Andrea Fatona

Dr. Andrea Fatona, Associate Professor, Faculty of Art and Graduate Program Director, Criticism and Curatorial Practice is an active curator with a busy schedule of upcoming exhibitions. She’s also working on The State of Blackness Database Project, a searchable, web-based, annotated catalogue of works produced by and about black Canadian artists, critics and curators from 1989 (the year of the inception of the Multiculturalism Act) to the present. 

 

“What I’m trying to do is increase the visibility of black artists,” she says. “When we look around the art world we see very few racialized artists, particularly black artists, so I’m trying to understand how multiculturalism worked in terms of providing space, and debunk the myth that black people are perennial newcomers to Canada.”  

 

Some of her research findings include lack of production from different racialized groups, and notions around who belongs in fine art. “We’ve had a long history of European artists being the ones who are seen as producing art, while others are seen as producing craft or work that doesn’t immediately fit in the category of fine art.” 

 

Dr. Fatona addresses similar themes in her curatorial practice, which focuses on works by other Canadians and the ways these works enable us to think about Canada in a more complex and nuanced sense.  

 

In the classroom she engages students in thinking about issues around equity and diversity in the context of art. “In my teaching I’m concerned with creating sites of what I call multiple epistemologies and making sure discourses around black art and culture become present in the institutions of art presentation and art education,” she says. 

 

Dr. Fatona brings a long and varied resume of her own academic scholarship, and as such tries to impress upon students that “learning is a very difficult process but a very fulfilling process,” particularly in an art environment. “I believe that art affords us space to discuss the very difficult issues that we face around race, sexuality and class,” she says. “I take an interdisciplinary approach to these issues because I believe a more prismatic approach allows us to find new solutions.” 

 

“Although I focus on blackness and moving past the anti-black sentiment I think has always been there in our world ideologies, I’m really concerned with trying to understand how all of us together, particularly those of us producing art and thinking about cultural theory, might develop what we consider to be a new sense of being human together in the world.” 

 

Find out more: https://www2.ocadu.ca/bio/andrea-fatona  

 

 

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