Commit Us to Memory: Black Women Curators Interrupting the Canon roundtable digs into history and future, at Art Connects on May 27
Discussion inspired by Nya Lewis’s site-specific installation at Vancouver Art Gallery’s Where do we go from here? exhibit
The Vancouver Art Gallery’s online Art Connects and The State of Blackness present Commit Us to Memory: Black Women Curators Interrupting the Canon, on May 27 at 4 pm.
AS PART OF the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Where do we go from here? exhibit, guest curator Nya Lewis installed a text-based, site-specific installation in the rotunda at the centre of the exhibit. Responding to the facility’s colonialist architecture and history, she blended manifesto, poem, and testimony, integrating the titles of important exhibitions curated by Black curators in Canada.
“It’s not just about calling out the institution. It’s also about what’s next,” Lewis told Stir when the wide-reaching show of recent work by BIPOC artists, which continues to June 13, opened last year. “The question is: Does your gallery accurately represent the Canadian art canon? We’re missing out on great art. When our work or stories—BIPOC artists’ or curators’—are absent, what happens? It’s about looking at the reality of why we aren’t there and how exclusion is perpetuated.”
Now, as part of the Art Connects series, Lewis uses that installation as a jumping off point for a roundtable called Commit Us to Memory: Black Women Curators Interrupting the Canon. A collaboration with The State of Blackness, the discussion includes Alyssa Fearon, director/curator at the Dunlop Art Gallery in the Regina Public Library; Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Nigerian-Canadian visual artist; and Geneviève Wallen, a Montreal- and Toronto-based independent curator, writer, and researcher.
Lewis, director of BlackArt Gastown, and her peers will reflect on the ongoing work of “building a Black art history for the future”.
The webinair takes place via Zoom, and you can register here.
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