(In)Visible Minorities
In 2019, while I was completing an MFA in Craft Media at the Alberta University of the Arts, I worked on an imagined exhibition catalogue for a graduate school assignment. This exercise involved finding works by Canadian craftspeople that had never been exhibited together in order to spark new conversations. It was a troubling process as I encountered a disappointing lack of Black Canadian makers. I knew they existed. I personally know of many, but when it came time to find out if and how these works were being represented, something was off.
The year 2020 brought about a racial reckoning that resulted in many organizations examining their relationship to Black arts and artists. At the same time, racialized artists spoke out loudly and clearly about the manifestations of systemic racism in creative spaces.
In September 2020, the Black Curators Forum — a collective founded in 2019 — addressed a letter to the contemporary art institutions and organizations across “the land called Canada.” Signed by 23 curators and gallerists, one of the most striking statements made was that “the professional trajectories, influence and access to resources offered by Canadian arts organizations do not adequately reflect our levels of experience and training, nor do they reflect the labour we have invested in our own professional practices.” [1]
Tafui, Patois, 2020, in Where do we go from here?, exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, December 12, 2020 to June 13, 2021, Photo: Ian Lefebvre, COURTESY OF VANCOUVER ART GALLERY.
Emerging craft makers, especially in an academic setting, are advised by instructors and mentors to network with other artists and join associations to further chances of being represented by galleries. However, the artists who seek to enter this market are subject to the vague gatekeeping whims of a market that cannot disavow itself of the structurally racist policies that keep it afloat.
There is this hushed sentiment that Black Canadian art hasn’t yet achieved the status and commercial viability required to entice galleries to show them. Writer and artist oualie frost alludes to this in her discussion of a lack of Black artists in Calgary’s artist-run centres, suggesting that these galleries need to stop asking “why Black art isn’t ‘good’ or ‘refined’ or ‘Black’ enough” and to instead contend with “why their own tastes are exclusionary.” [2] There is a lot to unpack in this sentiment: primarily, what or who determines the value and commercial viability of a maker’s work?
The development and control of the creative sector, and how works and artists are assigned value, is via capitalism. Considering that the arts and culture sector does not operate separately from wider society, the same societal elements are at play here. Racism, colonialism and capitalism are inextricable, and it is an uphill battle for those who make work that challenge the existing systems.
Africana studies scholar Reiland Rabaka, in his discussion of critical analyses on race, capitalism and value in the purpose of decolonization, highlights a relevant analysis from the works of Frantz Fanon and Herbert Marcuse. Drawing on Fanon’s critical approach to Marxism, and Marcuse’s idea of the “transvaluation of values,” Rabaka argues that the lived experiences of racialized peoples will deviate from the “existing imperialist setup,” and as such be met with obstruction because it “contradicts and overturns imperialist values.” [3] It’s quite simple: Capital dictates the development of the cultural sector in a society whose values are founded in imperialist systems.
And this is endemic to Canadian society at large. Amanda Parris, host of CBC’s The Exhibitionists, wrote that there are many examples where members of the Black community in Canada have attempted to challenge anti-Black racism, only to be met with swift backlash. She highlights four cases, including that of journalist Desmond Cole, who was a weekly columnist with the Toronto Star, one of Canada’s most highly circulated newspapers. Cole attended a protest at a Toronto Police Services board meeting regarding carding, after which he was informed by his editors that he was “writing about race too often,” and “encouraged” to diversify his topics. Parris points out that institutions like the Star are powerful gatekeepers that are complicit in perpetuating anti-Black racism and influencing Canadian understandings of themselves. [4]
Much of the time, when issues related to addressing anti-Blackness in Canadian institutions are broached — whether media, arts or culture — they are deflected. Art curator and scholar Andrea Fatona states that “we tend to import black artists and discourses from elsewhere. And so then we end up with a kind of innocence in Canada. We continue to replicate this notion of our benevolent space.” [5]
In 2016, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) issued a long-overdue apology for its 1989 exhibition Into the Heart of Africa. The apology read: “The ROM expresses its deep regret for having contributed to anti-African racism. The ROM also apologizes for the suffering endured by members of the African-Canadian community as a result of ‘Into the Heart of Africa ’ ” [6] Jeanne Cannizzo, the guest curator for that exhibition, appears to have been attempting to use her platform to highlight the museum’s complicity in advancing narratives of Canadian imperialism:
“It was my job and the purpose of the exhibition to interpret and display the Ethnology Department’s own African collection, as it existed. That is, there was no question of a loan exhibition or fieldwork to gather more artifacts to update or supplement the extant collection, which had rarely been on display … the African collection had not been in the regular care of curators trained in the ethnography and material culture of the continent.” [7]
