F.3 Parallel: A Roundtable on the History and Archiving of Artist Run Centres in Canada

Sat Oct 21 / 10:15 – 11:45 / KC 201

chairs /
Devon Smither, University of Lethbridge
Amber Berson, Concordia University & The Visual Arts Centre
Artist-run centres (ARCs) have undoubtedly helped to shape Canadian culture, yet their histories have been understudied in both art history and museum studies. This roundtable invites participants to dialogue about how we can better account for ARCs in Canadian art history and why–against a backdrop of increasing equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility throughout the art world–the history of ARCs is so pressing right now. If ARCs truly were, and continue to be, parallel institutions, how have they challenged hegemonic discourses of authority, artistic agency, equity, and accessibility and how do these challenges contribute to a richer understanding of cultural history in Canada? We invite participants to apply to this roundtable whose professional experience and/or research takes up these concerns at both a practical and theoretical level.
keywords: artist-run-centre, Canadian art, art institutions, gallery, art history
session type: roundtable
Devon Smither is Associate Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge. She is a faculty member in the Art History/Museum Studies program at UofL. She is a founding member of Open Art Histories and the Prairie Art Network. Her research and teaching examine the intersections of nation-building and nationalism, the visual arts, and the development of modern art and culture in early twentieth-century Canada and North America. Her research program has focused on women artists and how gender biases have shaped North American art historiography. Her research and publications have been generously funded by, among other sources, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Terra Foundation of Art. She is the 2023 recipient of the University of Lethbridge Excellence in Teaching Award.
Executive Director of The Visual Arts Centre in Montreal (CA), Amber Berson is a writer, a curator, and an Art Historian. She holds a doctoral degree from Queen’s University where her SSHRC-funded research examined artist-run culture and feminist, utopian thinking. She is also an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, in Montréal, where she is working on a long-term research project on the history of equity-seeking artist-run centres tentatively titled Parallel. In her spare time, Berson works on knowledge equity projects, especially with the Art+Feminism Wikipedia project, where she worked in various capacities for a decade and now sits on the Board. In addition to her curatorial work, Berson’s writing has been published in a variety of Canadian and international publications.

Parallel Conversations: Thinking through the Communicative Spaces Created by Artist-Run Centres

Sarah Smith, Western University

Beyond providing community for artists, artist-run centres (ARCs) have fostered vital communication networks. These, in turn, have created spaces for central discussions in the cultural sector, including conversations about artists’ material conditions. Drawing on an ongoing collaborative project assessing the Independent Artists’ Union (IAU), I suggest one way to account for the history of ARCs in Canada is through attention to their publications, including ARC newsletters, as well as the sectoral publication Parallelogram. In the case of the IAU—a tenacious group of Ontario artists who set out in the 1980s to organize the province’s artists into a new collective agency—key conversations about labour and advocacy for artists as workers took place in these venues. Thus, the history of artists’ engagement with labour lies in these texts, while simultaneously we find that ARCs were a pivotal communication network through which the IAU advanced its work. In fact, our research reveals that the union leveraged existent ARC infrastructure to develop locals outside of Toronto. Through this historic case study, I suggest we might think about how ARCs have challenged hegemonic discourses about cultural work, which resonate with the art world’s ongoing reckoning with its own labour economy.

keywords: Parallelogram, Independent Artists’ Union, labour, artist-run centres

Sarah E.K. Smith is Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Art, Culture and Global Relations, based in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University. Her research examines contemporary art and museums, with an interest in how artworks and institutions provide a lens to address cultural diplomacy, labour, and policy. Sarah is currently co-authoring a book on the history of the Independent Artists’ Union. Other forthcoming publications include the co-edited collection Museum Diplomacy: How Cultural Institutions Shape Global Engagement (Rowman & Littlefield/ American Alliance of Museums). Sarah is a co-founder of the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative and member of the International Cultural Relations Research Alliance.

