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Listening to Silence

vanews — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 02:00:32 +0000

What does it mean to revisit the stories we’ve been told, the stories that purport to tell us who we are? And why might we do so in the first place? This is the premise that underpins What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic, an exhibition curated by Toronto-based artist, curator, and administrator Bushra Junaid at The Rooms.

Camille Turner, Afronautic Research Lab: Newfoundland, 2019.
Video installation. Cinematographer and editor : Brian Ricks for the Bonavista Biennale.
Image courtesy of the artist

At a curatorial talk, Junaid stated that the impetus for this exhibition came from John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (also on display at The Rooms). Akomfrah’s wash of water, sound, and history takes viewers through a constantly moving ocean, asking us to consider the oceanic sublime, a space of wonder and magic, violence, destruction, and death. It’s this wash of contradiction that Junaid locates in this place now called Newfoundland and Labrador: a wash of beauty, connection, and foodways, on the one hand, and silence, violence, and haunting, on the other.

Junaid grew up in St. John’s, and she feels the city and its landscape deep in her bones. One might then reasonably expect that she would have encountered stories of Black life during her childhood. But as she observed during her curatorial talk, such stories never formed part of her girlhood education. St. John’s, and Newfoundland and Labrador more broadly speaking, have instead long been imagined as white spaces shaped by Irish and English (and to a much lesser extent French) histories.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the overarching theme of the exhibition is that of silence: the silence of forcibly suppressed stories alongside the silence of lost ones. What Carries Us includes not only a variety of works by artists based in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and the UK, but also archival materials and archaeological artifacts. Taken together, they invite us to reflect on storytelling and identity, and on how we might imagine things differently.

The theme of silence is told perhaps most hauntingly in the form of the garments worn by a man with the initials W.H., an otherwise anonymous sailor of African heritage whose grave in Labrador emerged in the 1980s as a result of coastal erosion. The garments rest alone in a darkened room, their story a reminder that twenty percent of all British and American sailors in the early nineteenth century were black men. What brought W.H. to these shores? How long was he here? Which parts of this place had he visited? Who did he encounter along the way? How did his voice sound? What were his favourite foods? What did he do in his spare time? These are silences we can’t recover; they remain only in shadows.

Installation view of objects owned by W.H. held in the Museum collection, as part of What Carries Us. Photo: The Rooms

Meanwhile, Shelley Miller’s Trade (2020), constructed as a series of seemingly edible blue-and-white tiles made of icing sugar, gelatin, and edible inks and arranged in the form of a patchwork tile mural, offers a material commentary on the ways that the unfree labour of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean supported and sustained European wealth. I’ve seen such tiles in many Dutch museums over the years, often decorating fireplaces and kitchen walls. Here, however, they tell a very different story, drawing out the triangle trade that linked Newfoundland and Labrador with Africa and the Caribbean. Perhaps because of my own Dutch family histories on my father’s side (histories that tangle simultaneously with Dutch Caribbean colonial histories of slavery and indenture on my mother’s side), this piece stood out most to me. The stickiness. The sweetness. The sugar that binds oppression and wealth together, all of it captured in innocuous blue and white tiles that you can buy in any cheesy tourist shop in the Netherlands. What was the cost of sugar? asks the title of a novel by Surinamese author Cynthia McLeod. What, indeed.

Installation view of What Carries Us featuring Trade by Shelley Miller, icing sugar, gelatin, and edible inks, 2020. Photo: The Rooms

But silence is not just grief-laden or mournful in this exhibition—it’s also pointed, political, and playful. Camille Turner, whose Afronautic Research Lab featured at the 2019 Bonavista Biennale, returns here, locating histories of enslavement not just in faraway Caribbean colonies but also right here in this place. If the island of Newfoundland is seen, today, as an isolated outpost, its history gestures towards a long imbrication in the Atlantic slave trade. Turner’s immersive research lab, which includes not only film but also a table filled with books, archival materials, and the tools of the archival researcher’s trade (pencils, blank paper, magnifying glasses), chronicles the nineteen slave ships constructed here and reminds us that it’s all too easy to separate ourselves from messy, oppressive histories. It also asks us to consider what it means to take up a violent inheritance.

Camille Turner, Afronautic Research Lab, 2019, installation view.
Photo: The Rooms

The work of Sonia Boyce takes a playful carnivalesque approach. In “Crop Over” (2007), a two-channel video installation, she chronicles a Caribbean festival, with all the colours, music, and dancing so common to many Caribbean celebrations. But Boyce’s “Crop Over” is playfully—and pointedly—subversive. Her characters dance not just in the streets but also through houses and landmarks created as a result of the trade in slaves and sugar. Stilt-walking folk figures dressed in sequined outfits romp through formal gardens and clamber around staid sitting room furniture. They plant themselves on stone balconies and peer around corners, their presence a mocking reminder of the unruly, colourful bodies whose unfree labour made these great homes possible in the first place. In many ways, “Crop Over” reminded me of the spoken word poetry of El Jones (“Dear Benedict” in particular): it’s cheeky, spirited, pleasure-filled, parodic, and, at the same time, deeply political.

Installation view of Camille Turner ’s Afronautic Research Lab. In back (l to r): Sandra Brewster ’s Essequibo 1, 2018, Heirloom, 2017, and Dutch Pot, 2018; Sonia Boyce’s Crop Over, 2007. Photo: The Rooms

What Carries Us is not a large exhibition. And yet it packs a punch. Each element, from the archival materials to the archaeological artifacts to the artworks, offers an opening towards a reimagining and a retelling of Newfoundland and Labrador and the people who have visited its shores and called it home.

Landscape as Archive: Tracing Rivers + stories with Carrie Allison

admin — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 18:59:46 +0000

Carrie Allison, Sîpîy (River), beaded detail of the Heart River,
created during a residency at Anna Leonowens Gallery

Carrie Allison’s work deals with identity, as well as ideas of allyship, kinship, and hosting. An artist of Cree, Metis, and European descent who embraced her Indigeneity at a later age, her approach to materials is empathetic and thoughtful, working in large and often collaborative beading projects. Her work traces lines—fingers over pages, veins across skin, rivers across landscapes, while looking to the future of cultural institutions and the laws that govern them.

As part of her MFA thesis work, Allison considered waterways that were important to her maternal lineage, and beaded the Heart and Fraser Rivers (in Alberta and B.C., respectively). Wanting to make a similar gesture to the place she has called home for the past seven years, Allison turned her attention to the Shubenacadie River. She invited collaborators of all skill levels to bead a portion of the River in an attempt to build community and draw attention to the work of Indigenous water protectors who are on the front lines fighting the Alton Gas development—underground gas storage units that Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies are opposing, due to the development’s plan to dump salt brine into the Shubenacadie River.

MOLLIE CRONIN interviews CARRIE ALLISON in anticipation of her latest body of research and work with Eyelevel Gallery the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History in Halifax, NS.

MOLLIE: I remember talking with Eyelevel director Julia McMillan back in the spring and when she told me about your work, she kept using the word “transplant,” relating to how you were thinking about plants (invasive species in particular) and sort of seeing yourself reflected in that idea.

CARRIE: I love plants, I think they’re amazing … Identity has always been in my practice, but it’s always been a hard thing for me to understand. When you’re trying to reclaim a connection to Indigeneity … it was hard for me to do, I didn’t grow up in an Indigenous community—my grandmother wouldn’t acknowledge that she was Indigenous and that was mostly because of residential school guilt, so I feel like that was passed down to me. It took me a really long time to be okay with saying: “I’m an Indigenous person, as well as mixed-race” (which is something that I identify more with). Plants were the first way I understood that. It made more sense to think about colonialism though plants, how the landscape has been altered, and that moved [my work] to more political and social practice in general.

I looked at a lot of indigenous plants and invasive species, which I’m still very fascinated by because they’re so pervasive. With projects like this I really just see myself as trying to navigate [these ideas] but also build connections, kin and work within this idea of allyship. I understand that I am a guest here, that I am being hosted by the Mi’kmaq people.

MOLLIE: I think there’s a lot of material there, in terms of thinking about colonialism through plants: landscape, agriculture, even gardening and growing grass…

CARRIE: Grass is so crazy! It’s like a sign of royalty—the fact that we still have it in our lives is very weird!

MOLLIE: Our “natural” spaces in Halifax are so Victorian still—from the park to the public gardens, it’s very British.

