In 2022, the University of Regina Archives and Special Collections was thrilled to begin working with artist Lorne Beug. The archives received an initial donation of material from Beug’s early days as an artist, which includes sketchbooks, workbooks, notes, photographs, and artwork. The Archives looks forward to continued collaboration with this amazing artist.

Lorne Arthur Beug was born in Regina in 1948. He studied Social Science at the University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus, earning his Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Psychology with Great Distinction in 1967. It was only after working for a time at the Weyburn Psychiatric Hospital as a clinical psychology intern that he shifted into an art practice. In 1972-73 Lorne studied ceramics at the University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus, with Joe Fafard and Marilyn Levine, and in 1977 he received a Canada Council Art grant which enabled him to study “Outsider” art in Europe. He then moved to Vancouver and taught ceramics at the Burnaby Art Centre and at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design through their Outreach Program.

Beug’s work is widely collected across Canada, and he has had over 20 solo gallery exhibitions as well as 40 group exhibitions with his contemporaries. Beug has been commissioned for numerous installations for public spaces, among them the City of Regina Field House, where “Patterned Ground” was installed in 1987; the ceramic floor tiling in the University of Regina’s Riddell Center, installed in 1996; and the terrazzo floor designs for the University’s Paskwāw and Wakpá Towers in 2003. His walk-in collage, an installation titled Museum and A Tent for the Exploration of a Dark Continent, toured nationally. Beug has also produced digitally printed artists’ books, one of which is included in the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt. He has also co-authored Regina’s Secret Spaces: Love and Lore of Local Geography, with Anne Campbell and Jeannie Mah.

“The library’s online resources were an invaluable aid to me when I had to write an essay for Political Science 100 back in Winter 2022 semester. I managed to find a paper from 1996 titled: “Thinking Ahead to Mixed-Member Propotional Representation: Party Strategies and Election Campaigning under New Zealand’s New Electoral Law” by David Denemark which I used as the basis of the paper.”

- Alisdair Ramsay-Mackenzie, via Facebook