chair /

• Myrtle Sodhi, York University

This panel invites submissions that explore Afrofuturism, “endarkened storywork” (Toliver, 2022), and “Black geographies” (McKittrick, 2006) as ways of speaking to displacement and reclamation, revisiting and re-envisioning, and survival and flourishing through artistic scholarship. How might we explore the places, times, and approaches where Blackness speaks from, speaks to, and speaks back in ways that creates or acts as a “homeplace” (hooks, 1990) for Black scholarship and artist scholars? Submissions that explore Black epistemologies and ontologies by utilizing written, sonic, visual, embodied, and integrative art practices are welcome.

keywords: Afrofuturism, Black geographies, endarkened storywork, Black studies, Black life

session type: panel

Radical Contemporary Visual Culture: Black Activist Public Art in N’Swakamok

• Ra’anaa Ekundayo, Concordia University

In 2020, amidst the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, an unprecedented emergence of Black activist public art appeared in N’Swakamok, later colonized as Sudbury, Ontario. Through the analysis of three case studies; initiatives facilitated by BLM Sudbury, collective and individual works by SOLARIS arts collective, and a series of independent initiatives, this research utilizes an autoethnographic approach to contemplate the ways in which Black activist public art permeates beyond urban centres and develops within rural white-dominant communities. Utilizing an intersectional and accessible framework, this work demonstrates the importance of these Black activist public art initiatives and how they shape the larger Canadian art historical narrative.

The largest city in Northern Ontario, N’Swakamok (Sudbury, Ontario) has a population of 166,004, of which Black people make up less than 1%. Despite Black people representing such a small portion of the area’s demographics, within a contemporary context, they have produced impressive feats of activist art interventions that have meaningfully altered public perception and created networks for advocacy surrounding anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and intersectional awareness of marginalized individuals. In presenting a historical context for the emergence of said work, this proposal seeks to provide a framework for other rural communities across the lands of so-called Canada, while centring the need for work of this calibre and the ongoing implications for justice, equity, decolonization, diversity, and inclusivity (JEDDI) in N’Swakamok.

keywords: contemporary art, Black Lives Matter, Black studies, decolonial art history, public activist art

Diaspora Perspective: Drawing on Hybridity, Afropolitanism, and Black Geographies in ruby onyinyeche amanze’s Visual Compositions

• Ojo Agi, Concordia University

In this paper, I propose a critical discussion of the representation of space in three works on paper by contemporary Nigerian-British artist ruby onyinyeche amanze*. Her large-scale drawings—made from graphite, ink, and coloured pigments on white paper—explore the interconnected themes of migration, cultural hybridity, identity, and belonging. Her multi-media drawings represent naturalistic depictions of humanoid figures, motor vehicles, flocks of birds, windows, swimming pools, and houseplants; however, these depictions are fragmented, drawn to different scales and proportions, oriented at contradictory angles, and placed randomly throughout the composition.

Through a decolonial, transnational feminist approach to spatial theory and visual politics, I will formally analyze how ruby’s compositional strategies and drawing techniques create a sense of disorientation for the viewer, thus representing the experience of contemporary African migration. I will argue that ruby’s drawings reinvent Renaissance perspective in a manner that is akin to oral storytelling, by decentering linearity and inviting collaborative meaning-making. I will examine how her choice to include various cultural objects related to travel and domesticity in her compositions centers a Black female subjectivity of space and place, defined by a struggle for liberation from colonizing systems. I will demonstrate how her drawings subvert Eurocentric traditions of placemaking (i.e. Cartesian mapping) and make visible the ways in which space is socially produced, negotiated, and remapped. I situate my analysis within theories of hybridity (Bhabha), Afropolitanism (Selasi), Black geographies (McKittrick), and perspective drawing (Panofsky) to highlight the spatial and discursive effects of ruby’s drawings.

keywords: Black geographies, spatial aesthetics, perspective drawing, hybridity, placemaking