For the third year in a row, visitors to the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada are able to view an innovative installation of Hirschfeld art related to the Festival’s Season. 2008 saw “Hirschfeld On Shaw,” which included seven decades of Hirschfeld drawings of George Bernard Shaw productions in America; 2009 witnessed “Men About Town: Hirschfeld Draws Noel Coward” which documented 69 years of Coward on Broadway. To celebrate this year’s Shaw Festival production of Clare Booth Luce’s The Women, Louise Hirschfeld and archivist David Leopold brought together images of 15 unforgettable women, from Mary Martin to Whoopi Goldberg, in an engaging installation at the Festival Theatre’s McDonald Heaslip Lounge.

“It is a natural fit,” says Louise Hirschfeld. “Both Shaw and Al had lengthy active careers, great capacities for work, and wore beards.” The Shaw Festival looks forward to the installations because Hirschfeld’s modern calligraphic portraits, combining his journalistic eye and wit, not only show us what the productions look like, but they give us the essence of the performances through his distinct point of view.