Fall 2020 Issue Launches

CHROMA LAUNCH: KELSEY ADAMS AND DAVID WOODS

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2020

11 A.M.–12:30 P.M. PDT

2–3:30 P.M. EDT

3–4:30 P.M. ADT

Register Here

Join us for a conversation focused on the overlooked histories and current work being done by Black artists, curators and thinkers in the Maritimes. This event will feature an introduction to the backstory of the Chroma issue by guest editors Yaniya Lee and Denise Ryner, followed by a conversation between curator, artist and cultural organizer David Woods and art and culture journalist Kelsey Adams. For the better part of 40 years, David Woods has been an archivist and advocate for the artistic contributions of Black Maritime communities. Kelsey Adams has worked with Woods to chronicle his pedagogy and advocacy around recentring local Black creative practice and history to tell a complex story of Black Canada and its links to the global African diaspora.

Kelsey Adams is an arts and culture journalist from Toronto. Her writing explores the intersection of music, art and film, with a focus on the work of marginalized creators. She has written for the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, The FADER and C Mag.

Yaniya Lee is a writer and editor interested in the ethics of aesthetics. Lee was the 2019–20 researcher in residence at Vtape. She works as senior editor-at-large at Canadian Art and teaches art criticism at the University of Toronto.

Denise Ryner is director/curator at Vancouver’s Or Gallery, and is a research fellow at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Her curatorial, research and writing interests include place-as-agent in exhibition-making and the cultural production of transnational counterflows of the 19th and 20th centuries.

David Woods is a largely self-taught multidisciplinary artist and arts-organization leader from Dartmouth, NS. He was the organizer of Nova Scotia’s first Black History Month (1984) and the founding organizer of several arts and cultural organizations including the Cultural Awareness Youth Group of Nova Scotia (1984) and the Black Artists Network of Nova Scotia (1992). Woods has curated pioneering exhibitions of African Nova Scotian art such as “In This Place” (1998) and “The Secret Codes: African Nova Scotian Quilts” (2012). His current research focuses on African American art pioneer Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828–1901), who is greatly revered in the United States but largely unheralded in Canada—the country of his birth. Woods is also writing a history of Black art in Nova Scotia from 1888 to the present.

CHROMA LAUNCH: SALLY FRATER WITH JUSTINE A. CHAMBERS AND FARIHAH ALIYAH SHAH

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2020

11 A.M.–12:30 P.M. PDT

2–3:30 P.M. EDT

3–4:30 P.M. ADT

Register Here

Chroma Spotlight artists Justine A. Chambers and Farihah Aliyah Shah will discuss their distinctive practices with guest writer and curator Sally Frater. Their conversation will explore how shared themes of labour, consumption, the body, representation and community emerge in their respective practices, while mapping the points of convergence and divergence between them.

Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Her movement-based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation and the body as a site of a cumulative, embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with dances that are already there—the social choreographies present in the everyday. She is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.

Sally Frater has curated exhibitions for institutions such as Or Gallery; the Luminato Festival; the Ulrich Museum of Art; the McColl Center for Art and Innovation; the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto; Project Row Houses; and Centre[3] for Artistic and Social Practice. Her writing has appeared in FUSE magazine, X-TRA, Artforum, and Art21. She is currently the curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Guelph.

Farihah Aliyah Shah is a contemporary lens-based artist originally from Edmonton and now based in Bradford, ON. She holds a BHRM from York University and a BFA in photography with a minor in integrated media from OCAD University. Her practice explores issues of racial identity, land and collective memory. She is a member of Gallery 44 and Women Photograph, and has exhibited internationally in North America, Asia and Europe.

CHROMA LAUNCH: HIGH T PODCAST PARTNERSHIP

LATE OCTOBER, 2020

Leah Schulli and Madelyne Beckles, co-hosts of the podcast High T, are recording a special episode with guest Chroma Spotlight artist Kiera Boult in partnership with Canadian Art by applying their process to the themes in the Fall 2020 Chroma issue and connecting them with the happenings of that week’s cultural news cycle. Schulli and Beckles met in 2013 and quickly became collaborators on curatorial projects and performance works. In 2019 they started High T, a podcast “that is supposed to be about art kind of,” meaning: High T uses art criticism to discuss and problematize the millennial zeitgeist, pop culture news and internet gleanings.

Madelyne Beckles is a multidisciplinary artist from Toronto. She holds a BFA in art history and women’s studies, and now puts her critical faculties to work as a co-host of the podcast High T. Her artwork explores themes of femininity and the body with abject aesthetics and camp humour, and has been shown at MoMA, the AGO and Miami Art Basel. She is currently the curatorial assistant of youth and engagement at the AGO.

Leah Schulli is an Alberta-born, Toronto-based installation artist, curator and writer with a BFA in print media from Concordia University. Schulli explores consumer and brand culture and its distribution and circulation of desire in a variety of social platforms. Her sculptural works combine humour and material presence with criticality. The line between the young, socially conscious consumer and the inherently capitalist nature of online self-promotion/trends is often brought into question. She uses her knowledge of the cultural zeitgeist as well as her penchant for art criticism as the co-host of the podcast High T, which she also co-produces.

Kiera Boult is an interdisciplinary artist and performer from Hamilton. Boult’s practice utilizes camp and comedy to skeptically address issues that surround the role and/or identity of the artist and the institution. In 2019, Boult was the recipient of the Hamilton Emerging Visual Artist Award. Her work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and Trinity Square Video. She has participated in the Art Gallery of York University’s final Performance Bus, 7a*11D’s 7a*md8 – ONLINE  and Life of a Crap Head’s Doored. Boult appears in the recent Chroma Issue of Canadain Art. She holds a BFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University and is currently Vtape’s Submissions, Collections & Outreach Coordinator.