CARRIE: Very British. You can’t sit on the grass.

MOLLIE: I think that your work with museums right now is a similar sort of teasing out a very rigid way of moving through a space. Museums operate with these same restraints—very precious, very white glove, very don’t sit on the grass.

CARRIE: Totally. A lot of Indigenous knowledge is based within the land, but colonial knowledge is based in these boxes. These “discoveries.” Whereas a landscape can function as an archive in and of itself.

MOLLIE: A living archive.

CARRIE: Yeah, it’s just a matter of knowing how to read it. [Archives and museums] are gatekeepers. I’m fascinated by them—museums and libraries—I’ve always loved searching for things. They can hold so much power. Libraries, archives, churches—they just hold everything there. And [these are the spaces] where we were “legitimized” as people: marriage, birth, etc. I always have a hard time navigating these two worlds. I grew up in a world of museums and libraries; everyone grows up in institutions in some way, these colonial parameters that you have to navigate as a citizen. Indigenous ways of being don’t really function within those constraints. They’re more fluid—a more fluid way of being.

Beyond The Island, Another Island

vanews — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 19:19:16 +0000

Cape Breton has existed as a Shangri-La of sorts for Americans for over half a century, firmly rooting itself in the imaginary of New York’s avant-garde circles, political radicals, draft dodgers, back-to-the-landers and, more recently, those simply looking for an affordable getaway. AMISH MORRELL, a Cape Breton-born writer and curator, chats with New York artistic duo ERIK MOSKOWITZ and AMANDA TRAGER about their memories of the Cape Breton of their youths, exploring the pull of place and the idea of Cape Breton as refuge and site of utopian projections.

Early back-to-the-landers making hay. Photo: George Thomas, Northeast Margaree, 1973. Courtesy of George Thomas and Cape Breton University Art Gallery.

AMISH MORRELL: I’ve been reflecting on our conversations from this past summer, about our respective projects focusing on artists and members of the counterculture who came to Cape Breton during the 60s and 70s, and how this place was a refuge for many of these people, whether they were draft-dodgers searching for an alternative to mainstream society, or artists who simply wanted a quiet place to make their work. One of the things that struck me was the similarity between Erik’s and my own stories. I’ve also been reflecting on the relationship between aesthetics and survival, and how Cape Breton inf luenced culture and ideas that came to circulate internationally.

My story is that my parents came here from the United States in 1972 and bought a farm at the end of the road in Cape Breton that had a barn and a run-down farmhouse with no water, phone, electricity or indoor plumbing. Although they installed these modern conveniences, we otherwise lived as families had lived there for generations, raising animals, growing our own vegetables, cutting our own wood and lumber, existing almost entirely outside of a cash economy. And while both my parents had gone to college and were part of an educated American middle-class, they had skills that enabled them to readily integrate into a rural subsistence economy. My mother knew how to care for livestock and my father could build and repair the kinds of machines that people used, such as sawmills and farm machinery. At the time, young people were moving out of rural communities and these practices were being abandoned, so there was a vacuum that people like my parents could inhabit.

“As children, Margaree Island was a psychic and literal destination for me and my friends, and the adults also seemed to focus on it as a locus of endless fascination; it seemed to embody our deepest collective desires.” — ERIK MOSKOWITZ

ERIK MOSKOWITZ: My parents bought their original property in Cape Breton around 1973. My mom’s sister, married to a draft resistor, had been living in Montreal. Around 1969, a group of artists from the downtown scene in New York that included Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, JoAnne Akalaitis, Rudy Wurlitzer and Philip Glass started spending summers in Cape Breton. They ran in the same circles as my family in New York and they initiated our first forays to the Maritimes. Cape Breton gave my mom and her sister time they wouldn’t have otherwise had to see one another.

Photo: George Thomas, Northeast Margaree, 1973. Courtesy of George Thomas and Cape Breton University Art Gallery.

My parents would set up camp for the summer on our forty acres of land on Sight Point Road. The setup was surprisingly similar to the way we were already living in New York: artists were inhabiting industrial buildings that had been under-utilized or left behind by the manufacturing sector. The spaces were completely raw, equipped for the industry that had existed for the past century. Makeshift arrangements enabled workspace for making art, along with living spaces but with no residential infrastructure. We camped out in our huge abandoned loft space, using white gas for cooking on Coleman stoves. We collected used wooden trucking pallets from the street to heat our loft, whose heat shut off after working hours (5 p.m. at the time).

Summertime we’d pack up our loft’s camping gear, bring it north and live in tents. Once a farm, our property was now subsumed by rose bushes and spruce trees. Being in Cape Breton was a chance to leave the city heat and be in a different culture, but a culture that afforded yet another re-interpretation of space left behind in the wake of previous economies. During the first days of our arrival, a man named Dan Huey MacIsaac came around and pointed out the foundation from the old farmhouse that had collapsed and melted back into the land. He showed us where the spring was and other physical details of earlier life there. The other families from New York also moved into neighboring abandoned farms or hunting lodges that had outlived their original purposes. In both New York and Cape Breton there was what felt almost like a mission: to utilize and re-purpose the abandoned spaces that related to industry and economies from another era.

AMANDA TRAGER: My summer camp experiences in Vermont didn’t quite prepare me for Cape Breton! I only started coming in the 90s, as an adult. Amish, I’m curious about your regard of Cape Breton as a creative site. Can you speak more about your thinking around this, and how this has been a discursive project for you?

Amish Morrell’s childhood home in Cape Breton with machinery for making shingles in the front yard. Photo: George Thomas, Northeast Margaree, 1973. Courtesy of George Thomas and Cape Breton University Art Gallery.

AMISH: I see Cape Breton as a creative site in a few different ways. In the case of my family, my mother, Anne Morrell-Robinson has been making and selling quilts since the mid 70s. After my father died in 1984, that was how she supported our family. For people like my mother and other artists and craftspeople, selling things they made often supplemented subsistence food production. While this kind of work circulates as part of the tourist and craft economy, and reinforces ideas of rural cultural authenticity in Cape Breton, it’s also shaped by more global influences and forces. For example, one of the events that informed my mother’s beginnings as a quilter was a show at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1971, called Abstract Design in American Quilts. Many back-to-the-landers used craft as both an ideological and economic means of support. While this work can be found across
the province, it tends not to be shown outside the region.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the way that Cape Breton has operated as a creative site for the artists who come here in the summer. I’m referring to Erik’s parents, and many of the other artists from New York, who for the most part have hidden out in Cape Breton, where their work isn’t really legible to a lot of people. But there’s a middle-way between these two worlds and that describes what happened for my father. After going to art school, in 1971 he went to the Whitney Studio Program in New York, and then did his MFA at Rutgers. At the time, Rutgers was ground-zero for the Fluxus movement, and he worked with Robert Watts and knew Geoffrey Hendricks, who had already been coming up to Cape Breton. My father was familiar with a lot of the people and ideas circulating in the art world at the time, but he and my mother decided to come straight to Cape Breton after he finished his MFA, because at the time Cape Breton was more interesting to them than New York.

“I remember my father describing our life in Cape Breton as a more perfect realization of his work as an artist. He had to apply his skills in ways that were more utilitarian than aesthetic, as part of surviving in Cape Breton.” — AMISH MORRELL

It was always obvious to us—to me and my brother Ezra, and to other people around us—that my mother was an artist because she made quilts, but it wasn’t as clear how my father was an artist. He was constantly building and repairing things, like an elevator that lifted firewood from the basement, cars, tractors, sawmills and antique machines that served one function or another on the farm. He would sometimes show us his movies or artworks, which could be quite abstract, like a film that simply repeated a single- frame of someone throwing a rock 1,000 times. But I remember him describing our life in Cape Breton as a more perfect realization of his work as an artist. He had to apply his skills in ways that were more utilitarian than aesthetic, as part of surviving in Cape Breton. My parents weren’t working with other artists as much they were working with their neighbors with whom they exchanged skills and labor; taking care of horses, making hay, or cutting wood. In retrospect, I realize that this was an aesthetic project in the sense of making a life that fit with their Quaker social and spiritual ideals, which included simplicity and self-reliance. They emphasized labour and being known by one’s actions, as well as direct experience and learning by doing, which were the primary ways that knowledge was transmitted in Cape Breton at the time.

