Painter and conceptual artist Gerald Ferguson (1937–2009) played a central role in transforming Halifax’s Nova Scotia College of Art and Design into one of North America’s leading art schools in the 1970s. Skirting easy categorization, his work pursued a conflicted, anti-romantic, ‘tough’ school of high modernism, one that directly challenged the historical context within which paintings had been made, collected and discussed for centuries. Internationally exhibited and collected, Ferguson’s work won him the 1995 Molson Prize for distinguished contribution to Canadian culture.