented Canada at the 2026 Gwangju Biennale in an exhibition curated by Ryan Rice, executive director and curator, Indigenous art, at Onsite Gallery.
From left to right: Artist Shelley Niro, Curator Ryan Rice, Artist Melissa General and Artist Hannah Claus at the opening of "Skennen’kó:wa ken? Do You Carry Great Peace?" at the Gwangju Bieannale
These moments are extraordinary: OCAD U artists, all women, diasporic and with culturally diverse practices, representing Canada in two of the world’s most consequential art biennials. This isn’t representation as ornament; it’s authorship. It’s Canada’s story by the artists whose voices we once overlooked.
Once again, OCAD U has evolved alongside the country.
Today, Canada faces questions its founders could never have imagined.
ADDRESSING EMERGING CHALLENGES
Artificial intelligence is changing how we create, communicate and make decisions. Climate change is reshaping how we design our cities and communities. Accessibility is no longer viewed as a specialized concern, but as a fundamental principle of good design.
OCAD U is helping shape those conversations too.
OCAD U’s Inclusive Design Research Centre, founded by Dr. Jutta Treviranus, has helped shape accessibility policies, practices and standards in Canada and internationally. Dr. Treviranus’s work has taken her to the United Nations and the White House, and her inclusive design approach has been adopted by major technology companies and public-sector organizations. Her work asks a simple but profound question: what if systems were designed around human diversity rather than human averages?
That idea has inspired a new generation of entrepreneurs.
OCAD U alums Alwar Pillai and Abid Virani, both graduates of OCAD U’s Inclusive Design Master’s program founded Fable, a company that connects organizations directly with people with disabilities to improve the accessibility of digital products. Today, companies including Microsoft, Shopify and CBC use Fable’s platform to help build technology that works for more people.
IMAGINING AND DESIGNING POSSIBLE FUTURES
In addition to being a world leader in inclusive design, OCAD U’s Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation is one of only a few programs of its kind in the world. It combines design thinking, systems thinking and foresight to help students imagine and design possible futures.
In 2026, SFI student Danny Ghantous won an international award from the Association of Professional Futurists for his research into what happens to our perception of reality when more of what we see online is generated or manipulated by AI and bots. Graduates of the SFI program use their design and foresight skills to identify complex problems, anticipate what comes next and develop strategies for business, policy and organizational change.
The Cultural Policy Hub at OCAD U is a national, bilingual network of researchers, policymakers, artists and creators from across Canada’s academic, government, non-profit and private spheres. It is a partnership that facilitates and expands the arts and cultural sector’s capacity in policymaking, research, data analysis, program innovation, and knowledge mobilization and exchange.
The University is no longer shaping Canada only through paintings, sculpture or
graphic design. Its graduates are designing digital systems, businesses, public policy
and technologies that affect millions of people’s daily lives.
That is what creativity looks like today.
It is also what OCAD U has always done.
Over 150 years, the tools have grown — from paintbrushes to printing presses, from film cameras to computer code, from sketchbooks to artificial intelligence — but the purpose has remained remarkably consistent: to help people imagine and build a better future.
This is why OCAD University’s story cannot be separated from Canada’s story.
The University helped shape how Canadians came to see and represent their country, contributing to the designs of institutions, symbols and brands that became part of Canada’s visual identity.
As the country grew more diverse, OCAD U broadened the voices and perspectives telling its story. Today, as Canada navigates an era of artificial intelligence, accessibility and rapid technological change, the University continues to explore how art and design can help imagine and shape what comes next.
The two have grown up together.
And if the past 150 years are any indication, they will continue shaping one another for generations to come.
OCAD U launched its 150th celebrations at an event on Oct. 19 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.
On stage, master of ceremonies Jeanne Beker, at right, has a conversation with OCAD U alum and Pulitzer Prize winning illustrator Barry Blitt.
The celebration ended with a musical performance, introduced by songwriter and OCAD U alum Simon Wilcox, by the Etobicoke School of the Arts Choir Splash.