Amish Morrell (right) with parents Anne and Gary. Photo: George Thomas, Northeast Margaree, 1973. Courtesy of George Thomas and Cape Breton University Art Gallery.

AMANDA: So interesting, beginning with your mother’s quilts! I saw that Whitney show when I was 12. There was another amazing Whitney exhibition thirty years later of quilts made by members of the Black community in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, which was even more revelatory in terms of connections between local craft, long traditions and contemporary art. Quilts are so interesting in the way they conflate or problematize these connections, but also in how they sustain life, providing a living to the quilter and keeping folks from freezing to death! Plus they’re made from scraps that would otherwise be thrown away. This relates to Anna Tsing’s discussion of salvage accumulation; the idea of life outside of capitalism. Thinking about survival within an aesthetic modality feels urgent now.

AMISH: I’m also interested in how Cape Breton was connected to an international avant-garde. While we can look at how people who came to the Island had a role in shaping its culture, I think that it’s more interesting to consider how the Island and its people have secretly inhabited a more global art world. In Joan Jonas’s They Come to Us Without a Word, the work she made for the 2015 Venice Biennale, she uses fragments of ghost stories from The Cape Breton Book of the Night and populates her videos with characters and objects and scenes from near Inverness. For anyone from Inverness county, her performance and installations are clearly made in and are about this place. It’s the same with Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer’s film, Keep Busy, which was set on Margaree Island. The connection isn’t just artists, though. Stewart Brand, who founded The Whole Earth Catalog and was one of the key architects of the back-to-the- land movement, also lived near Mabou Mines for some time during the early 70s.

AMANDA: We saw Robert and Rudy’s Keep Busy together at Anthology Film Archives in 2008. Erik had seen it earlier, but we went crazy over it because, for us, it functioned first as an expanded home-movie exercise, literally so in that it included many of the adults Erik had grown up knowing in New York and Cape Breton— people I had also come to know. The film was made in 1975. Rudy wrote the script on the back of an envelope as they made their way to Margaree Island to begin shooting. JoAnne Akalaitis invited the late, great Samuel Beckett actor, David Warrilow, up from New York to participate and the story, such as it is, seems like a Beckett-like take on Cape Breton locals as they prepare for winter, but in a way that is somewhat vaudevillian, with Richard Serra seen constantly astride one of the shacks while disassembling it, and Joan Jonas laughing hysterically as she pushes a mound of garbage up a hill. JoAnne gives a marvelous performance as a feckless yokel. There are many stories about them being stranded on the island while making the film and nearly losing the footage when they came back in a storm. Absolutely no one seems to agree on how long the process took. Was it a few days or a few weeks? We’ll never know.

But June Leaf told me that some of the locals who saw the film felt they were being mocked. Local people lost lives and limbs through their work on that Island. We interviewed a man, Herbie MacArthur, whose parents both drowned on their way to tend the lighthouse there. The gap between these groups’ stories about the island is stark.

In about 2013 we came around to wanting to make work in response to the film and its production. At the same time, we got turned on to the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler through Kodwo Eshun and Angalika Sagar of the Otolith Group and wondered: Can we somehow combine these works? Can we tell the story of the New York artists coming to a remote place of great natural beauty, living among agrarian people from another time— from the perspective of Afro-futurism? To many folks this seemed fanciful and in need of defense. But we’ve held on, in a landscape of changing awareness wrought by the Black Lives Matter movement. We’ve spent the past few years in research mode.

“Thinking about survival within an aesthetic modality feels urgent now.” —AMANDA TRAGER

ERIK: As children, Margaree Island was a psychic and literal destination for me and my friends, and the adults also seemed to focus on it as a locus of endless fascination; it seemed to embody our deepest collective desires. The coast curves around the smaller, abandoned island and creates a natural amphitheater so that it becomes a central figure in the landscape and psyche of the community here.

After first seeing Keep Busy, Margaree Island became a logical place to imagine a re-centering of my own sense of cultural identity. What if the planet had begun a process of cultural remapping during the Keep Busy production, with Margaree Island the center of this newly terraformed culture? I saw the Keep Busy cast and crew as back-to-the-land psycho-geographers. The flâneurs of Paris re-imagined on that abandoned island, literally deconstructing the shacks that housed the former fishermen, for no other reason than the inevitability of poetic gesture while the camera rolled. Keep Busy exists for me as a document of a production, a distant remnant of that original gesture, those folks wandering through that landscape, at that time, and also an imagined future that unfolds from that time and place.

AMISH: I’ve been trying to map out the points of early contact for some of these American artists who started coming here in the late 60s. A key actor in that story is Carmelita Hinton, who founded the Putney School in Vermont, in 1935. This past summer David and Tamara Rasmussen in Bay St. Lawrence told us about how Carmelita and a group of students from Putney came to Cape Breton on a bicycle tour in the 30s or 40s, and bought a disused farm along the coast between Mabou and Inverness, to use for the school’s International Program. Over the years the Putney School sent students to Cape Breton to work on the farm, and to run summer camps there. A lot of people, including David Rasmussen, Jon Hendricks, and Parker Barrs Donham, came to Cape Breton as counsellors for the Putney School camp, or as Putney students.

Among these people was Timothy Asch, who had worked with Ansel Adams and some of the other modernist photographers including Paul Strand and Minor White. After coming to Mabou Mines on a Putney School trip, Asch returned in 1952 to make a photo-documentary as part of the Stirling County study, a project that employed visual anthropologist John Collier to study mental health effects on people as a result of migrating from fishing and farming communities along the Digby Neck to larger centres such as Digby. The Mabou Mines photographs were to serve as a “control group,” documenting subsistence farming and fishing. The images he produced were in the style of the Farm Security Administration photographs of the 30s, documenting rural conditions during the Great Depression. I suspect that in looking a lot like the rural United States in the years before WWII, Cape Breton would have occupied a particular place of imaginative potential for these critics of modernity and leftist-progressive educators.

For me, this shows that the idea of Cape Breton as a refuge, from the kinds of political and economic changes going on in the United States after WWII, existed among leftist-artistic circles as early as the 40s. Timothy Asch came to Cape Breton almost 15 years before Robert Frank, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, JoAnne Akalaitis and Philip Glass. Cape Breton inhabited the imagination of successive generations of artists, from the 50s through the 70s, in similar ways. This attraction and integration was aesthetic, ideological and practical. The Putney School students, for instance, helped their neighbors make hay, repaired the farm buildings and went on hiking trips. The school’s educational philosophy was heavily influenced by the ideas of American philosopher and progressive educator John Dewey. Instead of athletics, they did farm labour or went on hiking trips.

“Cape Breton as a site for so many people’s utopian projections is something that defies easy explanation” —AMANDA TRAGER

AMANDA: I love hearing this history, particularly about the visual anthropologists. The overlap between political radicalism and the avant-garde is fascinating. I see Robert Frank’s work as a turning point in this tradition of documentary photography. Although The Americans could be used as a visual textbook explicating class and racial divide in America during the 50s, it also represented a departure. It was not distanced or objective, but intensely felt, off-kilter in every way; profound on another level. And then he abandoned that kind of work at the moment of its highest acclaim. He became a different kind of photographer, more playful, and he became a filmmaker. I don’t think he wanted to be associated with photojournalism or social justice issues. He wanted to be an artist, which in those days, didn’t dovetail with politics too much, or not in the ways that it had. He fell in with the Beats, that quintessentially optimistic American movement. But growing up in Switzerland as a Jew during WWII, he was a doleful guy. So maybe for Frank the move away from overt politics is more akin to the Surrealists or the Dada movement’s cultivation of the absurd in the aftermath of WWI—a purposeful response to, and escape from, that period’s horrors. During the time that we’re speaking about, Frank’s horrors included the deaths of both his children.

The New York artists who came here shortly after Frank in the late 60s and early 70s were also not like the socially-conscious photographers; their work was not motivated by politics. Nor did they embrace the ecstatic chaos of the Beats. But then, what were they, as a group? We tried all summer to link the older artists in our circle to the larger countercultural moment—a.k.a. the hippie movement—to no avail. Their disavowal is almost comical given the way they lived. But they were not seeking alternatives to consumer culture. They possessed outsized ambition, and they desired recognition and financial support, all of which came from New York City and other urban art centers. Needing to get away for the summer, they came here because land was cheap and they had very little money and this was a place they could all be together. They came to know other communities of people “from away,” like the back-to-the-landers, only gradually or not at all. They were self-involved and involved with one another. Their work was what it was all about. For artists like your father who came to live on Cape Breton as part of the back-to-the-land movement, life and art came together. Not so for these driven New Yorkers.

