Artist Profile | Cartoon & Caricature

Bruce MacKinnon

Bruce MacKinnon was born in 1961 in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, where he attended high school and later studied the arts at “St. Francis Xavier University”. When he was young he also lived with his family in Kingston, Ontario, and Truro and Halifax, Nova Scotia. He studied Fine Arts at Mount Allison University and Graphic Design at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He had not graduated from college when he began drawing cartoons full time. His first paid job as a cartoonist was when he was 14, when he began drawing a weekly cartoon for "The Casket" in Antigonish. In high school and college in Antigonish, he drew cartoons for the Antigonish Spectator and Xaverian Weekly, respectively. In 1985, MacKinnon began drawing weekly cartoons for "The Chronicle Herald" in Halifax, and was hired full-time in 1986, filling a void on the newspaper's editorial page that had been around since the retirement of its cartoonist Bob Chambers in 1976. With the redesign of the Herald's weekend edition in April 2013, his hand-drawn font was used for all headlines in the "Opinion" section. Since he became the newspaper's regular cartoonist, MacKinnon has achieved the status of one of Canada's top editorial cartoonists, considered by the Canadian Encyclopedia "among the new generation of distinguished artists" in Canadian editorial cartooning. To date, he has won 18 Atlantic Journalism Awards for his editorial and cartooning work and six National Newspaper Awards (1992, 1993, 2013, 2014 and 2015), including the inaugural NNA Journalist of the Year award in 2014. It came in second in the “World Press Cartoon” contest in 2004. In 2014 it won the World Press Freedom Award and received its Honorable Mention in 2015. It also won second place in the “Niels Bugge Cartoon” Award. of 2014. He is a Canadian editorial cartoonist for The Chronicle Herald in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a popular and sometimes controversial artist, and he was named “Best Political Cartoonist” in Halifax for several years in a row by “The Coast” newspaper. MacKinnon participated as a judge on political cartoons in Canada at the screening of “Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers of Democracy” held on March 27, 2015 at the Reel Artists Film Festival and appeared as a guest speaker at “Eurocature '15” in June 2015 at Vienna, Austria. Much of MacKinnon's work is part of the permanent collections of the “University of Saint Francis Xavier”, the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. In 1996 St. Mary's University awarded him an honorary doctorate for his work and in 2011 he was made a Member of the Order of Nova Scotia. In 2013 he received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from NSCAD University and the Friend of StFX Award from St. Francis Xavier University. In 2016, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada. Some of MacKinnon's images have garnered wider coverage, sometimes beyond Canada's borders. In 2014, after a reservist on ceremonial guard duty at the nation's National War Memorial was killed by a gunman who then stormed the parliament building and got into a shootout with security, MacKinnon represented soldiers from World War I memorial bronze stretching out his hands to the slain man. In response to the Las Vegas mass shooting, MacKinnon drew a cartoon showing Uncle Sam using his body to shield a spokesman for the National Rifle Association and reassuringly saying, "It's all good... you're safe..." while surrounded by the bloody corpses of the victims of the shooting. That cartoon was widely shared in 2017 and again in 2018 following other gun attacks. After the Parkland High School shooting, the cartoon was shared more than 600,000 times on Facebook and retweeted by Twitter users including Mark Hamill, Steven Van Zandt and Ron Perlman more than a million times. In 2018, during US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, which included a controversial sexual assault investigation, MacKinnon drew a cartoon showing "Lady Justice" being violently pinned to the ground and with the mouth covered by the hands of republican men, imitating the story of Christine Blasey Ford. The image was shared and also appeared on protest posters. MacKinnon is married with two children.