Remembering
SAC pays tribute to some of the city’s finest artists and performers who have contributed to this city.
Bruno Cavallo
Artist Bruno Cavallo will be remembered not only for his ”Group of Seven style” landscape paintings but as the designer of Sudbury’s famous landmark, The Big Nickel. In the early 1960s Cavallo collaborated with Ted Szilva to create the 30-foot Big Nickel monument to mark Canada’s Centennial in 1967. Cavallo created the design on the 13 ton massive piece of stainless steel with the help of a sheet metal worker. It was erected at Centennial Park overlooking Highway 17 W. The property was eventually purchased by Science North and is now the site of Dynamic Earth. He died in 1996.
Born in 1913, Cavallo was a gifted and talented artist, sculptor and businessman. In 1929, at the age of 16, he went to the Ontario College of Art. His teachers included Group of Seven members J.E.H. MacDonald and Franklin Carmichael, and their contemporaries.
Cavallo is the artist who painted the portrait of Queen Elizabeth at Sudbury Arena. A few years before he died in 1996, he replaced his damaged painting of a young queen with a more mature portrait of QE II.
Source: Sudbury Living
Robert Dickson made a significant contribution to French-language poetry and to the Franco-Ontarian artistic community for more than 25 years.
Dickson was recognized with a Governer General’s Award in 2002 for his book Humains paysages en temps de paix relative (Human Landscape in Times of Relative Peace).
Born in Toronto, he loved French and studied in Quebec. He taught in Paris before settling in Sudbury. He taught French-Canadian literature and creative writing at Laurentian University for many years. Along with poetry, he wrote songs for the Franco-Ontarian group CANO in the 1970s, and translated both French and English including the translation of Tomson Highway’s play Kiss of the Fur Queen to French. He published six collections of his poetry such as Grand ciel bleu par ici. He received many awards including the Prix Nouvel-Ontario in 1998 and an honorary doctorate from Laurentian University in 2006.
Dickson died in March 2007 from brain cancer. His daughter Tiphanie Dickson wrote at his death, ”He was humble, politically engaged, fiercely intelligent, and cared deeply about the people whom he taught, for whom he wrote and performed his art, and whose work he supported with genuine enthusiasm and pride.”
https://ggbooks.canadacouncil.ca/en/about-apropos/archives/authors/r/robert%20dickson
Emil First
Emil First’s pioneering drive and passion helped to establish Sudbury Symphony Orchestra in 1953. SSO had its first public performance in January 1954. First conducted the symphony until 1957.
First born in Kutina, Croatia, in March 1921. At the age of seven, he came to Canada with his parents. They lived in Rouyn-Noranda and Kirkland Lake. He began playing violin in 1934 and went on to study music at the University of Toronto.
After serving with the RCAF during the Second World War, he moved to Sudbury and became music director for the Sudbury Board of Education. He retired in 1978. First conducted a student school orchestra from 1951 to 1972. In 1967 he conducted 2,300 children in the Centennial Choir and Orchestra.
He was recognized for his many contributions to music by the University of Sudbury with an honorary doctorate in 1982. First died in 2000 at the age of 79.
Sudbury Symphony Orchestra was incorporated in 1975. For many years, there was a waiting list for concerts. This past season, SSO began performing in the 1,200 seat Glad Tidings Auditorium. The new venue has allowed the symphony to enjoy a larger audience and to schedule additional concert dates.
Joan Mantle
Joan Mantle was an educator and arts supporter. The Joan Mantle Music Trust was established in the fall of 2008 to help refresh, modernize and revitalize school music programs in the Rainbow District School Board. The Trust allocates funding for musical instruments and equipment to selected schools on a rotating basis. The Trust also accepts the donation of new and used musical instruments and allocates them to schools in need. This ensures that there is an ongoing improvement in the condition of musical equipment throughout the Board, allowing for students to achieve more in their musical studies together. Donations to the Joan Mantle Music Trust are always welcome. Cheques should be made payable to Rainbow District School Board. Receipts will be provided for all donations of $25 or more.
Erik Munsterhjelm
Geologist Erik Munsterhjelm (1905-1992) wrote several novels when he was employed as an assistant area field geologist with Inco in Copper Cliff for 22 years.
He came to Canada from Finland in 1928 seeking adventure and he got it. When he died in Brantford in 1992, his resume included soldier, dishwasher, doorman, trapper, hunter, fisherman, bushman, prospector, geologist, and author.
Roger Phillips, a Saskatchewan writer who has done some research on Munsterhjelm, writes that the 250-pound mountain man who was six feet, six inches tall was a late bloomer as a writer.
The Wind and the Caribou was published to favorable reviews in 1953. He earned a reputation as a Canadian non-fiction writer to watch and became more prolific penning Fool’s Gold in 1957 and A Dog Named Wolf in 1973.
The Inco Triangle for November 1953 reported, “The Victoria Colonist has said this about it: ‘The Wind and the Caribou’ is one of the most entertaining and most informative documentary books to be published in a long time about the Canadian Northland and the men who live there.”
He wrote eight books in Swedish and Finnish as well as English.
According to articles written in the Inco Triangle, Munsterhjelm, was born in Finland to his Swedish parents who were both artists. He came to Canada in 1928. He found work as a dishwasher in Montreal then headed west where he worked for a time as a doorman for Warner Brothers Motion Picture Studios in Hollywood. He was enticed by stories of the Canadian wild and he headed into the far north as a trapper in Northern Saskatchewan.
In the late 1930s he returned with a group of Finnish Canadians to Finland to fight in the Winter War against the Soviet Union. Munsterhjelm returned to Canada after World War Two and joined the International Nickel Company as a field geologist.
There is one copy of The Wind and the Caribou at the Mackenzie Library.