A.1 ROUNDTABLE Accessing Art in the Virtual World: A Conversation about Access, Equity, and Diversity in 2020
Thu Oct 15 / 9:00 – 10:30 / public
voice_chat expiredchairs /
- Samantha Chang, University of Toronto
- Brittany Myburgh, University of Toronto
- Lauryn Smith, Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Museum of Art
By April 2020, a third of the world population was on lockdown. As schools, businesses, and cultural institutions shut their physical doors to the world, organizations turned to digital technology to provide and enhance virtual cultural spaces online. While numerous digital initiatives, such as Google Arts & Culture, began to preserve and provide access to cultural heritage objects online long before the global pandemic, the current situation has expanded the number of digital initiatives. Art history educators worked collaboratively in compiling lists of online resources to assist students and colleagues worldwide. Although the internet has helped many, the lockdown highlights significant connectivity and access inequality. In this roundtable, we will be addressing issues of access, equity, and diversity in online art resources, such as the digitization of collections and archives. What voices have overtaken digital spaces? How can we ensure that art is truly accessible to anyone, anywhere in 2020? See the Accessing Art in the Virtual World website.
Samantha Chang is a PhD Candidate from the Department of Art History at University of Toronto where she holds a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS) Doctoral Award, a Faculty of Arts and Science Top (FAST) Doctoral Fellowship, and a Mary H. Beatty Fellowship. A professional flutist and conductor, Samantha graduated from the Royal Academy of Music in London (England) and she is a fellow of the Trinity College London and the London College of Music. Samantha’s research explores the conceptual relationships between visual arts and music in the early modern period, specifically those of artistic identity, temporality, synaesthesia, and performativity. Her current research project examines the representation of music in the painter’s studio.
Brittany Myburgh is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation Projected Visions examines the various ways in which electric light took center stage as a medium in the twentieth century, seeking to provide a deeper history of contemporary light installation, new media practices, and the politics of participation in immersive environments. She is the journal manager and curator of The Six Hundred, an arts collective that seeks to promote youth and student artwork and writing through both physical exhibitions and an online platform. Originally from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Brittany also maintains a deep interest in contemporary Oceanic artistic practices. She recently received the Richard Charles Lee leadership award for her work as journal manager and art editor for the University of Toronto’s Re:Locations: Journal of the Asia-Pacific World.
Lauryn Smith is a PhD candidate in the Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Museum of Art Joint Art History Program. Her dissertation examines the cabinets of Amalia van Solms-Braunfels, Princess of Orange (1602-1675), to illuminate instances of innovation and exchange in her collecting practices and patronage. Lauryn is the co-founder of an international, transdisciplinary collaboration that seeks to integrate traditional art historical methodologies with cutting edge technological tools. She has presented her research internationally, including at the Dressing the Early Modern Network Conference, SECAC, and ACMRS. She also co-organized an international music and visual culture conference at the University of Toronto (2016). Lauryn has received numerous fellowships, including the Eva L. Pancoast Memorial Fellowship and a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Fellowship.
Digital Network, Vector Illustration, Image: Ikatod
panelists /
- Kanika Gupta, Visual Artist, Graphic Storyteller
- Adrienne Huard, Editor, PhD Student, Board Member
- Key Jo Lee, Assistant Director of Academic Affairs
- Sequoia Miller, Chief Curator
- Isabel Pedersen, Associate Professor of Communication Studies
- Emily Watlington, Critic, Curator, Assistant Editor
Kanika Gupta is a multidisciplinary artist who uses visual art and storytelling to create dialogue and foster deeper human connections. Through multi-modal and sensory based work, Kanika is passionate about engaging public audiences with art in ways that are meaningful and inclusive to them. Kanika is the author and illustrator of BRAVE and her artwork has been presented in public spaces, outdoor festivals, museums and galleries. She also collaborates with cultural institutions and organizations to make their practices and physical environments more inclusive through breaking both physical and invisible barriers to access. Named among Canada's Top 100 Most Powerful Women, Kanika's artwork and community building endeavours have been profiled internationally: byKanika.com
Adrienne Huard is a Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer Anishinaabekwe, registered at Couchiching First Nation and currently based in Winnipeg. After recently graduating from OCAD University’s graduate-level Criticism and Curatorial Practice program, she is now enrolled in the PhD-level Native Studies program at University of Manitoba. Her research focuses on desire within Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous visual culture, specifically located on the prairies. Her goal is to highlight these practices that are often overlooked by the contemporary art world while pushing to make it more accessible for Indigenous artists to participate. Adrienne curated her first program of queer Indigenous/Two-Spirit short films titled Kinship and Closeness, co-presented by Mediaqueer.ca, which toured extensively across Canada in 2018. Since then, she has developed a curatorial collective, gijiit, alongside her collaborators Lindsay Nixon and Dayna Danger, who continue to work between Montreal and Toronto. She now joins the team at Canadian Art magazine, a national arts publication, as an Editor-at-Large.
Key Jo Lee is the Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at The Cleveland Museum of Art. Lee has held positions at the Yale University Art Gallery as a Wurtele Gallery Teacher and as the Rose Herrick-Jackson Graduate Intern in American Painting and Sculpture. Her research interests include histories and theories of photography, American visual and material culture, performance studies, contemporary African American and transnational art, as well as histories of black visual humor. Key Jo is also an independent curator and has published multiple critical essays on the work of emerging artists.
Sequoia Miller is a historian, curator, and studio potter. He is the Chief Curator at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, Toronto, Canada. Miller holds a BA in Russian and Art History from Brandeis University; an MA from the Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture; and a PhD in the History of Art from Yale University. His recent curatorial projects at the Gardiner Museum include RAW and Ai Weiwei: Unbroken. Prior to earning his graduate degrees, Miller was a full-time studio potter for over ten years in the Pacific Northwest.
Isabel Pedersen is Canada Research Chair in Digital Life, Media, and Culture and Professor of Communication Studies at Ontario Tech University. She is Founder and Director of the Digital Life Institute. She studies the cultural, ethical, and political challenges posed by technological change. She is co-editor of Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles (2020, MIT Press). She is published in many academic journals including the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, and Parol - Quaderni d'arte e di eipistemologia. Her collaborative media arts projects include iMind, TombSeer, Fearmonger, and fabricofdigitallife.com.
Emily Watlington is a critic, curator, and assistant editor at Art in America. She is a Fulbright Scholar and has taught in the Department of Architecture at MIT. Emily writes on topics including art, design, disability justice, and feminism. She holds a SMArchS in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT, and has given talks at a number of institutions including the University of California, Berkeley; Rhode Island School of Design; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Harvard University; and Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid. Her writing has been assigned on syllabi at universities including Oberlin, NYU, and Harvard; has appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, The Baffler, Mousse, Frieze, and Another Gaze; and has been translated into German, French, and Croatian. Recently, she contributed to the exhibition catalogues Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995, Sheida Soleimani: Medium of Exchange, and An Inventory of Shimmers: Objects of Intimacy in Contemporary Art. She received the Vera List Writing Prize in the Visual Arts (2018) and the Theorist Award from C/O Berlin (2020).
