Intro

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[Music] [Applause]

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[Music] [Applause]

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[Applause] want to thank you so much for hanging out with us we really appreciate your

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time thanks wonder wonder if we could start with the broadest of strokes if you wouldn’t mind

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introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about what you do sure

About Wanda Nanibush

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um i’m wanda ninabush i’m shinabe kuey from bosley first nation

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i am wolf clan i come from the nanobush families my neck families

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mccue families all of us from this my mother and father and everybody from the same reserves

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and i currently work as the curator of indigenous arts and the co-lead of the

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indigenous and canadian art department at the art gallery of ontario a whole bunch of words

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and i also have like an outside of that practice an independent curatorial

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practice i also make things write things i activate things in the community

International Gathering of Indigenous Artists

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there’s a lot of a lot of stuff that i’ve been doing um we also

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i started a international gathering of indigenous artists curators and thinkers in 2018

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which has been going yearly um it’s in toronto one year and then

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international the next and it goes back and forth like that i committed seven years to it

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because seven years is like an anishinaabe kind of stage of life so then you have to

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reevaluate and rethink and then see what the next iteration of life will be so it’s like

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in its uh you know childhood phase and uh

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yeah it’s been it’s been really um interesting because right now i’m doing

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one for toronto in december and then it’s going to be in venice in april so i’m doing two actually back to

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back it’s kind of insane and then the last one was in

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sydney for the sydney biennial and the day that all the artists were in the

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sky is when the pandemic was called the global pandemic so

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it was really fascinating and here i am going to be having planned three

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covet pandemic abba quads and it’s kind of insane because i just thought oh they’re only i

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wasn’t even sure there’d be one right until until i was in it

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so yeah those are some of the things preoccupying me at the moment working on a retrospective of robert poole

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anishinaabe artist um he’s 74 now and this is going to be his big 50-year

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retrospective and he’ll be at the ago also opening in december so there’s a few of the little things

Extracting institutional resources

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fantastic thank you um we’re just coming out of a conversation with cyrus marcus ware and um

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chase brought up this phrase that um cyrus had had shared with him about

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extracting institutional resources and

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i’m just thinking about the projects that you’ve described particularly the robert

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hoole exhibition um thinking back of course to the

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rebecca bellmore show that that you did at the ago and also

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thinking about tributes and tributaries the group exhibition looking at the history of

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art the recent history of art in toronto and

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i’m wondering um you know to put my cards on the table as

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somebody who worked at the ago and didn’t always find it easy to do um

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the kinds of projects that i wanted to do um and having such admiration and seeing

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such value in the projects that you’ve been doing i’m wondering can you talk a little bit about how easy

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or not it’s being how much of a trickster you are in the instant in the ago in the

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institution um or you know has it has it been pretty easy for you to come in and do those

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projects there i think nothing is easy in an institution so

Being nicer

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we make it look easy but it’s not um actually i’m pretty outright about it

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not being easy but um sometimes you know i try to be nicer

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uh but i was i also think like different time periods you know like institutions shift depending on

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who’s in power and what’s happening um but i think i came into the ago

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from the from the activism of i don’t know more right so

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and spending three years like organizing that stuff in toronto and doing stuff you know across ontario and

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then nationally um i reached a point where

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i think it was at the powerpoint power plant talk i was giving where i noticed there was like 200

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people who came to a sunday scene when normally it’s like 10 people right like they come to these things

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and so i was like looking out at the crowd and it was like my activists and you know the people who would come to

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and i don’t know more event and then there’s all these art people too right and i thought for one it was

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the moment of like i can’t say the same things i normally say because i actually do say certain things in

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in in the you know the community that i wouldn’t say to an art and audience and

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the art audience i don’t i say things to that i wouldn’t say in that other environment and so i was stuck in this

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moment of like oh crap i have to integrate myself in this moment like i have to integrate

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like these two people that are actually quite different you know and so uh it was a moment of

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of realizing that i wanted to speak differently in the art in the that that was my choice

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that i wanted to speak differently in that space and start um really making

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my underlying value system really present

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in my work and like not in the work it’s always there in the work but in the way i talk about the work

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so not hiding that part anymore um and then the second thing

