commit us to memory

The Vancouver Art Gallery, in collaboration with The State of Blackness, presents Commit us to memory: Black Women curators interrupting the canon, a public program organized within the framework of the exhibition Where do we go from here?. Moderated by the exhibition’s guest curator and featured artist Nya Lewis, the roundtable will include her guests Alyssa Fearon, Kosisochukwu Nnebe and Geneviève Wallen. The roundtable stems in part from Commit Us to Memory (2020), a provocative site-specific installation by Lewis conceived specifically for Where do we go from here? in response to the Gallery’s colonialist architecture and history. Located at the centre of the exhibition, this monumental text-based work functions as a kind of manifesto, poem and testimony, which speak to the complexity of Black Canadian expression and experience. Lewis integrates into the installation the titles of important exhibitions curated by Black curators in Canada, proposing a groundwork for an art history of Black artistic production across Canada. For this important roundtable discussion, Lewis and her peers will reflect on the ongoing work—both past and present—of building a Black art history for the future.