Even though that’s the scene to which we’re most connected, perhaps Erik and I are trying to return to the attitude of the earlier visual anthropologists and the back-to-the-land artists. We’re thinking about a work that re-invests in the idea of Cape Breton as a place that actively models alterity and ways of re-thinking community. In our fantasy, the avant-gardes and countercultures come together—but informed by Black theory and Black presence, like an aspirational, alternative history realized in a future. We learned so much about Black Nova Scotian history this summer, including the fact of thousands of free Blacks coming here as British Loyalists after the American Revolution, and other waves of migration. Marcus Garvey visited in 1937. He delivered a speech in Sydney that formed the basis of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song. We heard a lot about this history from Theresa Brewster, chair of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Glace Bay. The UNIA was started there in 1914. According to her, there’s a general lack of knowledge regarding Black presence within Canada. Scholars like Katherine McKittrick, Rinaldo Walcott and Afua Cooper say the same thing. For us, as Americans, this ignorance was even more pronounced in that we weren’t even fully aware that slavery had existed here.

Connections between Black life counterculture and nature became more tangible only after absorbing Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman’s 2016 talk “The Black Outdoors,” at Duke University. We’re still thinking about the similarities, and mainly the differences, between the escaped slaves of petit marronage finding temporary refuge while hidden in mountain homesteads and 60s American draft-dodgers escaping to the Canadian woods. However inadequate the comparison may be, both are instances of people living outside capitalist space, however precariously. Fred Moten’s talk with Robin D.G. Kelley earlier this year at University of Toronto (along with Rinaldo Walcott and Afua Cooper) was also eye-opening, particularly Fred’s way of seeming to speak not on the level of theory, but quite literally, about saving the planet through small self-organized cells.

AMISH: Earlier you referenced Octavia Butler and the idea of speculative fiction. As I understand it, it projects a possible future.

AMANDA: This fall we’ve been in Los Angeles, of all places, with fires raging like never before, but predicted in Octavia Butler’s fiction. We’ve been studying under the great Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes, keepers of Octavia’s flame and prominent figures in the field of Black horror and sci-fi. Our project is a geographical mash-up, as was the North Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath. Black horror is a rising genre without, completely unsurprisingly, much white contribution. But centuries of slavery and post- slavery have taken a toll on everyone, including slave-owners, who grotesquely dehumanized themselves to do what they did, and went so far as to institutionalize their crimes against other humans. To that extent, slavery is everyone’s horror story. Fiction can re-tie threads in different patterns; it can heal; it can re-think a future.

AMISH: Many people who were attracted to Cape Breton during the 60s and 70s—back-to-the-landers in particular—sought to create a future that was radically different from what they’d left behind, but had elements that were well in place within Cape Breton communities. Cape Breton was an emancipatory space—at least in their imaginations, and at least until cold cashless reality sunk in. How does the speculative play out in how you approach the history of these artists in Cape Breton?

AMANDA: Cape Breton as a site for so many people’s utopian projections is something that defies easy explanation. We’re adapting our research into a script that includes all the groups we’ve been discussing, not just the artists. The back-to-the-landers, the Buddhists are now all part of the story. We’re aware that re-telling the story of Cape Breton as refuge through the lens of Afrofuturism and Black horror may be controversial, or feel random. But a trope within Afrofuturism and social justice-oriented sci-fi is that imagining a better future is foundational to realizing one. Enslaved Blacks believing in and fighting for slavery’s end meant investing in a fantasy; it was their science fiction. But it happened, miraculously, more or less. Believing capitalism can end is our current science fiction. The global ecology, of which Cape Breton is a part, has always been at the heart of these struggles.

Indigenous artists vs. Paul Kane’s controversial legacy

admin — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 21:10:47 +0000

The Colours of Pride NFB film from 1973

As Visual Arts News Research intern, I spend a lot of time digging around the Nova Scotia Archives. Recently, I discovered an interesting pair of film advertisements, which the National Film Board (NFB) sent to VANS in the late 1970s. One film portrayed Indigenous people in visual art, while the other depicted Indigenous people as visual art. In the middle of this 150th year of colonialism, seeing both films together feels like an accurate snapshot of the roots of our cultural mis/understandings of the history of Canada today.

The 1973 documentary The Colours of Pride, hosted by ground breaking curator/art historian/administrator and multi- disciplinary artist Tom Hill, centers around four highly celebrated Indigenous artists, including three members of the influential Professional Native Indian Artists Association (PNIAA)—known colloquially as the “Indian Group of Seven.” The film (available here via a campus subcribtion) features compelling interviews with Daphne Odjig, Alex Janvier, Norval Morrisseau and Allan Sapp, each of whom has their own unique aesthetic but shared a desire to reflect on their cultural identities. For instance, Anishinaabe artist Morrisseau, aka Copper Thunderbird—the founder of the Woodland style movement, dubbed the “Picasso of the north”—takes inspiration from his family’s oral traditions, vibrantly depicting Ojibwe legends, visions and dreams. By contrast, Sapp’s paintings are more grounded in everyday realities, featuring his Cree community’s experiences on the Red Pheasant Reserve in north central Saskatchewan.

Paul Kane, Assiniboine hunting buffalo, National Gallery of Canada

Paul Kane, Flathead woman with child, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Achat, legs William Gilman Cheney

In his sensitive depiction of his subjects, Sapp’s work contrasts Irish born Canadian painter Paul Kane’s embellished depictions of Indigenous people from about a 100 years earlier. The second film I stumbled across, Paul Kane Goes West (1972), explores Kane’s popular paintings and journal sketches from mid-1800s—credited as the first settler depiction of Indigenous peoples between Toronto and Vancouver. The film relies on voice-over readings from Kane’s journal and images from

Paul Kane Goes West NFB film postcard

his journal sketches—now considered an accurate depiction of First Nations people during that time—and his studio paintings, which liberally take inspiration from his sketches. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes his studio work as using the “stylistic discourse of his day: idealized Aboriginal people, Europeanized landscapes, muted colours.” From today’s more critical viewpoint, one can view Kane’s romanticized studio paintings as contributing to harmful stereotypes, such as the “Noble Savage,” unlike some of the more authentic fieldwork he recorded in his journals. Critics such as Arlene Gehmacher, a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, have noted a number of factual inaccuracies in Kane’s paintings. For instance, his Flat Head Woman and Child, Caw-wacham appears to be a mashup of a few of his watercolour paintings, fusing characteristics from three tribes into his depiction of a mother and child.

The legacy and influence of the artists in these films can be seen in Canadian contemporary arts today. Celebrated Cree and Irish multi-disciplinary artist Kent Monkman directly responds to artists like Paul Kane by reclaiming and queering the historical representation of Indigenous people from mid 1800s, as well as continuing the trailblazing legacy and tradition of the members of the “Indian group of Seven.” This year, 150 Indigenous artists including Monkman, as well as Mi’kmaq artists Ursula Johnson, Jordan Bennett and Alan Syliboy, received $10 000 each from the REVEAL Indigenous Art Awards, funded through donations and sponsors, to continue the creation of art by them, not about them.

Unearthing buried histories of African Nova Scotian artists

admin — Fri, 09 Jun 2017 01:58:07 +0000

“Powerful legacies, both individual and collective, were unveiled, forever changing the expectations of Black artists in this province.”

I have been researching all things related to the 1998 seminal exhibition of works by Black Nova Scotian artists In this Place… for weeks, trying to uncover more about the history of Black artists in the Halifax art world—a history which is buried too deeply in our archives. Case in point: when Jade Peek graced the cover of The Coast in February to talk about curating her exhibition The Griots, the article heralded it as “the first exhibition of solely Afro-Indigenous artists in Halifax since the 1990s.” This got me wondering why I hadn’t heard more about exhibitions by Black Nova Scotian artists in the past two decades and sent me digging through the archives to learn more. As a student of Art History and Visual Arts News’ research intern, I was eager to find out whether there were other significant exhibitions or dialogues regarding African Nova Scotians’ culture that had fallen through the cracks of the canon I studied at the NSCAD.