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i learned is that carrying that reputation that i had from the from outside inside gave me more

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power in a certain way like it gave me internal internal

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certitude like i knew that i had my my communities backing

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you know for certain things and so if something i knew that if something went wrong i could go outside and cause a ruckus

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you know what i mean or like something could happen you know there would be repercussions

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um there would also be and i also realized that i came into the institution

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um to do work like to get some stuff done not for my career

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and not for a job but because i wanted to make space for

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because all of my friends and all of the people that are part of my world um don’t have space in there so i was

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like oh i can you know this is just another place to make another land claim it’s another place to

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um create uh avenues and spaces for for us to do our work right and for

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there to be energy from the community in and out um so it was just

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so i think that that those kinds of things the fact that i didn’t care about getting fired that like all of those

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things um and i’d already been broke right from doing the movement for three years i was so

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damn broke and if my brother hadn’t supported me you know through it i would never like have made it through so

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all of those things i think contributed to a very sovereign kind of attitude um

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coming into the institution which maybe when maybe if i hadn’t been through that

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maybe i would have been not so sovereign or able to be so sovereign

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also i think [Music] talking to people

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i always try to think of it from an anishinaabe point of view like we have to treat people as human beings like

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doesn’t matter where they come from or how much money they have or whatever so i’m expected

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and i i want to treat people as human beings and try to figure out where they’re coming from so even if i really

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can’t stand somebody i really don’t want to work on them i will dive deep as deep and hard as i

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can to find some angle some place inside of them that humanizes them for me so that i can find

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that that connection line that i need to be able to do something with them

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so i think that helps as well inside of an institution full of different people who are there for very different reasons

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than i am and an institution that is built on a kind of violence and an institution

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that also doesn’t humanize people in the way it operates right so it’s automatically a

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dehumanizing kind of machine so which i think is what you experienced a lot of

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and then i think i do too it’s just i know i’m here for a very short period of time so i can take quite a bit of crap

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as long as i can see that there’s a lot happening at the same time but i will leave because i i will burn

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out right so because you can’t you can’t work in that environment at that with that kind of

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force for very long without burning out

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i don’t know if that even answers your question oh my god it answered it so beautifully

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thank you it wasn’t even my question and i feel the same way

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i you know i wrote down a few things as you were speaking one of which was you know walking into a space making your

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value systems explicit and having that be such a central methodological

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commitment and you know the the reality of burnout when

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making that choice like those are such linked occurrences

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and i think one of the things that is exciting to michelle and i as we

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think together about this thing we’ve called the feminist art field school is our genuine suspicion over our terms of

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engagement over feminism over art over the idea of school and pedagogy and i

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wonder what your reaction was to the invitation to join us here in this

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conversation or how you might think about some of these categories well i think that i i mean immediately i

Why feminism

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wanted to join because it’s youtube you know and i know kind of like the complexity you bring to these questions

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so i knew i wasn’t going to be sitting here like lotting feminism from a certain era

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that we really need to leave behind you know what i’m saying so i knew it wasn’t going to be that and

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i knew i wasn’t going to be brought in as like some kind of native informant or something you know

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so i thought i think that’s my first thing to say when i get involved in things these are questions that i have

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and then i think each part of it is something that

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interests me you know feminism is something that i’ve been engaging with since i was a

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teenager i think i engage with very different streams of it

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so i wouldn’t be who i am if i hadn’t read emma goldman for example you know if i think back to

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to uh feminists that really inspire me she is one um

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and i think it’s it’s that kind of anarchist sensibility that

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actually made i made so many connections to being anishinaabe and it made sense in certain kinds of ways i wouldn’t overstate that

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though because people write about that and they’re wrong you know like anishinaabes are not

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anarchists you know i can say that very clearly um but you know as a i was a mother at

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20. um so i took my son to university with me and um emma goldman strangely became like a

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role model for parenting him it’s like how do you do like and i wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else

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but non-authoritarian parenting it’s like doesn’t work but anyway we tried it

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and so we tried all these like critical pedagogies in terms of raising our kid and he’s really quite brilliant but it

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made it hard for him because other parents aren’t raising their kids that way so he had to have like all these

