| Stained-glass window by Marcelle Ferron, at Champ-de-Mars metro station in Montreal |
Born in Louiseville, Quebec, she was an early member of Paul-Émile Borduas's Automatistes art movement. She signed the manifesto Refus global, a watershed event in the Quebec cultural scene, in 1948.
In 1953 she moved to Paris, where she worked for thirteen years in drawing and painting and was introduced to the art of stained glass, for which she would become best known.
One of her most famous stained-glass windows is at Champ-de-Mars metro station in Montreal. It was one of the first non-figurative works to be installed in the metro, in defiance of the didactic style present in other works of the period, and signaled a major shift in public art in Montreal between the policies of then-art director Robert Lapalme and future art director and fellow Automatiste Jean-Paul Mousseau. Other of her works can be seen at Vendôme metro station, Hôpital Sainte-Justine, and the ICAO headquarters, in Montreal; the Place du Portage in Gatineau, Quebec; and the Granby, Quebec courthouse.
She was awarded the 1983 Paul-Émile-Borduas medal for the visual arts by the government of Quebec. [1]
She died in Montreal.
Marcelle Ferron, Untitled (1972). Stained glass. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
