Joanne Tod b. 1953

Private Collection, Ontario

Jeanne Randolph is a psychiatrist and an art commentator with a rich and idiosyncratic personality, according to the artist. She is also Caucasian. Tod celebrates her friend’s special status in this portrait by painting her as a confident, young black woman whose surroundings (early plantation mansion?) and dress (upper class ballgown?) totally belie her likely attendance at such an event in the past. When the artist Stan Douglas wrote for Tod’s Power Plant exhibition in 1991 that 'what the picture makes apparent is the way in which categorical imperatives of media images or private assumptions may be applied, with stunning efficiency, to human bodies,' he was referring to the racial aspect of the canvas, which the artist has courageously addressed