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bathroom conversations with other kids about racism and you know sexism and things like this when he was little so

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anyway and how they shouldn’t behave so chastising his teachers

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anyway it’s very hard for him growing up with all this knowledge in his brain

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so yeah i was thinking about these things and i think um black feminism has been

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like central because um uh black women were writing about things that were really pertinent to

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us as indigenous women before indigenous women’s books were being published you know so that’s who i turned to first to

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make sense of of what it is um to be a woman

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in a world where white women is the only kind of sort of category and

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whiteness and femininity have been kind of the category that has been the most violent to us as indigenous women as

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well and then what what does culture bring to those conversations right and what does

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it add and then what about the experience of colonization what does that add to

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to our understanding of what this this uh kind of critical practice could be

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that we call feminism or feminisms and then i fell in love when i found you know judith butler because it

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was like yay it’s queer queer’s back

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because you know as somebody who’s like just definitely doesn’t want to live in any

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of the categories um and doesn’t match and unnaturally i never have and i just don’t

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i needed some kind of discourse because in my own it doesn’t exist in my community

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like we have like um a really kind of traditional understanding that comes from colonialism like being

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instituted like sexism and you know homophobia and all of that is like

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really strong in our communities it’s slowly going in the last 10 years and then the discourse around

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two-spiritedness was kind of it has become

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like another word for being gay or lesbian and so that didn’t work for me either so

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and it’s funny because my brother i’m gonna meander around a little but my brother last night we were talking about

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it and he we were talking about how you have to put the pronoun thing after your name now and i’ve been asked to and i’m

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really resistant to it um for very you know we were all just

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discussing why there was three of us at a table who all are resisting and we’re like weird why because we believe in

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this stuff you know what i mean but we just don’t want to put it on our emails so it was really interesting

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anyway so he said like as a human he feels too spirited but that term

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no longer can be meaning you’re like the way you’re in touch with these two sides of yourself

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so as a straight man blah blah so interesting anyway we had all these

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little conversations so yeah so that’s those are all the things and um

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yeah and then art i think in the art in the age of covid and black lives matter and i don’t

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know more and fracking and like climate change and floods and hurricanes

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i mean if you’re not asking how it’s relevant then i i don’t think you’re you should be here

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so yeah i love your meandering toward the table

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conversation about pronouns in part because it’s an example of the on the

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record off the record work that i think we all do the kitchen table conversations that allow us to think out

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loud together and help each other to find those moments of like why do i feel this way and why am i not

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able to make this or why do i not agree and and i think one of the things that i feel really excited about

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as i continue to think about conversation as method is not that we have to make all of our

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behind-the-scenes conversations public i definitely am not advocating for that but i think there is and you know a

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political um pulse behind privacy you know but also

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what does it mean to like think out loud and to support a kind of a dialogue based learning and engagement around

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these questions um and i wonder as we continue to meander down our our keywords

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what role does school play i’m thinking back that you and i met in an academic

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context um at first many years ago and and how do you think about school and pedagogies these days

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um well i love school and i hate school

Love hate school

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so it’s like a love hate thing um thankfully

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i mean growing up like i was somebody who everybody uh

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because i was the only native kid in a white school at one point they just kept fit i was failing

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everything and they just kept kind of pushing you through you know how that happens and um

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i kept thinking um like school is just not

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at all relevant to my world or to my life or and these people are weird you know like

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looking around at the way they behave and talk and like even the my fellow students you know the only

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oh my gosh like i have so many stories about this stuff but we don’t need to go there but anyway

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but at one point um a lovely human like passed me a book

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and i realized i’d never been in a home with books before and so it was not around me and um

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i wanted to figure out my own life like trauma like how trauma was going to

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affect me as an adult and la la la i was about nine and my sister was going to um

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my it was my foster sister at the time our our family didn’t go to university but uh she was going to university for

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psychology and so she said oh i said can i read your psychology books and she kind of laughed to herself like ha ha funny

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and then she said yeah whatever’s on the shelf you can read and so like the first book i picked up was um

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carl young and then freud’s interpretation of dreams and then adler and like all those

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folks you know rogers and like all those kind of and that’s back when education had to read

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texts like actual texts not secondary things so there i think that developed a little

