About
The School of Fine Art and Music was pleased to announce the official naming of the Bachinski/Chu Print Study Collection on April 29, 1997. Housed in a specially-designed facility in Zavitz Hall, the collection is a remarkable result of collaborative initiative and efforts by faculty, staff and students.
Now being named in honour of Professors Walter Bachinski and Gene Chu, recently retired School of Fine Art and Music faculty, the Bachinski/Chu Print Study Collection, was initiated in 1968 as a resource for students to have first-hand experience with pertinent examples of historic and contemporary fine art prints. From its beginning, the collection has been primarily funded by the proceeds of student print sales and now holds over 250 works in all traditional print media, from etching and lithography to serigraphy and woodblock. For three decades, acquisitions for this extraordinary teaching collection were guided by the expertise of Professors Bachinski and Chu. Reportedly, modelled, originally, after a similar teaching collection assembled by Professor Mauricio Lasansky of the University of Iowa where Bachinski did his graduate studies, the Bachinski/Chu Print Study Collection now includes exceptional examples by such important Canadian artists as Alex Colville, Michael Snow, and Joyce Weiland, as well as by such significant international artists as Durer, Goya, Rembrandt, Picasso, Motherwell and Golub.
In addition to the purchased works, many full and part-time faculty have donated their own and other artists' prints to the collection. Currently, there are works by Walter Bachinski, Gene Chu, Stu Oxley, Margaret Priest, Tony Scherman, Ron Shuebrook, Tim Zuck and other faculty in the collection. Housed in improvised facilities for many years, the renovation of Zavitz Hall in 1990 now provides the appropriate climate control and security systems as well as necessary storage to preserve the collection for present and future generations of students.
ABOUT PROFESSORS BACHINSKI AND CHU
Professor Walter Bachinski began his teaching career at the University of Guelph in 1967 following the completion of an M.A. in Studio Art at the University of Iowa. Also, a graduate of the Ontario College of Art, Bachinski has had a long and distinguished career as a printmaker, sculptor and painter whose works have been included in solo and group exhibition in galleries and museums across Canada and abroad. His pastels, drawings and sculpture can be found in such collections as the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Walter Bachinski: Approaching Classicism; works from 1979-1989 was organized by the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in 1991 and Bachinski: Still-life-Ten Years was mounted by the McLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Ontario in 1992. Walter Bachinski is currently represented by the Moore Gallery, Toronto. He took an early retirement in 1993.
Professor Gene Chu came to the University of Guelph in 1969. Gene completed his M.F.A. at the Claremont Graduate School in California in 1968 after studying previously at the Ontario College of Art and the Art Students' League, N.Y. Well-known across Canada as a printmaker, he has shown his lithographs in major international and national exhibitions at such galleries and museums as the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pratt Centre, N.Y.C.; De Cordova Museum, Mass.; Silvermine Guild, Conn.; Washington Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers; Art Gallery of Hamilton, etc. His prints have been collected by such museums as Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Tom Thomson Memorial Gallery, McMaster University, Memorial University, London Regional Art Gallery, etc. Professor Chu took an early retirement in 1995.