Michael Snow was born in Toronto not so long ago, and lives there now – but has also lived in Montreal, Chicoutimi and New York.
He is a musician (piano and other instruments) who has performed solo as well as with various ensembles (most often with the CCMC of Toronto) in Canada, USA, Europe and Japan. Numerous recordings of his music have been released.
His films have been presented at
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stivals in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Korea, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Turkey, United Kingdom and USA, and are in the collections of several film archives, including Anthology Film Archives in New York City, the Royal Belgian Film Archives (Brussels), and the Österreichische Film Museum (Vienna).
He has been a painter and sculptor, though since 1962, much of his gallery work has been photo-based or holographic. Work in all these media is represented in private and public collections world-wide, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (Vienna), Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), and both the Musée des beaux-arts and Musée d'art contemporain in Montreal.
Since 1970 he has done video, film, slide and sound installations, and made such bookworks as Michael Snow/A Survey (1970), Cover to Cover (1975), 56 Tree Poems (1999), and BIOGRAPHIE of the Walking Woman 1961-1967 (2004), as well as magazine works for Impulse (1975), Photo-Communique (1986), and C magazine (1993).
Retrospectives of his painting, sculpture, photoworks and holography have been presented at the Hara Museum (Tokyo), of his films at the Cinémathèque Française and Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), Anthology Film Archives and Museum of Modern Art (New York) and L'Institut Lumière (Lyon) and of his work in all media simultaneously in 1994 at the Power Plant and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). A retrospective of his photoworks 1962-99 called Panoramique was presented in 1999 at the Palais des Beaux Arts (Brussels), touring the following year to Centre national de la photographie (Paris), MAMCO (Geneva), and Centre pour l'image contemporaine Saint-Gervais (Geneva). Additional retrospective exhibitions have been mounted at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.
Solo and group shows of his visual art works have been presented at museums and galleries in Amsterdam, Atlanta, Berlin, Bonn, Boston, Brussels, Kassel, Lima, Los Angeles, Lucerne, Lyons, Minneapolis, Montreux, Munich, New York, Ottawa, Paris, Pittsburgh, Quebec City, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Toronto and elsewhere.
Michael Snow has executed several public sculpture commissions, the best known being Flight Stop at Eaton Centre (1979) and The Audience (1988-1989)at Skydome (now Rogers Centre), both in Toronto. His installation The Windows Suite was opened in September 2006 at the Pantages Hotel and Condominium complex on Victoria Street, Toronto.
He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972) the Order of Canada (Officer, 1982; Companion, 2007), and the first Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2000) for cinema. Snow was made a Chevalier de l'ordre des arts et des lettres, France (1995) and in 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Université de Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne.