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bit of a snob inside of me that wants kids to read the actual text and not somebody

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interpreting it for them but anyway but i learned a lot about that and and

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the way that you the way that i understood those texts it when i went to university and i ended up studying

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philosophy my interpretation was radically different than the standard interpretations that

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that the world had given these texts and so i could open up other avenues for thinking through these texts

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that had nothing to do with the history of how they’ve been read before and so for me it’s like education can

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open those kinds of liberatory lines of flight and then education can really just hammer you the same old

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that they’ve been hammering at everybody forever and leads us nowhere and you know

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nowhere new and no we’re good so i don’t know i think school can be

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amazing when it is actually about education and learning

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and and experiencing and not about um standards and cannons and

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um money jobs

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you know all that crap

Learning to interpret art

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i am i’m totally feeling that like when i was working in victoria

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um at the art gallery of victoria because i had spent a couple of years in what was

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then the canadian department at the art gallery of ontario i ended up

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being responsible for the historical program in victoria and i would just like

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make stuff up i was like accused of having no expertise

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because often people who work in the historical fields and museums are like you know

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sort of bona fide art historians with lots and lots of knowledge and

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i would just like get in there and pull out a few works and just muck

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around with them and it’s so much fun and um

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i actually you know i think that um learning how to interpret

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art or groups of artworks is um

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is the fun in in curating um and so funny that

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it’s not really it’s not the thing that’s taught in curatorial studies programs and it’s certainly not the

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thing that is taught in art history um but that’s that’s a weird interjection

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from from me my question of you is actually i want to go back to

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your um your comments about looking to

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the work of black feminist writers and

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i’m thinking about the fact that you’re the computer of indigenous art at the ago but

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like the artists that you work with are actually like so diverse so heterogeneous and you

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really have brought a lot of black artists into the program for instance and i’m wondering

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is that um you know is that an institutional um

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expectation or a request of you or i think they’d forget about it

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sorry to say you’re you’re infusing or you’re complicating

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um the institutions expectations of you can you talk about that a little bit

Why she loves art

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yeah i think um i have a like i love art and so i i

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love artists and art and the whole thing like truly from a very like

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naive way you know inspired naiveness um so i’ve been introduced to so many

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things over my life and there’s no way in hell i can ignore them

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like once i’m in a position to put stuff on walls or to bring artisan for exhibitions or to do

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programming i can’t then hive off myself and say oh this is the only thing i do because it’s

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not and these and a lot of these artists know each other we we we don’t only work in an indigenous

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world you know we don’t only work in a black world so and the art world is one space where i

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think it’s actually more conversations are happening um across borders than

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elsewhere you know so why would we pretend like that it’s not happening but

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at the same time i fought really hard to have an indigenous art physician

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there with teeth and with power and all of that because if you don’t name it nothing

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happens so there’s that too right and they had to show an institutional commitment

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um but i also think like i’m i made a decision you know like between

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joining with in canadian like indigenous and canadian or hiving off one on its own which is

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indigenous art which is what most institutions are doing across the country and in the states

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um i made that decision so that we can rethink the country from a hole right

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like from it from a whole place so then even canada is not white right like i don’t start from whiteness of canada like i’d

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be like you know i’d be really bad at mishnavi if i did so i think that that’s also where i’m

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coming from with thinking about it it’s like when i looked at the collection for the toronto tributes and tributaries it

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was very much about seeing what was there and seeing where the gaps are

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thinking about diversifying the collection um and

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i had the idea of bringing art artists and artworks in that weren’t there from the get-go of the show right so

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for me everything is strategy so it’s like you bring it into the show and then you can start doing this and saying oh

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we need to buy this only we need to buy this because as soon as they show it they want to own it right and so

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because it becomes associated with the ago and so then you know it’s like all those stupid things that people think matter they don’t

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but i’ll use them you know the fact that it does matter to bring work in so i think that’s also

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part of it and no one was doing it like you know that there’s a gap in the

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silos so if canadian ends in 1990 which is like gonna be bumped up to 1995 because

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the contemporary is always moving so canadian art end date is always moving

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so then and if contemporary is very focused internationally then what happens to those artists like

