"Not even eight years after it was finished, the mural was obscured by a 25-storey high-rise built next door. Peering from the sidewalk into the small gap between buildings as this CBC Arts writer has done you can no longer glimpse a single beam of Letendre's luminous Sunrise. The masterpiece of Canadian art has been eclipsed behind a condo tower."
"The experience got me thinking about all of the other works of Canadian art that once delighted, bewildered and in some cases maddened visitors that have also since disappeared. Over the years, there have been a number of projects I've felt grateful to see before they departed as well as many more I can only ever dream of experiencing. Some research on "lost Canadian art" revealed a trove of these forgotten treasures."
Rita Letendre produced numerous large-scale public murals across Toronto during a public-art boom in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of her trailblazing abstract works were later demolished, removed, or concealed as the city developed. Sunrise (1971), painted on the Neill-Wycik building, was her first and largest Canadian mural; it survives physically but has been obscured by a neighbouring 25-storey high-rise. Roughly a dozen examples of Letendre's high-energy abstraction no longer exist in public view. Research and community input have identified dozens of other lost Canadian artworks, including tapestries, art-modified houses and major sculptures.
Read at www.cbc.ca
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