Art Institutions and the Feminist Dialectic

Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - 5:00am to Thursday, December 4, 2008 - 5:00am

The Ontario Association of Art Galleries presents Art Institutions and the Feminist Dialectic, a two-day symposium for visual art professionals addressing issues, contradictions and paradoxes arising from the exhibition, acquisition, and preservation of feminist artwork by Ontario public art galleries, archives, universities and other public institutions.
Art forms that gained popularity during the 1960s, taking up civil rights, the feminist movement and the possibilities of art as activism, have been entering public art galleries and museums. A new discussion of how feminist work performs in the museum space is timely. Symposium registrants will actively contribute in a working group environment.

The Ontario Association of Art Galleries is a independent charity serving and representing Ontario's public art galleries as valued and essential centres of art and learning. Our unique professional programming networks visual arts professionals together across sectors, disciplines, and cohorts. Seed funding requires matching registration fees from professional organizations: a minimum registration of 25 professional colleagues.

FEATURED SPEAKERS

Emelie Chhangur is a Toronto-based artist, cultural worker, and curator. Maintaining a process-based, collaborative approach to working with artists, her recent curatorial research and practice finds its relevant context in Latin-America. As an artist, her position as Assistant Director / Curator at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) is instrumental in transforming the nature of the contemporary art institution and the role of the university art gallery in relation to its academic context and its social function within an arts community.

Dr. Christine Conley is an art historian and independent curator concerned with issues of gender, difference, trauma, and the art gallery as site of ethical encounters. Her MA thesis (Carleton) examined the status of women artists in Toronto during the 1960s, focusing on Christiane Pflug and Joyce Wieland, and her PhD (Essex) considered the reinvention of allegory by 20th century women artists Charlotte Salomon, Eva Hesse, and Mary Kelly as a means of symbolising loss and imaging feminine subjectivities.

Pamela Edmonds is a visual and media arts curator working at the Art Gallery of Peterborough. She received her BFA and an MA in Art History from Concordia University. The former co-editor of the Black cultural journal Kola (based in Montreal), she is interested in developing and curating projects that focus on the creative production of African-Canadian artists and in work that deals with issues surrounding the ideologies of race, gender, cultural identity and representation.

Carla Garnet works in Toronto as an independent curator, actively supporting contemporary culture through a variety of initiatives that aim to interrogate the politics of aesthetics. Most recently Garnet curated Sharon Switzer: Falling from Grace for the McMaster Museum of Art in 2006-07, and Allyson Mitchell's Ladies Sasquatch Gathering, launching at McMaster in 2009 and traveling to the Art Gallery of Winnipeg, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Peterborough.

Sophie Hackett is the Assistant Curator, Photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She holds a Master of Arts from the University of Chicago, with a focus on the History of Photography, and spent a year in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2005-2006. She teaches in Ryerson University's Masters program in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management. For CONTACT 2008, she worked with Toronto artist Suzy Lake, Rhythm of a True Space, to create a site-specific installation on the construction hoarding of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Johanna Householder has been making performances and other artwork in Canada since the late 1970s. She was a member of the satirical feminist performance ensemble, The Clichettes, through the 1980s. She is one of the founders of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art. Her short video works, produced in collaboration with B.H. Yael, have screened internationally. She is a Professor in the Integrated Media Program at the Ontario College of Art and Design. With Tanya Mars, she edited Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance by Canadian women, published by YYZ Books in 2004.

Dr. Kristina Huneault is Associate Professor in the Art History department at Concordia University, where she occupies a University Research Chair. Together with Janice Anderson and Melinda Reinhart, she is one of the founders of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, a project that aims to bring researchers and resources together to foster the study of art made by women in Canada prior to 1967.

Suzy Lake was one of a group of artists in the early 70s to adopt performance, video and photography in order to explore the politics of gender, the body and identity. Early examples of her work are included in the touring exhibition: WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution 1965 - 1980, curated by Connie Butler for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Lake has a long exhibition career in Canada, and has also shown her work in Europe, the United States, South America and Asia. She is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art (Toronto) and SolwayJones (Los Angeles).

Allyson Mitchell is a maximalist artist working predominantly in sculpture, installation and film. Her work has exhibited in galleries and festivals across Canada, the US, Europe and East Asia. She teaches at York University in the School of Women's Studies. Currently, Mitchell is curating a survey exhibition of Judy Chicago's textile-based work, from 1968 to 2008, for the Textile Museum of Canada (opening February, 2009).

Camilla Singh, a practicing visual artist, working in Toronto, has exhibited in Austria, Canada, Holland, Iceland, and Serbia. She is the Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA). In Toronto's 2007, she curated Supernatural City, ten major outdoor contemporary art installations viewed by 800,000 people over the course of 12 hours from dusk to dawn.

Venue & Address: 
Symposium Location 918 Bathurst Street, Toronto, Ontario
Email: 
members@oaag.org
Cost: 
Registration: $195 OAAG Members / $250 General; please register by November 26