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where who buys them between 1990 and and to now like who’s gonna buy their

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work and um living artists so that’s why i was like i’m just gonna break all the rules and we’re just gonna

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put them through our department and put them through this space and hopefully the whole

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institution will realize there’s a gap and that it has happened now more and more it’s happening everywhere so and

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then there’s julie’s new position as well you know global arts and african arts in the diaspora

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it’s like it’s a long title and i just forgot it i think that is what it is but yeah

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so that’ll that’ll also like create more change too

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but we’re in it together so i can’t leave anyone out because it’s my understanding of the

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world i have a question for you about artists

Genre recognition

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but i wonder if i could ask you to clarify something that you just said before i get there which is you just

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said i think canadian art ends around 1990 but maybe 1995 and you made a kind

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of date stamp about a kind of genre recognition and for those who might be

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listening to our conversation who aren’t as familiar can you expand that or clarify what you mean

28:21

yeah so curatorial roles and collections have um

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they either have a medium specificity like photography or they have a date

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specificity so like canadian runs from you know beginning of canada when is

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that 1867 to to what they consider the beginning of

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contemporary art right so that moves five years every five years

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so right like right now it’s 1990 but it’ll move to 1995 soon it’ll jump

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five years and then contemporary can jump ahead because contemporary needs to keep moving in order to be contemporary

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which is different because we use contemporary in the art historical to mean 1970s pretty much and forward so

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it changes all the time and then my position is from time immemorial till now

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and global [Laughter] so i gave myself the most widest breath

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i could have so we even have you know our maori artist from new zealand in the canadian

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galleries and nobody really wonders about it you know because no one really cares you know a visitor just

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wants to see and experience something amazing they don’t really care about these categories as much as we do

Working with artists

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thank you for that clarification you know one of the things that you just said was i love artists

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and you know i have been following your collaborations and exhibitions with

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rebecca belmore and was actually i think it might have even been the last time i was in the gallery was to see that show

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and i’ve been thinking a lot about the intimacy of curatorial practice and the

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necessity of long-term relationship building and i was wondering if you might

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speak about perhaps your work with belmore in particular or your broader

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thoughts and feelings or methods around working with artists as a curator

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um well i didn’t know what a curator was growing up i didn’t know what a curator was even

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when i was doing my masters in film so i think i

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started curating before this word was even part of my universe

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and the way i started um when i moved into working with visual artists because i’d

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always worked like more specifically in a gallery setting but i’d always worked with new media and performance and

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film and video but it’s very different in a gallery

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um so i thinking about

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maybe the fact that i never thought about what a curator is probably helps me

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do it my own way um i mean i did come and do a master’s but at that point i’d already been doing

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the work for over a decade like 15 years at that point so it’s not like they could change me

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very much at that point um but i did think it was important to have

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some of that canonical contemporary art and modern art stuff that i didn’t have so

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um that’s why i did it uh okay go back to where where your

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question is coming from uh oh yeah intimacy so i began curating because i had artist

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friends who weren’t having shows or didn’t like the curators they had to work with they had really bad

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relationships so they had really bad experiences so it also came out of a desire wanting to have a good experience

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or like what would this person produce if they were with somebody who trusted them or were with somebody who actually

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understood their whole being as opposed to just their work

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and so that’s kind of how it started so i think that’s why a lot of um

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a lot of the people i work with i do have really long relationships with or even if they’re short they’re deep

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and very personal i also don’t like treating people like they’re

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i don’t know like i just like to know people like him

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deep in a deeper way you know i get bored if i don’t so um

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so yeah there’s part of that intimacy i think is uh

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really amazing outside the institution intimacy inside the institution is really hard

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like the institution at the ago is the first time i’ve ever had conflict with artists working with them

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never had it before because i’m in control and i can make happen and this is my desires to make happen what

33:09

the artist wants to happen um and i have no you know in its conversation it can be

33:16

messy it can be all kinds of things we can create it together um but the institution comes in between

33:22

you you know it breaks your intimacy it breaks your ability to follow through on your word

33:28

it makes you know it makes you say no when you don’t want to so there’s all kinds of things that the

33:34

institution puts in place that actually impedes some of that intimacy but thankfully rebecca and i have worked