“Rapids in the Backwater: A History of the Exhibition In This Place.” Found in the NSCAD archives.

In my previous post, I looked back at the milestone exhibition In this Place…, and spoke with curator David Woods, but I couldn’t stop researching there. For one, it took a while to get to a hold of materials and actually see things—like, for instance, the archives of the Anna Leonowens Gallery, where In This Place was exhibited. When I finally got to look through the archives, I stumbled across the work of another researcher, Meril Rasmussen, who spoke out to me straight from 1998 through a 62-page unpublished thesis paper (which we’ve now put online here, with help from NSCAD head librarian Rebecca Young) that detailed the history and context of In This Place. To my surprise and amazement, the paper contains more history of African Nova Scotian art and artists in Halifax (up to 1998) than I’ve been able to track down anywhere else to date.

“Powerful legacies, both individual and collective, were unveiled, forever changing the expectations of Black artists in this province,” writes Rasmussen, highlighting the significance of In this Place. “It was a grand entrance into the spotlighted arena of the public art gallery.” But more than that, Rasmussen’s paper examines the racial tensions that existed in 90’s Halifax within the white and Black art worlds.

After Melanie Colosimo—the current Anna Leonowens Gallery Director and protector of the archives—and I washed our hands (cleaner and safer than gloves, she explained), I poured over five large manila folders for In This Place (full disclosure, I have never looked at any archives ever; it’s very cool). Towards the end of the first folder, there was a thick document titled “Rapids in the Backwater: A history of the Exhibition In This Place…” by Rasmussen, dated Sept 15^th 1998. The document had this note on the bottom:

“I am enroute to New York for the winter months. Pamela Edmonds (###-####) and Rudi Meyer (###-####) have agreed to help respond to any questions inquires. Also, you can send any response to merilr@hotmail.com (note the hotmail does not take attachments. I will arrange another address from New York, so please make contact and I will provide an updated and more useful address.)

These very ‘90’s technology issues made me laugh. I felt that this mystery document in my hands must have been a lost attachment in ‘the hotmail’ that didn’t make it into today’s online research materials. I flipped through the 60 plus double-spaced white pages, and stumbled across a quote by Peter Dykhuis (now the curator of the Dalhousie Art Gallery) regarding the exhibition that gave me goose bumps: “I hope that twenty years from now some archivist might find Anna Leonowens’ name attached to it; that’s nice. But ultimately I hope that BANNS [Black Artists Network of Nova Scotia] is completely affiliated with this thing … That’s what I want.” I almost fell over—I am a researcher (or archivist if you will) and next year is the 20^th anniversary of the exhibition. If this isn’t a sign I don’t know what is.

“No Laughing Matter” 1993 exhibition catalog from the Dalhousie Archives

I dive into Rasmussen’s accessible, conversational-style thesis, and learn that he happened to be the gallery intern during the exhibition of In this Place and a student at NSCAD at the time, and toured with curator David Woods as the exhibition traveled around the province. Having read Rasmussen’s Rapids in the Backwater: A History of the Exhibition a few times now, I want to explain why I find it so significant. It tells the stories that no one else has. It reads like an insider’s perspective, a fly on the wall to some very uncomfortable but relevant discussions of the often not talked about race relations in Halifax’s major art institutions like NSCAD, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Dalhousie Art Gallery and Mount Saint Vincent University Gallery during the 1990’s.

For instance, he draws attention to one of the least talked about group exhibitions today, but very controversial at the time, No Laughing Matter—which included works by celebrated African American artist, Carrie Mae Weems in 1992 at the Dalhousie Art Gallery. I went to the Dalhousie gallery archives to find out even more about this particular exhibition because it caused such unprecedented social turmoil in Halifax—even inspiring Black students from Dalhousie University to stage a sit-in protesting the exhibition in the gallery. Gallery goers interpreted the exhibition as completely racist, despite the fact that Weems’ intention was to convey a very anti-racist message. In the exhibition catalogue, Weems explains that her work “attempts to get at the racism of whites and internalized racism of Blacks.”

“This work, like the other in the series, reminds us that it is appropriate to ask not ‘Is it funny?’ but rather ‘Funny to whom? And why?”

Weems struck a nerve by pairing photography of African Americans and monkeys with racist jokes: “She confronts the whole psychology of racism by confronting people with their own racism,” Rasmussen quotes Woods explaining in his unpublished thesis. “So there were a number of pieces, like they’d have a picture of a Black man and a gorilla and they’d say things like ‘Which one’s smarter?’ The whole idea being that what you are thinking—since everybody knows the answers to these things—it challenges you. It is sort of like, ‘Well, why do you actually know the answer to this?’ So that’s her methodology.”

Nina Felshin, from New York’s Independent Curators Incorporated, further explains Weems’ work in the show’s exhibition catalogue: “This work, like the other in the series, reminds us that it is appropriate to ask not ‘Is it funny?’ but rather ‘Funny to whom? And why?” As there was not much precedent for this type of racially focused art work in the city’s art scene yet, and no previous dialogue with any Black student or community organizations when the show was booked almost two years prior to its opening, it came as a sucker punch to many.

Rasmussen also critically explores the influence of artist Jim Shirley (an American-born Cape Breton transplant) and his connections to the Black civil rights movement, the cultural impact of first Black student to graduate from NSCAD in 1951, Audrey Dear, and author/curator Barry Lord’s spotlight on Lawren Harris’ (of the Group of Seven) paintings of Black communities in Nova Scotia—amongst other things. And he unpacks exhibitions like Africville: A Spirit That Lives On from 1989 at The Mount Saint Vincent Art Gallery.

Who is Rasmussen?

But who was this Rasmussen character? I was so taken by this story of the fly on the wall researcher that I immediately Googled “Meril Rasmussen” and tried to figure out how I could get a hold of him. Did that old hotmail address still work? After a quick search, a website for someone with that name came up right away (www.merilrasmussen.com/)! The website homepage showed some text about math that my eyes glazed over, and his bio showed a picture of a white guy in probably his 40’s who described himself as “raised in a remote fishing village on the northern tip of Cape Breton Island in Atlantic Canada.” He writes: “I attended university in Halifax and have subsequently lived for extended periods in Cape Breton, Johannesburg, and New Delhi. I currently live in Rio de Janeiro.” Brazil? Could this be our guy?

Author of “The History of In this Place…” Meril Rasmussen, now living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

He continues: “I have degrees in Art, Art History and Film, and I’ve worked in film and television as a director and producer.” This sounds like the person! I immediately sent him a message asking if he had been a gallery intern at Anna Leonowens in 1998. Within moments, I received a reply.

Meril: Chris! I have been secretly waiting for this email for decades! Talk to me.

I got goose bumps over my whole body and my eyes watered a bit. What are the chances? Our first couple emails looked like this:

Chris: Meril! I’m literally sitting here with the archives. My mind is blown on all of your research and how well this work was put together. Why wasn’t this published or at least taken out of the gallery archives? It’s amazing. Who did you write this for? I have so many questions…

Meril: Thanks! I assume that you are looking at the catalogue for Skin that I produced along with Pamela Edmonds (who is now a curator in TO). I also wrote a sort of a thesis at that time linked with the In This Place show that looked at the history of race at NSCAD. I can’t remember if I managed to time-capsule that one into an archives somewhere.

I explained that I was looking at the thesis on In this Place. But I also quickly checked the aforementioned Skin. (The full name is Skin: a Political Boundary. It was an exhibition at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in 1998, co-curated by Meril Rasmussen and Pamela Edmonds.)

“Skin: a Political Boundary”. Co-curated Meril Rasmussen and Pamela Edmonds in 1998

Meril: I wrote that paper as part of an independent study for Rudi Meyer (Now the director of the Master Design Program at NSCAD) … There was a legitimate question about who would get to tell that story … My suggestion that my piece should be included in the catalogue was not really taken seriously and I had the sense that it would not be constructive to push.

Some of Meril’s work did make it into the exhibition catalogue for In This Place, as it was used extensively for Dr. Harold Pearse’s curatorial statement, at the end of which he says he is “indebted to Meril Rasmussen, the curatorial intern of Anna Leonowens for sharing his research.”

“I learned so much from David about community-building. He was the driving force behind that show. He went door to door around the province and found the art.”

