A Calgary artist who withdrew from an Art Gallery of Alberta exhibition this summer prompted the organization to take a closer look at its history and commit to take more steps toward dismantling systemic racism.
Justin Waddell, a visual artist and associate professor at the Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, has participated in the AGA’s Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art — which celebrates Alberta artists — twice in the past decade.
Having researched and experienced previous Biennial exhibitions, he knew there was a lack of Black artists and asked the gallery to determine whether it had ever included any.
Waddell said he asked the gallery to reckon with that history by apologizing and taking steps to address systemic racism.
Not satisfied with the institution’s response, he wrote in a email to an AGA curator that he was withdrawing his work from the exhibition.
“As a BIPOC artist and educator, I have a shared responsibility to meet that work and to stand accountable for its absence,” he wrote in the July email.
Justin Seiji Waddell’s film and installation, we can touch the earth with two arms, was selected for the 2020 Art Gallery of Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art. He withdrew the work from the exhibition in July. (Justin Seiji Waddell)
The AGA has since issued a statement acknowledging the lack of Black artists included in the Biennial. The gallery has postponed the 2022 exhibition and committed to holding discussions with BIPOC artists and community members.
After Waddell withdrew his work from the exhibition, the show’s four curators held two discussions with participating artists.
Other artists told the gallery to address the issue publicly, Waddell said.
“I don’t think the AGA ever would have come clean about the history of the Biennial had these artists not pushed the institution,” he told CBC Edmonton’s Radio Active on Friday.
Radio Active12:06Systemic racism in Alberta’s art community
Why a Calgary artist withdrew from the Art Gallery of Alberta’s biennial exhibition. Justin Waddell joins us to talk about systemic racism in the province’s visual art communities. 12:06
“The AGA recognized that it was an important first step for us to be transparent about this part of the Biennial’s history and to make a public statement,” social and digital media coordinator Jordan LaRiviere said in an emailed statement.
She said the gallery has created an equity committee, which is meeting early next week. The committee will plan community discussions over the next few months.
As much as he appreciates the efforts of individual curators, Waddell said he is suspect of the organization’s public statements and commitments so far.
Systemic, institutional change involving leadership and fundraising changes is needed, he said.
As a person of colour who has held leadership positions in Alberta’s visual arts community, Waddell said he knows he also has a role to play in eliminating anti-Black racism.
“I take up a lot of space and I participate in systems that have excluded Black people,” he said.
“I can’t do that anymore. I need to work to make things better.”
Though there are no Black artists included in this year’s Biennial exhibition, this lack of representation does not extend to the rest of the AGA’s exhibitions.
Black artists are included in all of the gallery’s upcoming (2020–2021) group exhibitions of contemporary art.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