33:40

together for so long that we kind of we think in a similar like we

33:46

almost have our own shorthand and um so for us it’s like really hard to break

33:53

the the strength that we have together and it’s actually the ins and we’re both both

33:59

similarly pokey kind of don’t with me kind of people so i think it’s like easier for

34:05

for us to swim through that and maintain it which i think was evident in the show

34:10

so like even my style of curating is is very intuitive it comes from dreams it

34:16

comes from all kinds of things so which is not how people work you know it’s i can develop a list and then do a

34:22

floor plan and like blah blah or chronology and stuff so it’s like i’ll dream something and then i’ll go

34:28

rebecca i dream these things you know but um you don’t like that work with any

34:33

other work do you think we could do it anyway so it’s like you know just doing this and trusting each other and like

34:39

working that way and you know and the show in my humble opinion is very beautiful

34:44

you know it has a kind of beauty to it which mimics her use of beauty in her

34:50

work which is to draw people in so that they can start grappling with these really difficult

34:56

subjects and to grapple with ourselves and what’s you know the way in which we perpetuate all these violences so

35:08

i am i’m going to acknowledge my role in leading you down the path of um

Institutional critique

35:17

doing a like a kind of specific institutional critique of the ago

35:22

so i’m trying to think of a way to ask this question which is um a question that we’ve been asking

35:30

everybody um i want to ask it in a way that will

35:35

open it up even though we’ve pinned you down um

35:40

it’s all right i’m used to it but the ins the question is about what is what is the role of the institution

35:47

in um social justice in imagining a better future

35:54

and um i guess the thing that i’m i’m thinking about in relation to your work

35:59

is um how important it is to share the work of the artists that

36:06

you are working with and the ago is a place that

36:12

can allow a lot of people to see that to see that work

36:18

so i wonder um you know if you can answer the

36:23

the question that we’ve been universally answering but i also wonder if you want to talk a little bit about

36:29

um the communities that you interact with at

36:34

the heo the many many many people that that

36:40

you’re able to share your ideas with the artists that you are intimate with

36:48

you get to share all of that with so many people and what is that like um well i think the first part of your

Role of the institution

36:56

question like role of the institution i think from my point of view and this is where i differ from even people in my

37:02

own community there isn’t one institution so the fact that we have multiple institutions is

37:08

really important and i don’t want every institution to do everything

37:14

and so it’s very different and this is where i bump up against like people who want the ago to be

37:21

everything to everybody and actually do want it to be a community art space and i don’t because

37:27

um not that i don’t want community arts to happen there or whatever i just don’t want it to become something that we

37:34

already have elsewhere because it has a specific role to play within the gallery system

37:40

because i center artists and artists are we wouldn’t have any of these institutions we wouldn’t have this any

37:46

jobs we wouldn’t have anything to write about we wouldn’t have like the whole system rests on the artist and their labor

37:54

and so if you think about it like most of the i was in this meeting with because i used to be an arts funder as

38:00

well so i know that side of things but um they built this pyramid right of the

38:05

arts ecology system and the art artist was at the top here right in this pyramid

38:12

and so i just took the paper and i turned it around and i was like actually the artist is at the bottom and this

38:17

whole thing is resting on them so think about that right like when you’re thinking about funding

38:24

this is like the least fundedly supported uh spot really in the whole system and

38:29

even museums ignore artists you know what i mean like that isn’t their primary purpose

38:35

so something like the ago i think is a specific institution that can do a lot

38:40

for artists you know because it has this capacity because it has this audience because it

38:46

has this international reputation because it has this kind of space because it can enter certain discourses

38:53

so this is going to sound conservative in the sense that i wanted to continue to do those kinds of things for artists

38:59

because where the hell alice in canada are they going to get that nowhere so

39:04

maybe the ngc will give them a little something and now the remy is becoming that kind

39:10

of institution too which can launch careers you know and people think we shouldn’t care about

39:17

that right but i do because these are people that i live with love and

39:22

i see their labor i see their poverty i see their struggle and there’s no way in hell i can think that

39:29

that i can just walk in there and just like want to dismantle that you know something that

39:36

is really good for it’s probably the one place and i’ve made it happen for artists too making

