Toni Onley was a British artist who came to Canada in 1948, bringing with him the influence of the English watercolourists, as well as his own love of Japanese calligraphy. Based in Vancouver, Onley spent much of his life flying to remote parts of British Columbia to paint, draw, and experience the land. In 2004, at the age of 75, he died tragically when his float plane crashed into the Fraser River. A great supporter of environmental causes and a legend in the art of BC, Onley has left this province with a vividly personal record of its landscape.

Brad Pasutti is a local artist who draws much of his inspiration from Mexico. His abundantly detailed pastel works seek to express the country’s intensity with overlapping layers of meaning. Located in the centre of this work are the ghostlike figures of the great Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

John Livingston, born in Vancouver, is a non-Native, adopted Kwakwaka'wakw. He has been affiliated with the Hunt family since the 1970s when he was taught the art of carving by Henry and Tony Hunt. A renowned carver, he has also produced numerous reproductions of older works in museum collections.

The Bella Bella Chest Study was created after he was commissioned to restore the fragments of an old Heiltsuk chest from Bella Bella. In Livingston's words: "Most always these chests have a human or half human side and an animal side. In this case there's a bird design. . . . The quality of the design and the fact that it's painted with native made pigments dates the chest to the latter half of the 1800s."

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Norval Morrisseau was born in 1932 in Fort Arthur (Thunder Bay), Ontario. He is an Ojibwa artist who is the celebrated founder of the Woodland School, which revitalized Anishnabe iconography, traditionally incised on rocks and Midewiwin birch bark scrolls. He is largely a self-taught painter, printmaker, and illustrator. His work is recognized for its innovative vocabulary, which was initially criticized in the Native community for its disclosure of traditional spiritual knowledge. His paintings are often signed with the syllabic spelling of Copper Thunderbird, the name his grandfather gave him.

Sean Nattrass was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1965. He graduated from the Alberta College of Art in 1987 and moved to Victoria in 1989, where he ran the Buzzard’s Lunch Gallery throughout the mid 1990s. He now maintains Flux Fine Arts, a studio and framing business in downtown Victoria.

Jack Shadbolt is one of the oldest artists in the contemporary collection. He was born in England but grew up in Victoria. His family was very poor; his father was a craftsman and his mother a dressmaker. Shadbolt was a major force in bringing new ideas, particularly abstraction, to BC art. Unlike a lot of abstract artists his work was always rooted in BC, either by recreating a sense of the landscape or through the use of local motifs such as his owl series. He died in 1998.