He reflected on his relationships with David Woods, who he traveled around with in a cube van installing the exhibition:

Meril: I learned so much from David about community-building. He was the driving force behind that show. He went door to door around the province and found the art. He found Jim Shirley and convinced him to come for the opening … I remember the artistic intensity that David put into hanging the shows. It went to CBU (Cape Breton University) in Cape Breton, to the Museum of Industry in Stellarton and a tiny little museum in Shelburne, where the red dust from the Scarlet Letter years earlier still got in all the display cases.

[Side note: I look up this reference and discovered that historical drama The Scarlet Letter staring Demi Moore and Gary Oldman, was indeed filmed in Shelburne in 1995. You can see the red dirt roads in the trailer.]

Catalogue cover for “In This Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia”

Rasmussen was an undergraduate student when he wrote his unpublished thesis, and felt compelled to look deeply into In this Place…, which included racial inclusion and exclusion at NSCAD. In so many ways I feel that the change he was hoping for has been very slow in the last 20 years. For example Rasmussen cites a group called MOSAIC, lead by NSCAD faculty member Letti Beals, which formed at NSCAD in the early 1990’s. MOSAIC was for international and Canadian students of colour. The group had laid out eight goals of the club that included proposals to expand the European dominant Art History department, establishing a file cabinet that collected books, videos, articles and slides relevant to the group, and a group exhibition of the people in MOSIAC. Only one goal was achieved in the form of a 17-person group show in the Anna’s galleries I and II in the fall of 1993. Rasmussen writes in his thesis: “These goals however, were cut short when organizer, Lettie Beals was dismissed from her administrative position at NSCAD.” In the last couple years, almost 24 years after MOSIAC, the students have established a POC (people of colour) collective. I cannot help but wonder how having MOSIAC and Beals at NSCAD for the past two decades might have changed the representation of the faculty and student body, as NSCAD’s feminist collective has done for women over the years: the university now has a female president and high numbers of celebrated female alumni, students and faculty.

Discovering this document and connecting with Meril, has changed my view of Halifax’s art scene. My ignorance to the quiet history of racialized tension and the rich history of African Nova Scotians in visual art has been revealed to me, and I have begun to feel more educated on more of Nova Scotia’s art history. In our final emails Meril and I started making plans to discuss the whole situation of finding his paper and the lasting impact of In this Place… during a panel discussion this summer hosted by Visual Arts Nova Scotia (Stay tuned!). He signs off with “But as you see, this material is a potential tool for needed transformation and if you can connect it with the right people, it could all have legs.” I am filled with his contagious inspiration to share information.

In this time, when Canadians continue to be more and more aware of the ongoing oppression facing people of colour within the larger societal institutions such as justice and law enforcement, we within the art community must look to our own institutions. I believe that first step comes in knowing our histories and critically examining our own past of exclusion and white supremacy as a way to make sure we are not continuing it. In researching the exhibition In this Place, it was difficult to find written information around the histories of Black exhibitions, artists and curators in Nova Scotia—even about one of it’s most famous. So, inspired by Meril’s paper and his desire to share information, I’m working to make more of this information available online (such as Meril’s thesis which is online here now).

And for anyone looking to learn more about exhibitions featuring black artists in Nova Scotia in the past 20 years, I’ve starting compiling an incomplete list below—Let us know what I’ve missed in the comments!

Skin: A Political Boundary (1998), Curated by Pamela Edmonds and Meril Rasmussen

SisterVisions III: Through Our Eyes (2000), Curated by Pamela Edmonds

Cultural Memory (2000), Curated by Pamela Edmonds

Home: The Art of Preston (2000), Curated by David Woods and Dr. Harold Pearse

Black body: Race, Resistance, Response (2001), Curated by Pamela Edmonds

Lucie Chan : Something to Carry (2002) Curated by Ingrid Jenkner

Secret Codes Quilt Exhibition (2012), Curated by David Woods

The Hair Show: Honouring Our Roots: Viola Desmond (2016)

Inspire (2014), Curated by David Woods

Stitched Stories:The Family Quilts (2016), Curated by Shauntay Grant

Check out these other blog posts from our researcher as she digs through our archives:

Get to know our research intern

In this Place: The lasting impact of Nova Scotia’s first major exhibition of Black artists’ work

Looking back: Our version of “women in the arts”in the 70s

In This Place: The lasting impact of Nova Scotia’s first exhibition of Black artists’ work

admin — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 21:16:24 +0000

Detail of exhibition catalogue cover for “In This Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia”

The exhibition We are the Griots—curated by Jade Peek—may have opened to the biggest snowstorm all season this past February at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, but it still saw a lot of press coverage. Jade was on the cover of The Coast weekly paper. The article billed We are the Griots as the first exhibition of “solely Black Nova Scotian artists in Halifax since the 1990s.” I was stunned — Had there really not been another exhibition dedicated to Black Nova Scotian art since the 90’s?

So I went digging, looking up the late 90’s in the Visual Arts Nova Scotia archives, and low and behold, it was on the cover of the Spring 1998 issue, Volume 20 Number 1: In this Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia. The cover image is bold, graphic and visually striking. It features a painting of three figures in simple, but expressive white lines on a black thickly textured background. Inside, there’s an article by curator/artist Pamela Edmonds, stressing the historical importance of the exhibition. “In this Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia represents the first-ever attempt to represent and contextualize the tradition of Black Nova Scotian art making in the province,” she writes. In my research since, I have learned that David Woods—who co-curated the show with Harold Pearse—represents just one individual out of just a handful of Black curators who have been working in Halifax to this day, continuing the push for the self representation of Black Nova Scotians in visual art.

“A great void existed for me as an artist in Nova Scotia … of knowing that most people assume that no art of significance had been created by the Black community.” —David Woods

Volume 20 / Issue 1 / Spring 1998 / “In this Place” cover

Edmonds describes the exhibition as a “groundbreaking effort to provide a comprehensive overview of a sector of the art making community rarely shown or acknowledged.” She points to a history of exclusion and segregation in Nova Scotia. In the article she interviews the co-curators David Woods, a local artist and community organizer, and Dr. Harold Pearse, the academic dean at NSCAD, about their inspiration for the exhibit, their relationship and the project. As Woods explains, the title of the exhibition originates from his poem Abode, which references the experience of the early Black settlers and the land the government allotted them in Nova Scotia—described as
“barren, rocky soil or swampland.” For Pearse, MSVU Art Gallery’s 1983 show The Past in focus: a community album before 1918 : photographs from the Notman Studio served as his inspiration for the exhibition, as well as providing him with his first exposure to the depth of art created by Nova Scotia’s Black communities.

Pearse explains that even though many Black kids from the community spaces are very interested in visual art, their enrollment at NSCAD has always been very low. In the article, Pearse points to Woods, a self taught multi-disciplinary artist and an active community member, as the perfect link to try to bridge the two worlds of the Black art communities and the institutionalized White art world.

Installation view from the catalogue of “In This Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia”

Pearse and Woods discuss how surprised they all were by the amount of Black Nova Scotian artists that they uncovered in their interview with Edmonds. When they began planning their exhibition, they were thinking about featuring only a few artists—but that all changed by the end of Wood’s research, which consisted of his unorthodox, but essential curatorial method of driving to several rural Black communities around Nova Scotia and literally knocking on doors and asking questions. Woods brought back over 200 images of work, which they narrowed down to 100 pieces to show by 45 artists. As the exhibition grew, the curatorial team realized it deserved more than just a two-week show at the gallery. They decided to take the exhibition beyond Halifax, touring to three other galleries in the province.

In Halifax they planned several special events, connecting Black artists to the larger art community. These events included a panel discussion and performance event with guests including: Jim Shirley, one of the first Black artists to exhibit in Nova Scotia; Audrey Dear Hesson, the first Black graduate of NSCAD in 1951; local photographer and filmmaker Silvia Hamilton; and painter Crystal Clements. They also screened a film about celebrated African American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, gave youth workshops and tours of NSCAD, and provided a funding information session with the Canada Council and the Nova Scotia Arts Council (all made possible by $40 000 of grants obtained from the Nova Scotia Arts Council, Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts by Black Artist Network Nova Scotia (BANNS) and Peter Dykhuis, who was the director of the Anna Leonowens Gallery at the time). After the tour concluded, they were able to produce a full size catalogue from the NSCAD Press.