39:42

sure that they they get a lot of gigs after they get a lot they get sales after they get up more stuff you know it’s like that’s

39:48

really important to me and i think that’s part of my job that is social justice in my mind

39:53

and it’s about economics and it’s about poverty right and indigenous women artists are the

39:59

most poor artists in the world you know like in this stupid system we have here

What you can do

40:05

so anyway i would say that parts very passionate about it but it does make me

40:10

bump up against people who just want me to bring everybody in and throw up group shows and like do this whole thing

40:16

um so i would say that so the other part of that is that what you can do and say an artist run

40:23

center and what you can do in a gallery like a university gallery

40:29

they’re different things right so i really miss working in university galleries because that’s why i keep an

40:35

independent place in there because there you can ask really amazing intellectual

40:41

deep questions about you know like the philosophy behind something or i can

40:47

deepen people’s understanding what indigenous culture is and what it means and la la la you know

40:53

um which i can’t do at the ago because it’s not what it’s there for right so i do feel like they’re all these

41:00

institutions are doing different things um but the second part of your what you

41:05

said is that to actually say that the institution has a role in social justice

41:11

is a statement that has not been made yet so like getting the ago to think of

41:17

itself as an actor within the social justice field

41:23

has been a new thing and it’s something we’ve been pushing for and something that it’s resistant to

41:29

um and something that i think is extremely important

41:34

so yeah so that and i think i think of that different than the practices that are in there

41:40

it’s like the way that it identifies itself and its role that is important for it to think of

41:47

itself as a social justice thing so i’m you know i’m getting them to sign on to the

41:54

united nations declaration of the rights of indigenous people and the trc

41:59

and a number of other kinds of things so that it can think about itself as an

42:04

actor in the world like some something a being that acts

42:10

where their actions could actually lead to you know the actual um

42:18

uh growth health of indigenous communities and arts and culture is part of that right

42:24

so just it’s a shift right of their thought and i think

42:30

that’s very astute that they don’t think of themselves that way and then i guess the other part of what

42:35

you said was the ago and audience i mean the audience is like it’s like a double-edged sword

42:42

because it’s like the bigger the audience the harder it is to do what you want to do

42:48

but the more you can take an idea and get it out there pretty far right

42:53

um but i still and here’s another situation where maybe i’m more conservative than other people

42:59

but i believe in experience over education so

43:05

i or at least it’s experience is education rather than information

43:11

and so i really butt up against a lot of people who work um with audience like museums are now

43:18

audience centered they’re not artist centered and they’re not art centered anymore they have moved completely

43:24

towards audiences and it i’m i’m actually not a fan of that and i get in trouble for saying that but it’s

43:30

the truth i’m like not artist i’m not audience centered in that sense because they have

43:35

a very monolithic idea of what an audience is what they want what they’re doing you

43:40

know and i want to change souls you know like inside like who you’re afraid of

43:46

what you’re afraid of how do you see vulnerability how do you love how do you you know approach life like inside

43:53

that’s what art can do so i don’t care if they know the facts

43:59

about whatever whatever you know that doesn’t change how they’re going to behave when they’re in your kitchen table

44:07

at least that’s what i believe i could be wrong maybe facts do change people

44:13

it’s like oh there’s the connection back to feminism because the early feminism was about consciousness raising was the

44:19

main strategy right and i think that i just in my lifetime have really seen that that doesn’t work

Conclusion

44:32

i love that in your summary of what art can do you know who you’re afraid of and what

44:38

you’re afraid of like the first two things that sort of popped into conversation i think that’s

44:43

incredibly dynamic and provocative and there’s something there to me too about

44:48

the gallery space like the space of encountering art and moving through space that is particularly pointed and i

44:56

think is different than encountering things on screens and theaters and on another day in another conversation we

45:01

could think about that but you know as we come to the conclusion of our conversation i would love to know

45:10

what’s animating you and exciting you these days what’s next for you how can people

45:15

attach to the things that you’re doing where can people find you if you are okay to be found

45:21

um i think

45:28

like a stutter turned into a song and then turned into a word that was pretty good pretty good um i was cut to speak about what i’m

