Year One – 2020/21
activities and achievements
Establishment and virtual launch of the CSBCD
The CSBCD serves as a social justice-based research platform, amplifying Black Canadian art and curatorial practices. As both a virtual and physical space, it fosters opportunities for Black diasporic artists, curators, and students while addressing institutional exclusion and misrepresentation.
In Year One, a national Advisory Group comprising eight academics, community members, and experts in various fields was established to guide the ongoing development of the activities of the Centre. The Centre was publicly launched in January 2021. To commemorate this milestone, we organized The State of Blackness: Revisited, a public dialogue featuring scholars Rinaldo Walcott and artist Camille Turner, reflecting on changes in the culturescape since the original 2014 The State of Blackness: From Production to Presentation conference. This year laid the groundwork for critical research and programming, focusing on preserving and promoting the contributions of the Black diaspora to Canadian arts.
Collaborative Projects
In 2020–2021, we engaged in two significant collaborative projects:
Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC): Focused on archiving and presenting works by Black Canadian media artists.
Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG): Produced “Commit Us to Memory: Black Women Curators Interrupting the Canon”, a virtual roundtable featuring Black women curators discussing diasporic artistic production. This event was organized by Nya Lewis (CSBCD research assistant) in conjunction with VAG's first exhibition of artworks by Black artists in its 90-year history, greatly impacting students and emerging curators.
Research Initiatives
A team of four OCAD U graduate students-initiated Phase 1 of research activities, including data collection and digitization. Workshops on ethics and oral history techniques were implemented for researchers, while primary research began at VTape.