It is a style suited to a collection that celebrates a number of Canada’s most active and accomplished explorers, among them scientists, surveyors and cartographers, a mariner, an astronaut and an oral historian.

From Charles Camsell, founding president of the RCGS and an intrepid Arctic explorer and geologist, to Alice E. Wilson, Canada’s first woman geologist and the trailblazing expert on the Ottawa and St. Lawrence River valleys, to Louie Kamookak, Inuit oral historian, expert on the Franklin Expedition and another RCGS Honorary VP, each of the 10 historic figures and living luminaries celebrated in this exhibit have exemplified the core mandate of the RCGS: to make Canada better known to Canadians and to the world.

Cran, himself a Fellow of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, has been a prolific and influential artistic presence in Canada for decades. A graduate of the Alberta College of Art + Design, where he was an instructor from the 1990s until 2018, he has helped shape generations of new visual artists. In addition to the permanent collections of the National Gallery and the AGA, his often satirical and self-referential works appear in galleries and private collections across Canada and internationally. He is represented by the TrépanierBaer Gallery of Calgary, the Clint Roenisch Gallery of Toronto and the Wilding Cran Gallery of Los Angeles, Calif.