Arts & Culture | Women

Photo Credit : Jewish Public Library - Archive and Rita Briansky
Photo Credit : Jewish Public Library - Archive and Rita Briansky
Photo Credit : Jewish Public Library - Archive and Rita Briansky
Photo Credit : Jewish Public Library - Archive and Rita Briansky
Portrait of Rita Briansky.

Photo Credit : Jewish Public Library - Archives

1925 -

Rita Briansky

Rita Briansky is an award-winning painter, printmaker, etcher and teacher, whose work is included in the permanent collections of illustrious institutions such as the National Gallery in Ottawa, the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Briansky was born in Grajewo, Poland. With her mother and two sisters, she moved to Ontario in 1929, joining Ansonville’s small Jewish community. In 1939, the family moved to Val d’Or, Quebec and then again to Montreal, in 1941. There, the family struggled financially and was unable to afford the fee for Briansky’s high school education. It was the Yiddish poet Ida Massey who found the young artist a job so she would be able to pay for her schooling. This encouragement served as the beginning of a valuable friendship, as well as helping to foster Briansky’s artistic career. Massey later introduced Briansky to Alexander Berkowitz, who at the time was giving art classes at the St. Urbain Street Y. Her training and talent quickly took the young artist to the Montreal School of Fine Arts and New York’s Arts Student League.

In 1995, following travels in Poland to her birthplace and memorial sites, Briansky produced the “Kaddish series,” reflecting on the trauma of the Holocaust. Other series have broadly used landscape, portraiture and still lifes as a passionate response to the world around her, speaking fundamentally to the human condition.

Briansky’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions both in Canada and internationally. Her body of work is diverse in both theme and subject matter, reflecting her interests in fields such as astronomy and the natural world, while remaining deeply rooted in her own lived experiences. She has participated in multiple collaborative projects, such as the children’s book On Stage, Please with dancer/choreographer Veronica Tennant. She is long-established within Montreal’s art community, working and living alongside a tight-knit group of artists. She has also worked as a teacher, both of art history and studio art.

Briansky married fellow painter Joseph Prezament, and they have two children together, Anna and Wendy.

Learn more:

http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artist.php?iartistid=714
http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/exhibitions/jewish-painters-of-montreal/