chair / Alyssa Fearon, Dunlop Art Gallery; Regina Public Library
In recent years, there has been increased mainstream attention toward Black art and artists in Canada; however, racial equity in Canadian cultural policy has yet to be fully realized. Equity-seeking groups under the category Visible Minorities remain disproportionately underfunded given their overall percentage of the population, with only moderate increases over the past five years.
How might policy-makers, curators, art historians, and cultural workers take an anti-racist and intersectional approach to engaging Black artists? What shifts in power dynamics are needed to foster solidarity with and within BIPOC communities? What are the deeper structural issues related to fostering meaningful and sustainable engagement of Black artists and arts workers? This dialogue will envision a future for institutions and cultural policy in Canada and consider transformative possibilities for the ongoing production of Black Canadian cultural work.
The title of this panel takes its cue from Andrea Fatona’s 2011 PhD dissertation.
Alyssa Fearon (Regina, SK) is a curator, educator and arts manager. She currently holds the position of Director/Curator at the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library. Previously, she was the Curator at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba. In 2018, she was the inaugural Curator of Nuit Blanche Toronto’s Scarborough zone. Fearon has held contract teaching positions at the University of Toronto Scarborough, York University, and Brandon University; she has also worked in positions at the Art Gallery of Ontario and Independent Curators International, NY. She holds an MBA from the Schulich School of Business and an MA Art History from York University. She is also a Salzburg Global Fellow.
panelists /
- Andrea Fatona, OCAD University
- Denise Ryner, Or Gallery
Andrea Fatona (Toronto, ON) is an independent curator and an associate professor at the OCAD University. She is concerned with issues of equity within the sphere of the arts and the pedagogical possibilities of art works produced by ‘other’ Canadians in articulating broader perspectives of Canadian identities. Her broader interest is in the ways in which art, ‘culture’ and ‘education’ can be employed to illuminate complex issues that pertain to social justice, citizenship, belonging, and nationhood. She is the recipient of awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and was the 2017/18 OCAD U-Massey Fellow. Fatona has published scholarly articles, catalogue essays, and book chapters in a range of publications.
Denise Ryner (Vancouver, BC) is a curator and writer. She has worked with the Hart House Art Collection/Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Art Metropole, SFU Galleries, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Currently she is the Director/Curator of Or Gallery, Vancouver, where she explores placemaking and research as space through exhibition and discursive programming that has included Ligia Lewis, Joshua Schwebel, Sandra Brewster, Guadalupe Martinez and others. Most recently she developed and organized the symposium Bodies Borders Fields which was presented in collaboration with Yaniya Lee and Trinity Square Video in the fall of 2019.
