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Global Canadians: as Earl Miller notes, leaving the country is something of a tradition for Canadian artists.

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On a climate-change-driven balmy evening last September, I attended a launch party for C Magazine on the patio of that Toronto club with the Canadiana name: the Beaver. Performing a quick count, I calculated that about half of the attendees didn't live in Canada permanently: they either lived in Berlin or LA, full-time or part-time. I had just returned from Brazil; a friend at the launch was on her way there.

It didn't use to be like this--say, 20 years ago. A few artists moved to New York, usually after receiving a grant; Canada Council award recipients stayed as they do now in the Paris studio; and a few others, like Vincent Trasov and Michael Morris, who both moved to Berlin in the early 80s, settled in other European cities. Nevertheless, the new mobility does follow a Canadian tradition in the visual arts: leaving the country. In 1890, for instance, post-Impressionist JW Morrice moved to Europe from Montreal and after a brief sojourn for study in London, England, he relocated permanently to France, beginning with Paris, where he became the model for the Somerset Maugham character Cronshaw, the alcoholic poet in Of Human Bondage (1915). Morrice's increasingly frequent exhibitions received laudatory reviews--at least in Paris; Canada was less receptive.

The following decade, in 1903, David Milne made a similar move, from the decidedly non-psychedelic Paisley, Ontario, to New York, where he studied at the Art Students' League and later participated in the famous 1913 Duchamp urinal Armory Show. Milne's career waned, and he ended up in the employ of a ski resort in Lake Placid in upstate New York before returning to Canada in 1928.

Mid-20th century, in 1952, William Ronald, in a true "hosehead" Canadian success story, won a $1,000 hockey scholarship, allowing him to study painting with Hans Hofmann in New York. In 1955, he returned to New York, this time as a professional artist, where he was quickly picked up by the prestigious Kootz Gallery, becoming, one could say, the Wayne Gretzky of abstract expressionism. Ronald stayed in New York until 1963, when Kootz ceased exhibiting his work because the tide had turned to the less expressive style of colourfield painting.

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Three decades after Ronald's prodigal return, sonic artist and musician Gordon Monahan received a DAAD scholarship (an invitational grant for foreign artists) from...

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