Points of Interest at
Guild ParkÂ
Welcome to Guild Park – Where Art Meets Nature. Hundreds of fascinating sights and stories await you on these 88 acres. Here are the most popular:
Provincial Panels
The 12 sculpted panels at Guild Park came from the Bank of Montreal building (1948-72) at King and Bay in Toronto. The bas-reliefs display the dynamism and natural resources of Canada’s provinces and territories. They were created by some of Canada’s best sculptors of the 20th Century.
The panels at 1A are:
Ontario and Quebec, by Frances Loring;
B.C., by Jacobine Jones;
and N.S., by Donald Stewart.
Front Garden
Mixing modern art and neo-classic architecture. The four Ionic-style columns are from Toronto’s Bankers Bond building (1920-73) and based on the Erechtheum Temple at Athens’ Acropolis. The red sandstone façade was part of the Temple Building (1895-1970), home of the IOF, Independent Order of Foresters. It was once the tallest structure in Toronto and the British Empire. The black steel triangle, Spaceplough, and nearby Ravenna are by renowned sculptor Sorel Etrog.
Provincial Panels (Second Set)
Behind Guild Inn Estate is another set of four panels from the 1947 Bank of Montreal building at King and Bay streets in downtown Toronto.
The panels at 1B are:
Newfoundland by Donald Stewart;
N.W.T., by Emanuel Hahn;
Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick by Florence Wyle.
The Bear
The Bear: Carved here in 1979 by Michael Clay, resident sculptor at the Guild of All Arts, and his mentor, E.B. Cox. The figure is a brown bear, though made of white limestone. The rough surface shows how the work was done with air-powered tools, then an innovative approach to sculpting.
Mobius
Mobius Curve was carved from a 15-ton block of limestone by Guild resident sculptor Michael Clay in 1982 – the 50th anniversary of Guild of All Arts.
It depicts the one-sided geometric shape defined by German mathematician August Möbius in 1858.
Spaceplough
The black steel triangle, Spaceplough, and nearby surrealistic, Ravenna, are by Canadian sculptor Sorel Etrog.
More to follow...