Year Two – 2021/22
activities and achievements
Touring Exhibition
A major highlight was the launch and tour of Practice as Ritual/Ritual as Practice, an exhibition curated by Andrea Fatona, featuring the Diasporic African Women’s Art (DAWA) collective. This exhibition honours the legacy of the landmark 1989 exhibition Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter while showcasing contemporary works of the 10 artists and their relevance today.
The exhibition originated at A Space Gallery in Toronto and ran from November 24, 2022, to February 23, 2023. It is currently touring the country, hosted across artist-run centres, university art galleries, and public galleries alike, including Articule (Montreal), Artspeak (Vancouver), and Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa). It will close at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 2025, around which time the accompanying catalogue text will be released. This project constitutes a significant endeavour for the Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, honouring the work started by the DAWA artists while emphasizing the continuum of Black Canadian diasporic artistic practice over the last three decades. The tour is supported by the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Media Arts Presentation
To activate and affectively disseminate the research being done between the CSBCD and Vtape since 2017, a media arts presentation project was developed that saw the CSBCD partner with Vtape to present two public programs. From October 2021 to March 2022, two undergraduate OCAD U Criticism and Curatorial students organized online media arts programming during the period of COVID lockdown. TO REMEMBER AND REPAIR, was curated by Temple Marucci-Campbell and TELL THE BODY, curated by Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa. A total of 150 individuals attended the two screenings. This collaboration importantly investigates how older works function in and affect the present landscape of media arts, particularly through themes such as immigration and identity that continue to be highly relevant today.
In alignment with CSBCD goals, we co-sponsored the OCADU President’s Lecture Series, entitled, Sustaining Black Creativity: A Conversation with Dr. Zoé Whitley. The conversation was facilitated by Andrea Fatona. Dr. Zoe Whitley, a prominent UK curator, focusing on sustaining creativity in the arts community and supporting BIPOC talent.
SSHRC funded collaborative project
Crossing Fonds: Pollinating Access and Interpretation platform is a digital archival project in collaboration with Dr. Sara Diamond that addresses the need to formalize collaborative access across archives, enabling research, scholarship and the reinterpretation of collections through contemporary filters. Case Study 3 is the CSBCD’s contribution to the research platform.
Case study 3 is a collaboration between BLAC and Andrea Fatona that explores the connection between the histories and patterns of Black settlement in Surrey and Vancouver, BC, with a focus on Black people’s engagement in the labour force. https://omeka.crossingfonds.com/s/crossing-fonds/page/case-study-3
Utilizing the archives at SFU, Emily Carr University, City of Vancouver, City of Surrey, VIVO, and most importantly, family collections; the project seeks to document and commemorate histories of Black participation in Surrey and Vancouver. The project focuses on what is present in the archive and aims to fill some of the existing gaps pertaining to Black livingness (McKittrick,2021). The following questions guide the research activities: (a) How are Black communities formed and sustained in relation to access to the labour force; (b) How is Black people’s engagement in the labour force documented and represented in the official archive; and (c) who collects and describes the materials in the archive. A core activity of the project is the development of “other” means to classify and disseminate cultural and art objects produced by Black Canadian cultural producers with attention paid to the networked relationships that Black Canadian diasporic subjects have to other geographic locations, cultures, and radical traditions (Nelson 2018; Fatona 2011). The case study will also address how historical products “work” in the present to shed light on the conditions of Blackness then and now.
Research Workshops
Two workshops were organized for CSBCD researchers and partners involved in the SSHRC-funded “Crossing Fonds: Pollinating Access and Interpretation” project, focusing on data management and metadata.