Avrom Isaacs, D.F.A. (March 19, 1926 – January 15, 2016) was a Canadian art dealer and tastemaker.
Career
Avrom Isaacovitch, known as Av Isaacs, was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and moved to Toronto with his family in 1941. Isaacs graduated with a bachelor's degree in Political Science and Economics from the University of Toronto in 1950.
He began his career in the arts in 1950 when he opened the Greenwich Art Shop, a small framing store on Hayter Street in Toronto. In 1955, when he shared a room with artist Graham Coughtry, Coughtry, along with Michael Snow, persuaded him to open the Greenwich Gallery. The inaugural show, understandably, had paintings by Coughtry and Snow. The gallery was renamed the Isaacs Gallery in 1959 and moved to a new location at 832 Yonge Street in 1961. The Isaacs Gallery was noted for the broad range of work it showed, running from contemporary art to the art of New Guinea and west-coast Indian artists and even to Asian costumes but his efforts went beyond helping his artists and their markets, wrote the Globe and Mail in 2005. Isaacs also was famous for his "young talent" shows. The Art Gallery of Ontario described him in 2016 as both curator and agitator, challenging both his artists and the community to be progressive. He was more than just an art dealer, he was a champion for modern Canadian art and Toronto. In 2016, the AGO did a second show about Isaacs, Av Isaacs: Shaping the Scene which exhibited 19 works from the AGO's collection, donated by Av Isaacs or acquired from the Isaacs and Innuit Galleries through purchase and from local collectors.