Askew: Situating the Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive in a Parallel Universe

Karen Knights, VIVO

Knights will reflect on the strong archival impulse of west coast ARCs and, specifically, the Satellite Video Exchange Society (known publicly as VIVO Media Arts Centre) and its Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive (CDMLA). This CDMLA differs from many across the country. In addition to archiving its own records and a media library of international independent video, it holds the archives of now-defunct sister organizations including Metro Media (1971–1984); Women In Focus Media and Distribution Archives (1972–1992); and the First Nations Video Collective (1990–2000), as well as personal archives of artists and activists Sara Diamond, Margaret Dragu, Lenore Herb, Joe Sarahan, and Mary Anne McEwen, among others. Knights will discuss the institution’s decision to archive its own history in-house and the pros and cons of that decision across the past 50 years. She will examine the centre’s participation in three recent collaborative projects that aim to expand the accessibility of ARC collections and their impacts on the activities on the SVES: Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week, an ARC-initiated and defined project; Crossing Fonds, a SSHRC investigating the potential for a platform that can seamlessly bridge the collections of ARC, community, academic, and government archives; and Archive/Counter-Archive that partners ARCs with academic researchers. Finally, Knights will situate ARC history within the context of its newly “discovered” value. Is it possible for an external history-telling practice to not be extractive?

keywords: artist-run-centre, accessibility, history

Karen Knights is Archive Manager and Special Projects Lead at the VIVO Media Arts Centre’s Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive. She has 25-years of accumulated experience at VIVO as Librarian, Archivist, Distributor, Programmer, and Development Coordinator since 1984. As an independent curator and writer, she has undertaken several historical surveys of artist-run media archives including for Western Front, Ed Video, Em Media, and Satellite Video Exchange Society (VIVO); as well as exhibition essays for Sara Diamond and Jin-me Yoon. Karen’s current focus is on activating the CDMLA Special Collections through a series of archivist Internships, digitization projects, and curated exhibition series. Karen is Lead for VIVO’s Archive/Counter-Archive case study – Gendered Violence: Responses and Remediations. She is also a researcher with Dr. Sara Diamond’s SSHRC, Crossing Fonds.

Institutionalization of artist-run centres in British Columbia: Intersecting developments in federal and provincial cultural policies and artist-run centres, 1967–2020

Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, Simon Fraser University

This presentation draws from research in process undertaken in the development of my doctoral dissertation. The research maps processes of institutionalization that artist-run centres (ARCs) in British Columbia (BC) have undergone in relation to, and as a result of, interactions with cultural policy frameworks and processes at the federal, provincial, and sectoral level. The research looks at the inherent friction existing between the administrative logics of artist-run centres – what Vincent Bonin (2010) has coined as the “paradigm of self-determination” – and the administrative logics of government with regard to culture – what cultural policy theorists (Bennett, 1998; Miller & Yúdice, 2002; O’Brien, 2014) have, following Foucault’s (1991) ideas, understood as instruments of governmentality. The research first develops a history of ARCs and analyzes the emergence of “generations” of BC ARCs (1960s-70s, 1980s-90s, 2000s) in relation to developments in federal and provincial cultural policies and funding agencies, and changes in the structure and self-governance of ARC networks in Canada. Processes of institutionalization are analyzed through the lens of discursive institutionalism, which considers the role of ideas and discourse in the formation and transformation of institutions, which are understood as social structures collectively recognized and acknowledged as such.

The presentation will discuss the following levers of institutionalization, with examples drawn for the BC ARC network between 1967 and 2020:

Influence of/engagement with external policy frameworks: legal frameworks; funding agencies and programs; advocacy campaigns and interventions in policy processes)
Participating in ARC networks: affiliation to an ASO (ANNPAC, ARCA, PAARC, etc.); self-theorization of ARCs, ARC discourse, and emerging arts practices (video, sound art, performance); network professionalization through sectoral standards (CARFAC fees, contract templates)
Professionalization at the ARC level: organizational structures; employees and employment standards; capital projects and longevity

keywords: artist-run centres, cultural policy, institutionalization, artist-run networks, British Columbia

Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte is a Bombardier Doctoral Scholar and PhD Candidate at Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) School of Communication. Her research focuses on Canadian cultural policy, intersections of digital technologies and arts management, and artist-run visual and media arts organizations. Mariane obtained an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts in 2012 and has exhibited artistic and curatorial projects across Canada. Mariane has worked as the lead consultant on various sectoral and community research projects commissioned by national and provincial arts service organizations including ARCA, IMAA, CARFAC, and RCAAQ. Recent projects include IMAA’s Online Presentation Standards for Media Arts and an environmental scan commissioned by the CRTC, whichmapping new stakeholders for the Canadian brodcasting system. Mariane has served on the board of directors of the Pacific Association of Artist-Run Centres (2016-2018), VIVO Media Arts Centre (2014-2019), and Aphotic Theatre (2017-present).

Archiving Film & Media Co-ops in Canada

Michael Zyrd, York University

This proposed contribution to the roundtable would outline a larger project that investigates the history of film cooperatives and other artist-run centres (ARCs) in Canada, starting in 1967, when Intermedia and Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre were founded. Despite the current vibrancy of the Canadian independent film and media arts sector, there is a significant historical gap in scholarly accounts of Canadian film and media. Moreover, the relationship of film and media co-ops to other ARCs has not received sufficient scholarly attention despite the post-digital convergence of film/media and visual arts. As is true of many ARCs, the chronic precarity of the independent sector means that the basic documents that ground its history are scant and dispersed. My project’s priority is to assess the status of co-op documentation and collect vital materials for archives before undertaking critical analysis of these research materials to generate new histories that incorporate a decolonization, equity, diversity, and inclusion (DEDI) lens to address what Deanna Bowen (2019) calls the appalling “deficiency” of diversity in Canadian media arts history. The project hopes to expand Canadian film and media arts history to make it more inclusive of the diversity of grassroots cultural communities that engaged in independent experimentation across multiple media forms. This project asks, what has been the impact and legacy of the co-op sector on the cultural ecology of the arts in Canada, including media arts and industry? This project is supported by a 2022 SSHRC Insight Grant, “Expanding the History of Film and Media Co-ops in Canada since 1967.”

keywords: film co-ops, institutional archives, media arts, artist-run-centres, Canadian art

Michael Zryd (he/him) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design at York University. He is a researcher, critic, and curator of experimental film and media with an interest in its institutional infrastructures and ecologies and its intersections with the academy and the art world. He was founding co-chair of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Experimental Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group, and is currently Co-Director of Archive/Counter-Archive (SSHRC Partnership Grant). He has published essays in October, Cinema Journal, and CJFS. Book publications include Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2023), October Files: Hollis Frampton (editor, MIT Press, 2022) and Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada (co-author, Goose Lane Editions, 2021). He is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project on the archiving and history of film and media cooperatives in Canada.

St. Michael’s Printshop – Impressions past, present, and future

Andrew Testa, Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador

St. Michael’s Printshop (SMP) is an artist-run-centre founded in 1974, currently residing in St. John’s Newfoundland and Labrador. SMP is a self-reflexive organization that strives to be a critical, inclusive, and a meaningful space for its community – past, present, and future. SMP continues to overcome and be resilient in the face of challenges concerning financial sustainability, proving relevance/artistic merit in relationship to granting bodies, the ‘expectation’ of burn-out-culture in arts administration/not-for-profit staff, the preservation and celebration of its archive (and the difficulties in creating space for access/storage/recognition), and rurality and its relationship to accessibility and inclusivity. As the current Chair of the Board of Directors since 2020 (and interim co-chair in 2019), my proposed participation in this panel is to speak from my place within governance from a practical level about the challenges and growth SMP has experienced in its recent past while thinking towards its future.

keywords: artist-run centres, rurality, governance, community

Andrew Testa (he/him) is a settler artist, writer, educator, and amateur spoon carver gratefully living and working as an uninvited guest in Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). His current interests include the presentation and performance of research-creation, ethics and responsibilities, and community engaged practices. He is the Chair at St. Michael’s Printshop, Vice-Chair of CB Nuit, and is an Assistant Professor in printmaking at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.