Installation view from the catalogue of “In This Place: Black Art In Nova Scotia”

Pearse’s curatorial statement in the catalogue includes well-researched tidbits of information about the experience of Black artists in Halifax, such as the fact that Hesson received the Lieutenant-Governor’s prize and “taught for the school’s Saturday morning children’s art classes, at the YMCA’s boys club and to an adult education group in Africville.” But he points out that due to a shortage of employment opportunities, Hessen could never obtain steady employment in the public school system. Pearse continues with a sparse, but steady history of Black exhibitions and artists in Halifax in the 80’s and 90’s, a time when NSCAD grads and Black artists like Donna James were showing black and white photographs (Eight Men in a Big House, 1989), Buseje Baily was making videos about the female black body (Body Politic, 1992) and Derril Robinson showed his pottery in a joint exhibition with Andrea Arbour (Facades, 1995).

Woods’ statement provides a much more sobering reflection on the presence of Black artists in Nova Scotia. He notes that “a great void existed for me as an artist in Nova Scotia …the void of knowing that there were no exhibitions of local Black artists featured in the provinces’ major galleries; of knowing that Black artists were unfamiliar with each other’s work; of knowing that most people assume that no art of significance had been created by the Black community.” He wanted to challenge himself to try and fill that void with an exhibition that could change the status quo.

Beverly Bowden’s “Picking Strawberries” (1997), oil on canvas

When I spoke with Woods, I asked him what he thought, almost twenty years later, about the impact that In this Place had made. He talked a lot about an increase of visibility. “All of the establishment galleries offered shows to the NSCAD people for the next four or five years,” he pointed out. Woods himself has continued curating and one of his longest touring exhibitions has been The Secret Codes, which started touring 2012, where he featured narrative and pictorial quilts exhibited quilts made by African Nova Scotian quilt makers. These quilts are the result of a collaboration of Woods’ drawings and the talent of quilt makers like Myla Borden of the Vale Quilters, a group from New Glasgow, who have been working together since In this Place showed the pictorial quilt Passages. As well, he recalled MSVU Art Gallery invited Shirley back to the Mount to have a retrospective called Jim Shirley Returns: The Art of James R. Shirley (2000). Woods himself also worked as an Associate Curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia from 2006-2007, where he helped to develop the AGNS’ African Canadian Art Initiative. During his short time there he helped to bring Mary Bendolph: Gees Bend Quilts and Beyond to the gallery in 2007 and worked on acquiring work by early Black Atlantic painter Edward Mitchel Banister. He confidently states after all of this work things can “no longer go back to the status quo.”

I’d like to believe that the status quo has changed in the 19 years since In this Place opened. Researching this historically seminal exhibition in Halifax’s art history has opened my eyes to the work and struggle of Black visual artists and curators in the very White dominated art world of Halifax. A staggering number of galleries in Canada still almost exclusively give solo shows to white artists (according to statistics from a 2015 Canadian Art study). We are the Griots represents one in just a small fraction of Black artists and curators living and working in our province. In this Place blew the door open in terms of self-representation for Black artists in Nova Scotia, but that door is still there and it’s primed to be blown away completely.

In the next two parts of this series, I will be looking closer at the history and context of Black exhibitions in Halifax previous to In this Place, and report the prolific work of the author of the VANS article that started me on this journey, writer, artists, art administrator and curator, Pamela Edmonds in the years following In this Place.

More: Looking Back: Our version of “women in the arts” in the 70s

More: Get to know our research intern

Looking back: Our version of “women in the arts” in the 70’s

vanews — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 19:03:52 +0000

Photo from “Growing Up Female,” a personal photo journal by Abigail Heyman published in 1974, and in the NSCAD library ever since.

I decided it’s best to start my exploration of the archive at the very first issue of Visual Arts Nova Scotia from 1976. The very first issue is filled with opinions, opportunities and resources — like tips on taking slides, exhibition listings, reviews and some advice on how to get grants from Canada Council for the arts. It’s clear to me that there was lots of energy being put into the new publication, as a way to support the budding visual arts scene in Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada. This strong foundation of support clearly continues 40 years later. But in the second issue, I came across a very interesting article entitled “Women in the Arts.” It is an annotated bibliographic record of 52 publications that catalog women in the arts, in fields including film, photography, writing, painting and sculpture, compiled by Chery Homes from Montreal’s PowerHouse Gallery, that offers a great historical reference and a poignant reflection of society at the time by a young Canadian feminist of settler heritage.

The list mainly contains books about historical and contemporary (at the time) female artists from America, Canada, Europe, Egypt and Colombia. It is also peppered with a mix of well known feminist authors like Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex , 1952) and lesser known surrealist fiction/nonfiction works such as Down Below by Leonora Carrington (1972). There are some hidden gem artists’ books, such as the photo journal Growing Up Female by Abigail Heyman (1974), a pamphlet from the West Coast Women’s artist Conference at the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California (1972), and some great 1970’s feminist titles such as Rooms with No View (Media Association, no date), Popcorn Venus (Rosen, 1973), Not in God’s Image (O’Failain, Martines, 1970) and Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (Chicago,1975). Also included is a memoir of Elizabeth Vigér-Lebrun from 1903 where Homes writes “The Queen picked up her paints when Elizabeth was too far in pregnancy to stoop. These memoirs include many clever anecdotes of the guerrilla tactics to feminine feminists and artists.” I’m not exactly sure what this means, but it is alluring to find out what guerrilla tactics the portrait painter of Marie Antoinette knew for “feminine feminists and artists.”

Excerpts from “Women — The Visual Arts Bibliography”

The list also includes an “unprecedented survey” called “Sex Differences in Art Exhibition Reviews: A Statistical Study” from 1972 by June Wayne, that looked at “systematic sex discrimination toward women artists by US media… with scrupulously accurate charts to delineate the facts,” notes Homes. Most publications highlight the achievements of women that have been mainly ignored by the mainstream art world except for one noted: “Extremely sexist” (Mathey,1951) and another from The Vanguard Artist: Portrait and Self Portrait (Rosenburg, Norris, 1965) where it’s noted “Rosenburg confines the women artist and the black artist to separate ghettos, stressing in his chapter on women artists, male chauvinism and role conflicts; and omitting women’s problems elsewhere.” Now, the word ‘ghettos’ would not be used today, but it’s a great look at a feminist critique of the time.

Homes told me, through email, that it took her six months to make the list with the help of her community. “Feminist artists were enthusiastic about helping one another and promoting the art work and activities of like-minded groups and women. Word of mouth, the mail and the telephone — that was what we had to work with.” In 1973 she was a founding member of PowerHouse Gallery or La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse. It is one of Quebec’s oldest artist run-centres and has a mandate to “expand on a history of feminist art practices and aims to provide a platform for contemporary art that is informed by feminist and gender theory, as well as intercultural and trans-disciplinary practices.”

Homes doesn’t remember the exact connection she had to Halifax or to VANS, but emphasized how strong the network of women was how word must have got to her fast (after just one publication remember) that VANS would happily publish her compiled list. On making the list she said: “I had been building my own personal collection of books that featured women artists and it occurred to me that there was no one place where all these books were listed for those of us who were interested in the history of art by women.” When I asked her about diversity of representation on the list she said “Women artists from other cultures were only found in articles or group exhibitions and were probably not ‘popular’ enough to publish books on at the time. We discovered them on our own and through artists exhibition exchanges with other galleries. Montreal (and Canada) was not as diverse as it certainly is now.” She adds: “As well as Frida Kahlo, there was Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold and René Cox that were admired at that time.”

To understand the context of this time and analyze the list more, I needed an expert. Luckily we have one of the top PH.D’s in feminist Art History at NSCAD, and my faculty advisor for this internship, Jayne Wark.

When I met with Dr. Wark, she patiently listened to my concerns and then explained to me that I need to understand the context of what the Art World was like in the 1970’s. One of the first things she said to me was “It was a desert for women! Let alone any person of colour!”

She explained that the art world was almost exclusively a place of the elite. To become an artist or an art historian, you had to come up through an institution and institutions were full of old white men supporting the establishment of the art industry, which was a place only for investment and blue chip artists. The racism and sexism were very institutionalized and heavily entrenched. No one was interested in talking about or supporting women artists because they were not considered good investments, even if the art was good. It was not unusual to be denied entry to an exhibition solely based on the fact of being a woman or a person of colour. And galleries could and would literally say it to your face that bluntly. There was no hiding the sexism and racism in the more subtle ways that still exist today. Today, the law is supposed to protect people from being discriminated against based on gender, race or sexual identity. But in the 1970’s, that was not the case. Basically, anyone not a white man was considered “insignificant.” It was indeed, a desert.