45:35

about to do also comes back to something michelle said earlier about um

45:41

the excitement of interpretation you know and like not putting too many like borders around that kind of space so i

45:48

think that’s what um i’ve been trying to do with the mclean center for indigenous and canadian art right in terms of

45:54

putting things together that maybe aren’t necessarily like so obvious or

46:00

whatever and not worrying too much about the artist building an art historical

46:05

narrative um so we’re about to redo the mclean center again in um

46:11

in the in october so interestingly we’ve had this like

46:18

you know two-pronged approach where we have indigenous only spaces and we have you know the spaces with indigenous art

46:24

and canadian artists and um we have a lot of kind of solo spaces as

46:29

well um but this time it’s really swinging towards the indigenous like even more

46:36

so there’s like almost every room it’s going to be almost entirely indigenous art

46:41

which i think is fascinating we’re gonna try it out it just happened by chance sort of

46:47

um uh but yeah so we haven’t even really

46:52

sort of contemplated how that’s gonna go over but i mean the first changes that we’ve

46:57

done audiences love it it’s always full um lisa rihanna’s piece is always full

47:04

like there’s it’s interesting because i think they believed it would wouldn’t

47:09

work and people would be angry and people would be you know like where’s my historical canadian painting where’s the

47:16

salon room we really haven’t had that you know so i think it’s really interesting we had

47:22

some like trouble in the beginning in terms of because it’s like a pathways model which

47:27

you know me and tributaries and like this way of like not leading people it’s like

47:33

very hard for audiences like they want to be told but to think they want to be told what they’re learning and they want

47:39

to be led from room to room to room in a in an organized way so there was a

47:44

little bit of that at the beginning but then i would just walk them through i say let’s go to this piece here let’s

47:49

run over this piece and let’s run over that piece what does it make it you know they get so excited and then so a few of the older folks who were

47:56

having trouble with that are now like they now are very excited and the other part of it is that

48:02

permanent collections are meant to be permanent and we keep changing it all the time and then there’s work in there

48:08

that we don’t even own um but that’s a way to get to be able to own it so yeah but the sandra brewster

48:16

is staying up the blur um uh piece is staying up but we’re gonna now

48:22

put it with different work so it was with um carl beam asma mamwood and

48:29

tim whiten and some other white canadian artists i can’t i can’t believe i just said it’s

48:34

like 12 because they’re on this other wall anyway florence mcgill green like that

48:40

anyway so we’re gonna redo it with a bunch of actual um

48:47

kind of actually queer feminist um

48:53

humorous campy photography and then again some really

48:59

intimate kind of paintings so i think it’s yeah it’ll it’ll again shift right like it’s like what are we

49:05

looking at yeah there’s a whole bunch of changes coming that way so there’s gonna be by

49:10

the time apple quad comes which is december 2nd to december 5th and it will be partially in person and

49:16

partially online um but avocad.ca you’ll find it it’s uh

49:22

it’s felt like it’s said and everyone’s like how is it bad how is

49:28

it spelled um so a lot of those artists will be doing

49:34

artist talks and conversations so they’ll be able to see the work and then hear from the artist directly so it’s

49:40

gonna be kind of exciting and then robert’s opening is december 3rd friday december 3rd

49:47

yep so that’s the kind of stuff that’s happening

49:53

and you can reach me i don’t know how can you reach me email

50:01

i have an instagram account but it’s private because um because i post a lot of things that

50:07

i’m not allowed to post so i am have to make it private but you’re

50:12

welcome to join my instagram it’s nishnows n-i-s-h-k-n-o-w-s

50:20

used to be critical niche but somebody stole it from me so i couldn’t get it back after i closed

50:25

all my social media accounts because i was angry at being controlled

50:32

[Laughter] but now i’m back

50:38

from outer space okay sorry this is really long like that

50:47

anyway so yeah that open interpretation is very exciting right michelle that’s right that was a beautiful way to

50:55

end and uh i am trying to figure out if i can get to toronto in early december

51:02

now it all sounds super exciting yeah please come thanks for uh hanging out and spending

51:08

time with us we really appreciate it yeah thanks for having me have a good afternoon

51:13

absolutely or morning or whatever time zone we’re all in

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