Roy Kiyooka (1926-1994) was a painter, sculptor, teacher, poet, musician, filmmaker and photographer. When Kiyooka arrived in Vancouver in 1959 he was already one of Canada’s most respected abstract painters. His modernist stance at the time inspired a generation of Vancouver painters to reach beyond regionalism. In the sixties and seventies Kiyooka began to write and publish poetry and produce photographic works. The best known of these, StoneDGloves (1969-1970), is both a poetic and photographic project. As Kiyooka eventually rejected the Greenbergian modernist aesthetic that informed his paintings he increasingly took up performance, photography, film and music. He saw the position of the artist as being in opposition to the institutions of art. Born in Moose Jaw, SK, Kiyooka grew up in Calgary during the pre-World War II years. He studied at the Alberta College of Art in the 1940s under Jock MacDonald and Illingworth Kerr. In 1955 he won a scholarship to the Institutio Allende in Mexico, where he studied under James Pinto. During the summers between 1956 and 1960, Kiyooka attended the Artists’ workshops at Emma Lake, Saskatchewan, where he worked under two American leading abstract artists: Will Barnet and Barnett Newman. In the early 1960s, Kiyooka moved to Vancouver and soon became a leader in the emergent artistic community there. In the next two decades, he embarked on a remarkable career as an artist, and traveled across Canada to Calgary, Regina, Halifax and made many trips to Japan. He became a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1965; represented Canada at the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil, where he was awarded a silver medal. In 1967 his work was exhibited at Expo in Montreal and in every major centennial show across Canada.