However, Cannizzo's inability to explicitly name the offences levied against the ROM gave the impression of speaking uncritically on behalf of the institution: “Only after the ROM and the curator realized that their voice was camouflaged inadvertently into those of the imperialist collectors, did they seek refuge in the notion of curatorial authority.” [8] T. Cuyler Young, director of the ROM during this period, flipped the narrative following the protests by many Black Canadians into an argument of “intellectual freedom both for individuals and for institutions like museums.” [9]
Reflecting on the gathering of the inaugural Black Curators Forum in October 2019 at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), arts and culture journalist Kelsey Adams commented on the difficulties of feeling tokenized while working within Canadian art institutions. She expressed the exhaustion of “being the only Black person working within art institutions (and having to democratize those institutions), (dealing with) straight-up anti-Black racism, the burden of emotional labour, being pigeonholed, being expected to represent an entire community, getting called on for one month of the year (you know which one), needing a higher level of post-graduate education to even be considered, having to tiptoe around white supremacist authority, (and) having to bite their tongues.” [10] This tiptoe dance is all too familiar — I can count on one hand with fingers remaining the amount of Black students I encountered in graduate school.
The 2019 Black Curators Forum suggested institutional approaches to rectifying some of the issues Adams discusses:
“The creation of a national vision or directive for Black art in Canada, the need for more scholarship about historical and contemporary Black Canadian art to connect to a wider art history, ... ideas about how to be part of the institution but not institutionalized, and developing a countrywide network of curators to influence social, political and institutional practices related to Black art.” [11]
Adams also points to the 2018 ROM exhibition Here We are Here as an example of a push in the right direction of what a body of work put together by Black curators in decision-making positions could look like. Exhibitions such as Here We Are Here, curated by individuals who are invested in the meaning of the work, can strategically use the platform of the institution, to an extent, to amplify the message of their work. Curated by Silvia Forni, Julie Crooks and Dominique Fontaine, “the exhibition is wedged between the entrances to two permanent exhibitions: the Gallery of Byzantium and the European galleries … this location informs how Here We are Here is experienced, and the exhibition has the daunting task of moving Black people and Black art from the periphery of Canada’s cultural consciousness to its centre.” [12]
Racialized makers who seek to enter institutions to learn and develop professional practices are subject to the gatekeeping and the structurally racist policies that bolster these institutions. Conscious attempts at implementing practices that disrupt and decolonize the foundational narrative within institutions have been encouraged and gaining momentum in the past few years. For Dori Tunstall, design anthropologist and Dean, Faculty of Design at OCAD University, the process of decolonizing the curriculum in arts institutions is one that consciously rewrites the canon:
“Most of the time when we talk about design, we’re talking about the phenomena that came out of Europe in the 1800s, creating for the masses so that the ‘good life’ of the aristocracy could be more available to the peasantry. The way to achieve that was to make things cheaper and faster, but to do that, Europeans exploited the labour of Black people and exploited the land of Indigenous people. We can’t decouple colonialism from design or the way we understand and practice design. They’re deeply linked and implicated.” [13]
Other approaches to changing how things operate draw on Black feminist theories that prioritize collective community and care. Racialized artists, makers and curators who tackle institutional policies from within the institution and agitate its operations take risks that may or may not work in their favour, especially if there is no support system for them. In her keynote for the 2020 Adding Voices conference, art education researcher Joni Boyd Acuff speaks to the importance of finding communities that support you outside of the institution, especially when your experience within the institution itself is an isolating one. [14]
During graduate school, my advisor connected me with the Black Canadian makers eva birhanu and Simone Saunders, suggesting I curate a show with their work. I guest curated a joint exhibition that consisted of textiles and sculptural pieces [15] at the Alberta Craft Council, which was exhibited in Edmonton and Calgary. The exhibition emphasized the agency of Black Canadian female makers in their practice, and self-determination in the representation of their bodies.
Curator Geneviève Wallen reiterated this necessity of having support networks that you can turn to when you need to [16] and the importance of Black women insisting on communities of care that support them emotionally, as these are additional demands that affect the already prevalent expectation of additional labour of racialized bodies within the institution. When daily encounters in arts institutions can involve casual racist commentary, like the time I was referred to as “fresh slave labour” when I started a studio assistant position, it is of vital importance for makers and artists to develop and foster community outside of these institutions.
