The following question drives the current research program:
How can new and innovative cataloguing, dissemination, and pedagogical strategies be effectively used to position black cultural production centrally within discourses of contemporary art and culture?
objectives
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The goal of the proposed research program is to provide visibility and access to the works of contemporary Black artists, craftspeople, curators, and critics in Canada who have been historically erased from the imaginary of Canadian visual culture. In particular, it seeks to write contemporary Canadian Black cultural producers back into the histories of who produces art in Canada through the cataloguing of Black curatorial projects over the period spanning 1987 to the present.
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Working from the framework of Black diaspora and its notion of the dynamic tentacles and relationships of Black diasporic people/communities to Canada and ‘other’ geographies and aesthetics, as well as Black peoples’ diverse experiences within the settler-colonial paradigm the project seeks to expand our understanding of Canadian and diasporic Black contemporary cultural production.
framework
The research program draws on interdisciplinary scholarship from the fields of critical curatorial practice, Black Studies, Black Canadian Studies, art, art education, critical theory, cultural studies, and is rooted in a social justice approach to the study of culture, art, and art education.
The concept and practices of Black Diaspora guide the relational design of the research (Gilroy 1993, 1995; Hall 2000; Mercer 2005). Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic and the concomitant production of new Black cultures whose aesthetics, politics, themes, and ways of living life through ongoing connections to ‘home’, here and there, underpins the Centre’s mission to rethink the cultural production of Black Canadians within the contexts of post-modern art and curatorial movements in addition to parsing out the styles and orientations of Black Canadian art specificities /uniqueness. Black diasporic scholar Brent Hayes Edwards’ (2003) discussion of the associative ‘practice of diaspora’ and the ongoing work required to make and sustain linkages across the differences and geographies that comprise Black Diaspora grounds both the conceptual and practical organizational structure of our research.
Drawing on the tenets of critical curatorial and museological studies with regards to the call to develop inclusive, accessible, multivocal sites for cultural participation and dissemination (Sheikh 2005; Dewdney et all 2013; Butler 2003; Rogoff 2008; Bennett 1995), the proposed research program seeks to imagine and create possibilities for centrally positioning Black art and curatorial and criticism practices within Canadian art discourses and practices. The research is also guided by the principles of critical pedagogy that shift us from the view of the ‘other’ as bankrupt in terms of cultural capital (Giroux and McLaren 1992; Nelson 2010). Critical pedagogy views education as a political endeavor in which systems of domination are exposed and new transformative practices based on reflection and doing, are brought into being. Knowledge is viewed as relational and universalist tropes in education are replaced with ideas and practices that come from multiple cosmologies and ways of knowing. Both the gallery and the academy are central to the discussion as they are sites of pedagogy that are deeply engaged in the production and reproduction of culture (Bennett, 1993). This research is a method of inquiry in which partners, student researchers, and potential end-users engage in sharing and developing new knowledges (Freire 1993; Giroux and McLaren 1992) by way of critical reflection on and engagement with practices of digitizing and disseminating cultural knowledges and objects.
Political and Historical Context
The research objectives emerge in and out of a climate of anti-blackness and institutional histories that exclude and misrepresent the role of Black people in the continued making of the Canadian nation. They also emerge at a historical moment in which Black Canadian art and curatorial histories have become growing areas of scholarly engagement as the number of Black scholars, curators, and critics has increased due to academic credentialization. Art historian, Dr. Charmaine Nelson has led the charge with regards to rectifying the annals of art history, but still there are very few pedagogical resources that exist within the Canadian context for teaching about Black curatorial and artists’ practices. Scholars of Black Canada and Black Canadian art have argued that this absence has arisen due to the precarious position of Black people vis-à-vis articulations of the Canadian nation. Compounding this state of erasure is the inability of the stewards of Canadian culture to understand the networked relations that Black Canadian and diasporic cultural producers have to other geographical locations, cultures, and radical traditions (Walcott 2003; Nelson 2011, 2019; Philip 1992; Fatona 2011; McKittrick 2007).
Since the demise of Canadian Artists Network: Black Artists in Action (CAN: BAIA) in the late 1990s, there has been scant public attention paid to preserving and developing the cultural objects and discourses that define Blackness and its expressive manifestations in the Canadian context. The historical information on visual and media curatorial projects amassed by CAN: BAIA is currently held at Library and Archives Canada and has a caveat that restricts full access to the materials. A plethora of catalogued and uncatalogued information that remains inaccessible due to the decentralized nature of the materials exists across the country, kept in personal and organization archives. The bulk of the materials known to exist are located in large urban centres in Eastern, Central, and Western Canada and are inaccessible to many outside of those geographical locations. To date, there have been are no centralized sites for accessing discursive information on the works of Black Canadian cultural producers.
