Black Arts Vancouver co-founder Chase Keetley kicks off Sankofa Artist Talks at MOA, January 22
Joining the multidisciplinary African-Canadian artist is Chantal Gibson, who will read from her two recent books of poetry
Chase Keetley, Portrait, 2020.
Museum of Anthropology (MOA) presents Sankofa Artist Talks with Chase Keetley + Chantal Gibson on January 22 from 1 to 2:30 pm at MOA. Free with museum admission.
CHASE KEETLEY AND Chantal Gibson both have installations in the sweeping MOA exhibition Sankofa: African Routes, Canadian Roots, and the Vancouver-based artists will come together for an afternoon of conversation and poetry at the upcoming Sankofa Artist Talks.
The January 22 event opens with a discussion led by Keetley, co-founder of Black Arts Vancouver. He co-created the feature exhibition’s altar installation We Lost People: Diasporic Departure (2021) alongside artist and Black Arts Vancouver co-founder Berlynn Beam.
Keetley’s work is rooted in the Black experience.
“He investigates the mimicry and use of Blackness, such as the appropriation of cultural practices and iconography rooted in Pan-African Ethnography,” MOA notes. “Keetley’s practice takes a close look at the identities, desires, and the investments of non-Black people and how they live vicariously through Black Culture without actively dismantling the issues that coincide within its existence. Keetley’s work continually confronts forms of oppositional representations put on Black Bodies.”
Keetley will talk about the ideas that shape his work and his creative process.
A close up of Souvenir (2017) by Chantal Gibson in Sankofa: African Routes, Canadian Roots. Photo via MOA.
This will be followed by poetry readings and a book signing by Gibson, whose 2017 installation Souvenir is on display in Sankofa. An artist, poet, and educator who confronts colonialism and cultural erasure in her work, Gibson has exhibited her visual art in galleries and museums across North America. Recently named a 2021 3M National Teaching Fellow, she teaches writing and design communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
Gibson will read from her two recent books of poetry: 2019’s How She Read, which explores the representation of Black women in Canadian history, art, and literature and which won the 2020 Pat Lawther Memorial Award and 2020 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; and with/holding (2021), which brings a critical lens to the representation and reproduction of Blackness across digital media.
For more information, see MOA.
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