Whether through incorporating positive collective action in supporting each other, or actively challenging and revising the canon towards the goal of decolonizing institutions, Canadian arts institutions will have to reckon with racialized artists, designers and craftspeople. If there is one thing we have at our disposal, it is the ability to leverage our craft to tell our stories. This past year has seen a rise in the acclaim and representation of works by racialized makers. It remains to be seen if this representation has any sustainable merit, or if a quieting of the racial agitation will lift the burden of regulating the public’s perception of the institution.
There is a power in the lived experiences of racialized individuals that can provide unique solutions to discourses on humanity, says curator Nya Lewis, and this influences how stories are told. [17] The exclusionary structural practices that gatekeep the viability of racialized, specifically Black, makers will not stop the work from being made. They provide strategic lessons for the makers who will challenge the institution, whether from within or apart from it, rejecting the dogma that seeks to quiet and erase their stories and accomplishments.
[1] “A Letter from the Black Curators Forum to Contemporary Art Institutions and Organizations across This Land Called Canada,” Canadian Art, September 14, 2020, https://canadianart.ca/features/a-letter-from-the-black-curators-forum-to-contemporary-art-institutions-and-organizations-across-this-land-called-canada/.
[2] oualie frost. “On the Lack of Black Artists in Calgary’s Artist-Run Centres — and Canada’s Too,” Canadian Art, https://canadianart.ca/essays/on-the-lack-of-black-artists-in-calgarys-artist-run-centres-and-canadas-too/
[3] Reiland Rabaka, Forms of Fanonism: Frantz Fanon’s Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Decolonization (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010): 185.
[4] Amanda Parris, “Canadian Cultural Institutions Have Silenced Black Voices for Years. Can We Write a New Chapter?” CBC Arts, June 8, 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/arts/canadian-cultural-institutions-have-silenced-black-voices-for-years-can-we-write-a-new-chapter-1.5600064.
[5] Yaniya Lee, “How Canada Forgot Its Black Artists,” The FADER, August 31, 2016, https://www.thefader.com/2016/08/31/black-artists-in-canada.
[6] Alyssa Buffenstein, “Royal Ontario Museum Admits 1989 Exhibition Was Racist,” artnet News, November 10, 2016, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/royal-ontario-museum-racist-exhibition-742205.
[7] Jeanne Cannizzo, “Exhibiting Cultures: ‘Into the Heart of Africa,’” Visual Anthropology Review 7, no. 1 (1991): 150.
[8] Enid Schildkrout, “Ambiguous Messages and Ironic Twists: Into the Heart of Africa and The Other Museum,” Museum Anthropology 15, no. 2 (1991): 17.
[9] T. Cuyler Young, “Into the Heart of Africa: The Director’s Perspective,” Curator: The Museum Journal 36, no. 3 (1993): 174–88.
[10] Kelsey Adams, “A Black Curator Is Never Just a Curator,” Canadian Art, December 17, 2019, https://canadianart.ca/features/kelsey-adams-black-curators-forum/.
[11] Adams, 2019.
[12] Kelsey Adams, “Black Is Canadian” Canadian Art, April 10, 2018, https://canadianart.ca/reviews/black-is-canadian/.
[13] Doreen Lorenzo, “How OCAD’s Dori Tunstall Is Rewriting the Rules of Design Education,” Fast Company, August 19, 2020, https://www.fastcompany.com/90541079/.
[14] Joni Boyd Acuff, keynote presented at the 2020 Adding Voices conference, June 24, 2020. https://www.addingvoices.com/keynotespeaker.
[15] Shiemara Hogarth, “Threading Black: Eva Birhanu and Simone Elizabeth Saunders on Connecting Race, Roots and Identity,” Alberta Craft Council, June 24, 2021, https://www.albertacraft.ab.ca/blog/threading-black-eva-birhanu-and-simone-elizabeth-saunders-on-connecting-race-roots-and-identitynbspnbsp.
[16] Nya Lewis, Alyssa Fearon, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Geneviève Wallen, “Commit Us to Memory: Black Women Curators Interrupting the Canon” (roundtable discussion, Art Connects x The State of Blackness, Vancouver Art Gallery, May 27, 2021), https://vimeo.com/557857878.
[17] Lewis, Fearon, Nnebe, and Wallen, “Commit Us to Memory,” 2021.
This article was published in the Fall/Winter 2021 issue of Studio Magazine.