The spread of information about feminism and women’s art was new. Dr. Wark says that NSCAD offered its first Art History Class in 1976 called “Women in Image, Women as Image Maker.”

Looking at the list, Dr. Wark immediately noticed one book of huge significance missing; American Lucy Lippard’s From the Center: Feminist Essay’s on Women’s Art from 1976. There is a good chance, though, that Homes may not have heard about it by that time, but it is of particular importance as it may have been one of the first times the word “feminist” appeared in a publication. Lippard received an honorary degree from NSCAD in 2007.

We talked about other artists, particularly women of colour, who were significant during and before that time, but most likely not have had anything published about them. Such as the Harlem based painter, sculptor and quilter Faith Ringgold. Ringgold’s quilts at that time told the stories of African American women and portrayed their lived experiences. Another artist whose work I particularly enjoy is, Adrian Piper. Her performance work in the early 1970’s — such as her Catalysts lll, where she stuffs a large white towel into her mouth and rides around on a bus — explores race and gender and the feelings of public othering. Both artists have talked about not being able to get their own stories published and used their work to communicate their experiences.

Thanks to my chat with Dr. Wark, and my emails with Homes, I came away appreciating the reality of the situation for women in the Arts during the 1970’s. Homes’ initiative in gathering this feminist content for the second issue of Visual Arts Nova Scotia fed into the network of artists’ resources and publications of the 1970’s in Atlantic Canada.

More: Meet Visual Arts News’ research intern Chris Shapones

Looking back, Looking forward

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 22:01:58 +0000

Visual Arts News’ research intern Chris Shapones

Hi! My name is Chris. I’m the new student research intern at VANS. I’m going to be looking back at the archives of Visual Arts News and any other publications, galleries, organizations around Nova Scotia for the next few months. I’m also excited to talk to lots of people who were involve with starting, running and keeping VANS growing for the past 40 years.

A bit about me — I’m a queer, white, settler cis woman from Ontario. I moved to Halifax with my wife, Susie, and daughter, our cat Bart, last year to finally finish my interdisciplinary BFA at NSCAD (better late than never). I earned my diploma 10 years ago at Sheridan College in the glass department and since then have also become a bicycle mechanic and community organizer at the DIY Bike repair space, Bike Pirates, in Toronto and continue to volunteer every week at Bike Again here in Halifax. I consider myself a multidisciplinary designer and arts workers. Most recently I have been making short animated films with Susie. To our delight, last year we won the Halifax Smartphone Film Festival with a short animation Hide and Squeak.

I’m going to be posting here regularly for the next few months on things I find interesting from the past 40 years of Visual Arts News. If you have anything to share or add to the story please contact me at vanews@visualarts.ns.ca.

Cheers,

Chris Shapones

Retracing the past

vanews — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 22:04:55 +0000

Fifty years after the Confederation Centre opened its doors, Cathy Busby’s Acquired in 1964 displayed the artworks that Confederation Centre Art Gallery’s first director, Moncrieff Williamson, acquired on a shoestring budget ahead of a royal visit from the Queen. Or at least, what was left of them: seven of the original 33 pieces were no longer in the collection, seven others were in other exhibitions and three were in conservation. Busby noted the unavailable pieces’ absence through silhouettes on the gallery walls, painted in white against the muted green colour of the painting backings during the era. The exhibit was accompanied by an artist’s publication that brought together interviews, correspondence between the director and artists, Charlottetowners’ memories of the 1964 opening and a catalogue of the original 33 pieces.

The acquisitions that remain in the collection are a mix of figurative and abstract pieces. There were a variety of influences on Williamson’s choice of acquisitions, which were strongly determined by those he knew personally. And being 1964, there was a notable lack of female artists and no artworks by Aboriginal artists, let alone other cultures or perspectives. Busby spoke to me about Acquired in 1964 and related works via phone from B.C., where she is currently a teaching at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory.

Above: installation detail view of Cathy Busby’s Acquired in 1964, Confederation Centre Art gallery, october 25, 2014 – March 15, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

CHRISTIAN LEDWELL: What did the Confederation Centre’s 1964 acquisitions tell you about what the institution valued when it opened?

CATHY BUSBY: At the time, across the country, there was a kind of tension between modern, international-thinking artists and a more traditional pull—historical, like that of George Thresher and contemporary representational like Chris Pratt or Tom Forrestall, versus the abstraction of George Angliss or Suzanne Bergeron. So, in a sense, the collection is snapshot of that time and of those tendencies.

CL: What reactions did you hope to draw from viewers by representing the missing items as silhouettes?

CB: I think there’s something interesting about using the silhouette as a form for representing absence. With Acquired in 1964, the silhouettes created a kind of space. I liked that it piqued curiosity for the viewer to fill in. In the publication I record two stories from long-time Gallery supporters. When Catherine Hennessey saw the silhouette of the Dancer [by Thomas T. Bowie], she recalled its presence in its particular style and lightness.

An earlier installation, Atrium [at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in 2010] used silhouettes to group together works from various parts of the Gallery that had an Indigenous cultural presence through name or image, such as a ship painting called The Mi’kmaq. I was bringing forward the view that the influence of First Nations cultural presence permeates a lot of the collection — not just the gallery dedicated to Indigenous art — through the silhouettes.

For another installation, About Face [At the Union Theological Seminary in New York in 2012], I removed all the portraits that were up high circling the Refectory and replaced them with silhouettes. They were all formal portraits of former leaders of the Seminary and had an overbearing presence. Their absence had community members making new sense of the space and even suggesting other art installations.

CL: In what way did ethical or political concerns influence Acquired in 1964?

CB: I think Acquired makes apparent that public art institutions are more fluid than they seem. The values of an art institution change over time depending on what’s going on in the world, and in the art world in particular. In the publication I included letters between the director and the artists and these reveal how the acquisition process took place and how decisions were made. I think of our public institutions as malleable, as fluid in their potential to change over time. For instance, now the Confederation Art Gallery includes a much broader range of art practices than it did in 1964.

CL: Your other work with an ethical and political emphasis includes your installation WE ARE SORRY, representing apologies made to Aboriginal peoples by the Prime Ministers of Canada and Australia for the countries’ long-standing abuses. How does your new project Response build on that work?

The artist installing her work. Via the Confederation Centre Art Gallery.

CB: About a year ago, Beau Dick — a Kwakwaka’wakw artist from Alert Bay, an honorary chief and visiting artist at UBC — asked if I would give a large section of my work printed on sign vinyl, WE ARE SORRY, to be part of AWALASKENIS II: Journey of Truth and Unity. WE ARE SORRY was a text-based work that used my edited version of the statement of apology by the federal government to First Nations people for the Indian Residential School system in 2008. The caravan went across the country from Bella Bella to Ottawa [in July 2014], ending with a copper shaming ceremony to shame the government for its treatment of First Nations people. Both the ceremony and WE ARE SORRY were drawing attention to how so little has changed since the apology in 2008. The vinyl work gave the space a presence by providing a surface and boundary for the ceremony to take place on.

Now I’ve made this page work to contribute to extending the reach of the journey. It seemed like a good fit with Response, an artist publication out of Presentation House Gallery related to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Entitled Journeys, it’s a series of photos that documents the story of the work’s presence in the copper shaming ceremony on Parliament Hill.

CL: And hopefully institutions, both art and government, are changing and keeping up?

CB: I stay open to possibilities I feel like as artists and critics and cultural thinkers, [we] aim to keep our public institutions on the mark, to keep our eyes open to the possibilities, not falling into the routines—that can prevent that.

Turn on the radio

vanews — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 19:47:12 +0000

Double exposure of archival images from DEW Line station on Hershel Island, 1953. Image courtesy of Michael McCormack.

In this podcast for Visual Arts News, Veronica Simmonds chats with Halifax-based artist Michael McCormack about his explorations into shortwave radio. McCormack discusses revisiting the medium in his upcoming show at New Brunswick’s Galerie Sans Nom (February 28-April 4), Station, and his use of short-wave artifacts collected by his grandfather, a communications expert and avid collector.

Includes music from:
Apparat
Onra & Quetzal