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Qennefer Wood-Hahn Browne.The Globe and Mail

Qennefer Wood-Hahn Browne: Executrix. Designer. Correspondent. Caryatid. Born July 20, 1937, in Toronto; died Oct. 26, 2017, in Orillia, Ont., of cancer; aged 80.

Named for an ancient Egyptian statue, Qennefer was the only child of Canadian sculptors Emanuel Hahn and Elizabeth Wyn Wood. For more than 50 years, she championed their artistic legacies.

As a child, Qennefer often accompanied her parents to their studios, once modelling in her rain boots as John Graves Simcoe for a bas-relief sculpted by her mother. Later, she laid out the lettering for two of their monuments. But for her own creative expression, she chose architecture.

When Qennefer entered University of Manitoba to study design and planning, she was one of only two women in her class. She and her classmate Robert Browne were married in 1960. Even as a married woman with a second baby on the way, she continued her studies until they moved to Robert’s hometown of Fort William (later Thunder Bay) in Northern Ontario.

Ultimately, their family grew to five daughters: Sylvie, Sydney, Sybil, Nigama and Aurora. Not satisfied with renovating their home and making the best Halloween costumes, Qennefer advocated for new street trees, she married couples as a Unitarian chaplain, served on local planning boards, and helped create after-school and French Immersion classes. Occasionally, she worked for Robert’s architecture firm, designing local pocket parks, a private residence, and the colour scheme for the Thunder Bay Community Auditorium, regarded as one of the finest concert halls in North America.

In the 1980s, with most of her girls out of the nest, Qennefer began to divide her time between Northwestern Ontario and her grandparents’ former home in Orillia, Ont., which was closer to the curators who were researching her parents’ work. These efforts culminated in the National Gallery of Canada’s touring retrospective of Hahn and Wood in 1997-98.

In Orillia, she established an annual art history lecture and curated exhibits for the museum. She lobbied successfully for a sensitive reconfiguration of a major thoroughfare. When Robert retired and moved south to be with her full time, they joined a committee to attract a university campus to Orillia; both were then inspired to go back to school themselves. Qennefer relished the dive into new intellectual inquiries and, especially, the chance to conquer the internet.

Qennefer was an unconventional mother, welcoming each child as “an interesting design challenge” in how to raise a successful human being. She taught us her deep connection to the past, then encouraged us in forward thinking and our own pursuits. As Granny Q, she continued to nurture the next generation as his or her own person. In raising daughters, she was rewarded with great sons-in-law whom she also loved dearly.

When a sluggish recovery from minor surgery led to a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, Qennefer’s unyielding determination to follow her own plan allowed her to live beyond the few months her doctors had expected. In her final days, she was still contemplating design ideas and communicating love to her family and community.

Sylvie Browne is Qennefer’s oldest daughter.

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Lives Lived celebrates the everyday, extraordinary, unheralded lives of Canadians who have recently passed. To learn how to share the story of a family member or friend, go to tgam.ca/livesguide.

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