Rita Letendre

Born in 1928 in Drummondville, Québec, Rita Letendre (Abenaki/Québecoise) is an internationally renowned painter, printmaker and muralist. Her painting career began in the 1950s in Montreal, where she associated with the Automatistes and the Plasticiens—both who championed abstraction—and was often the sole woman artist included in their group exhibitions. While in California in the mid-1960s, Letendre was introduced to printmaking at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop and produced her first prints in 1965. She developed parallel printmaking and painting practices from the 1960s onward. Her work has been featured in many solo and group exhibitions in public and private galleries across Canada and internationally. Letendre was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2005 and received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2010.