Encounters: Challenging Limits
Challenging Limits: A Conversation on Inclusion in Canadian Craft
A diverse and inclusive craft community fosters a plurality of ideas and perspectives. However, the Canadian craft community — through its formal recognitions and institutions — does not reflect the diversity of Canadian craft and makers. To facilitate discussion and conversation, Studio Magazine was host to a panel to highlight the complex and complicated issues surrounding the Canadian craft landscape and to discuss best practices in the areas of diversity and inclusion that have proven successful in the panelist's experiences and practices.
This panel was on January 29th, 2022 from 1 - 3 pm EST.
Recording available here:
https://vimeo.com/678790428
*Please note that ASL interpretation was available live during the event
Panelists:
Shiemara Hogarth is a cross-disciplinary maker working between Moh’kinsstis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory; Tkaronto (Toronto), Treaty 13 territory; and Brampton, Treaty 19 territory. Her practice draws on weaving, screen and digital printing, felting, embroidery, and explorations in 3D fabrication. Informed by an anticolonial research lens, her work is mainly narrative.
Julie Hollenbach is a queer settler artist, scholar, and cultural worker based in K’jiputuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia). She teaches in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at NSCAD University. Her research interrogates topics of contemporary craft, art, and everyday creativity at the intersections of art history/visual and material culture studies, museum studies, and gender studies. She centers queer, feminist, and decolonial methodologies in her research and writing, as well as in using these approaches to craft dynamic forms of teaching and engaging publics through her artistic and curatorial practices.
Karyn Recollet is an urban Cree scholar/artist/and writer, whose work focuses on relationality and care as both an analytic and technology for Indigenous movement-based forms of inquiry within urban spaces. Recollet works collaboratively with Indigenous dance-makers and scholars to theorize forms of urban glyphing. Recollet is in conversation with dance choreographers, Black and Indigenous futurist thinkers and Indigenous and Black geographers as ways to theorize and activate futurist, feminist, celestial and decolonial land-ing relationships with more-than-human kinships, and each other.
Nehal El-Hadi is the Editor-in-Chief of Studio Magazine. Trained as an environmental journalist and a planning academic, her work explores the relationships between the body (racialised, gendered), place (urban, virtual), and technology (internet, health).
Event Partner:
artsUNITE / UNITÉ des arts is a free, centralized and comprehensive wayfinding service that connects artists and creatives to the resources they need. Created in response to the pandemic, and adapting to the changing needs of the arts sector, artsUNITE / UNITÉ des arts is a dynamic service, focused on providing diverse resources that will enable our Canadian creative communities to survive in the current moment and thrive in the long run.
Further Resources:
Harsha Walia, “Decolonizing Together: Moving beyond a politics of solidarity towards a practice of decolonization”, Briarpatch Magazine, 2012
Dr. Sara Ahmed, “Courageous Conversations: Complaint, Diversity and Other Hostile Environments”, YouTube, 2021.
Andrea Davis, “SCHOLAR STRIKE CANADA: Black Tax and the Invisible Labour of Black Women in the Academy”, YouTube, 2020.
Scholar Strike Canada: originated as a labour action in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, to protest anti-Black, Indigenous, racist and colonial police brutality in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere.
VerCetty Made It Studios: Established in 2015, VerCetty's creative works speculate addressing social issues and the imaginative futures of representation and preservation of the memories of people of African descent.
Lisa Jackson: known for her cross-genre projects including VR, animation, performance art film and a musical.
Biidaaban: First Light VR, Transmissions
Black Craftspeople Digital Archive: dedicated to telling the stories of Black Craftspeople and the objects they created.
The Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF) is a partnership of universities and community organizations dedicated to developing multiple visions of Indigenous peoples tomorrow in order to better understand where we need to go today. Through its four main components –workshops, residencies, symposia, and archive– IIF encourages and enable artists, academics, youth and elders to imagine how our communities will look in the future.
