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Dennis Tourbin (1946­–1998) was a multi-disciplinary Canadian artist, writer, poetry publisher, and arts activist. Working with painting, drawing, performance, collage, and video, Toubin’s work explored the visual dimensions of language, meaning, and perception in a world faced with an influx of digital media. He is best known for his works that address the October Crisis of 1970.

Born and raised in St. Catharines, Ontario, Tourbin studied social work at Centennial College in Toronto. A self-taught artist, Tourbin was also an active participant in the cultural explosion of the late 1960s in southwestern Ontario, foraging connections between artists and their communities. He was a founding member of the Niagara Artists Co-op (now the Niagara Artists Centre) in St. Catharines in 1969 and ARTSPACE in Peterborough in 1974. Furthermore, he was a spokesperson for Ontario’s Canadian Artists Representation (CAR, now CARFAC) from 1977 to 1979 and the Director of Gallery 101 in Ottawa from 1986 to 1987.

Tourbin’s work blended the stylistic influences of American Pop Art with Canadian Regionalism as he explored the complex relationship between painting and literature, the visual dimensions of language, and the way that media impacts perception. Tourbin investigated the concept of television as poetry through his painted plays. These multidisciplinary performances included a reading of Tourbin’s poetic works within theatrical sets that included painted poems, props, images, and sound. The contentious reaction to one of his performances inspired Tourbin to further explore themes of the media in his extensive series about the October Crisis in 1990.

Tourbin’s work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Canada and Europe, including The Language of Visual Poetry, a traveling retrospective exhibition of Tourbin’s work on view in 2012. His work is held in major Canadian museums, such as the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound, and the Art Gallery of Peterborough, among others. Many of his poems and stories were published in 20 Cents Magazine. Following his death in 1998, the Dennis Tourbin Fund for Emerging Artists was established in his memory.