The Globe and Mail

Call it "artist's intuition" mixed with serendipity. Or call it a mysterious force, but something prevented Professor Beate Ziegert from selling her Cabbagetown semi. Teaching at Cornell University in the 1980s and '90s would have been a good time, or perhaps afterward while at the University of Papua New Guinea. When she toured the Far East, writing a paper on the similarities between the Bauhaus and Japan's Mingei movement, or when she spent time in Switzerland visiting her brother would've worked, too. But that force . . .