Sandra Paikowsky CM (born December 29, 1945) is a Canadian art historian, academic, curator, and writer with a career spanning five decades.
In 2015, she received the Order of Canada for her contributions to the development of Canadian art history as a discipline.
[8] Paikowsky organized, co-organized, or contributed essays to exhibitions on the art of Joyce Wieland (1985), Betty Goodwin (1986), Medrie MacPhee (1986), Rita Letendre (1989), and Irene Whittome (1990), and many others as well as on subjects such Quebec abstract painting in such catalogues as Achieving the modern: Canadian abstract painting and design in the 1950s for the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1993.
She has curated exhibitions on a broad range of subjects from the L'Association des artistes non figuratifs de Montréal = The Non-Figurative Artists' Association of Montréal (1983) to an exhibition on Robert Ayre: Le critique face à la collection = Robert Ayre: The Critic and the Collection (1992).
She was the co-editor of the survey book The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2010), said to succeed as a "useful historiographic case study"[12] and wrote a chapter on modernist representational painting.
She is the author of several books on Canadian art and praised for her writing such as the book/catalogue Goodridge Roberts: 1904-1974 (McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1998) which accompanied the travelling exhibition [13] and James Wilson Morrice: Paintings and Drawings of Venice (2023), the first complete survey of the artist's images of Venice, Italy,[14][15] which was given a rating of five stars out of five on Goodreads.
Recent articles include a Foreword for an exhibition and catalogue of Peter Krausz: photographies = photographs: 1969-2015 (2015).
Prakash Collection in trust to the nation by Katerina Atanassova et al.[18] These chapters were called "wonderfully readable essays" in Goodreads.