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Commissioned for Canada's 150th birthday to encourage debate about the colonisation processes in Canadian society.

Video: an example of modern commissioned art displayed alongside historic objects. Interesting display.

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The Art Museum at the University of Toronto has partnered with artist Kent Monkman for a large-scale show of new works exploring the 150 years before and after Canadian Confederation.

More than two years in the making, the show features macabre and haunting artifacts - from leg irons to empty cradleboards - interspersed with large, dramatic paintings and life-sized installations.

"Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience" debuts on Jan. 26, kicking off a cross-Canada tour for 2017.

The exhibit came about after Barbara Fischer, director of the University of Toronto Art Museum, approached Monkman, who is First Nations Cree, back in 2014, inviting him to put together a large show to commemorate Canada's 150th anniversary.

It was part of an effort by the Canadian Museums Association to reflect on how museums have framed Canadian history, Fischer says - and she felt Monkman was the right artist for this project.

"I saw an exhibition of his where he brought together artifacts and materials, artworks by other artists and people from across hundreds of years, " she said. "I was amazed how different history can feel.

"You can see history with new eyes."

Professor Donald Ainslie, principal of University College, is chair of U of T's sesquicentennial steering committee.

"Monkman's show exemplifies how the university is responding to the sesquicentennial: not just with a celebration but with an intellectually informed, critical narrative that asks the hard questions about our nation's history and where it is headed," he says. "This is an especially important exhibit for the university as we mark Canada's 150 years and begin to respond to the federal government's - and U of T's own - Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) actions."

The exhibition opens Thursday but Monkman's work is already attracting attention.

In Monkman's 2016 painting "Daddies," Miss Chief Eagle Testickle holds court among the Fathers of Confederation (photo courtsey of Art Museum)
The exhibition is laid out in a linear narrative, a story told by Monkman's alter ego, a trickster character named Miss Chief Eagle Testickle - a play on the phrase "mischief egotistical." A series of didactics written in Miss Chief's voice tells a story playing on Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice narrative.

"The idea is that the Bennett girls were trying to marry well and improve their lot in life, so Miss Chief is trying to improve the lot of her own life and that of her family," explains Monkman, standing in front of his painting of Miss Chief seated on a chair under the looming figure of John A. McDonald, holding a glass of champagne.

"A country wife," says Monkman looking up at the painting. "A lot of trappers and men who were traders who were going out West would marry Indigenous women," he said. "Sometimes they stayed with them and sometimes no."

The exhibit fills the viewer with an uncomfortable mix of horror and humour - an effect Monkman elicits by placing artifacts collected from museums across Canada and in Europe next to his own works that play with the viewer, teasing out the ridiculous in colonial practice.

Copies of journal pages written and painted by Father Nicolas Point, a Jesuit priest, record his travels to Indigenous communities and depict scenes of Christianity and traditional life. Next to them, a life-sized crèche scene depicts an Indigenous version of the Virgin Mary and Joseph looking lovingly down on Miss Chief, laying on a Hudson Bay blanket.

The crèche is not a manger, it's a rez house with "dilapidated, porous, low living conditions, commodity foods with price tags showing how expensive it is to live in the north, bottled water," says Monkman.

"In the story that frames this exhibition, Miss Chief talks about the importance of family, she talks about community, and the impact of colonial policies on Indigenous people," he says.

Monkman points out an absurd feature of the crèche scene.

"Part of my work deals with how museums represent Indigenous people and the medium for that is the diorama," he explains. "At the Natural History Museum in New York, they use one face to standardize all Indigenous people in North America, male or female.

"So this is my head on mother, father and little baby Miss Chief."

The multi-room exhibit examines themes of poverty, illness, incarceration and trauma - all symptoms of a history Canada has begun to explore with Truth and Reconciliation. The role museums play in chronicling this history is important, Fischer says.

She explains that the University of Toronto - which has just released its own TRC report - has been revamping its collections to be more inclusive and reflective of the university's Indigenous community.

"Where the power of this project will really reveal itself will be in how Kent can tell us his bigger story," says Fischer. "It is a very moving project."

One of the most devastating installations may be a room with a wall of empty cradle boards, dedicated to Indigenous children, the history of residential schools and the Sixties Scoop.

"I think we can talk about it, but to see it is another level of understanding," Fischer says. "This exhibition will produce a much more intense sense of empathy and recognition for what happened."

Monkman gestures to a painting depicting a woman spilling out of a skid row bar on Winnipeg's main street.

"I went to the Manitoba Museum where I would see these dioramas of Indigenous people kind of frozen in the pre-contact idyllic state," he recalls, "and then I would walk out and see this literally right outside the museum.

"I could not reconcile the two worlds - what had happened to Indigenous people - I remember classmates looking at me, trying to get an answer, and I didn't even know how to talk about it.

"In many ways, that shaped this exhibition - and a lot of my work."

Fischer is encouraging students and faculty from across the university to visit the exhibition and learn more about Canada's Indigenous history.

The Art Museum welcomes the public to attend the opening reception of "Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience" from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 26th.

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"Shame and Prejudice": U of T Art Museum hosts artist Kent Monkman's exhibit for Canada 150

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The Art Museum at the University of Toronto has partnered with artist Kent Monkman for a large-scale show of new works exploring the 150 years before and after Canadian Confederation. More than two years in the making, the show features macabre and haunting artifacts - from leg irons to empty cradleboards - interspersed with large, dramatic paintings and life-sized installations.

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Picture taken from Nottingham Contemporary exhibition 'Still Rise'. Visitors are encouraged to take a piece of paper with questions related to the exhibition on it and to answer the question and post on the wall.

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William Wilberforce, the politician who helped abolish slavery, has been brought back to life in a series of virtual reality films.

Wilberforce's campaigning led to the passing of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which ended Britain's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.

To mark the 210th anniversary of the law, a 3D figure of the Hull-born abolitionist will appear in four films.

The videos will be shown around Hull as part of the city's year of culture.
Read more about this and other stories from across Hull and East Yorkshire
They are to be projected onto the side of the Wilberforce Institute, opposite Wilberforce House where he was born, from 18:00 GMT.

The films will then to be shown at Paragon Station and the Wilberforce House Museum.

John Oldfield, of the University of Hull's Wilberforce Institute, said: "We are telling his story again for a new audience.

"There is a lot of interest around the issue of slavery, both historical and contemporary.

"His success was hard-fought. It is a fight that still goes on."

The University of Hull and the Glasgow School of Art have created a digital 3D version of Wilberforce showing him at different stages of his life.

The Wilberforce figure is voiced by a drama student with his movements captured for the new video.

The Home Office estimated in 2014 there are up to 13,000 people in the UK still working in slavery,

"Enslaved persons are hidden in plain sight and it's about poverty and deprivation," said Mr Oldfield.

William Wilberforce: 1759-1833

Born on 24 August 1759 in Hull, he was the son of a wealthy merchant

He studied at Cambridge University becoming friends with William Pitt the Younger, the future prime minister

He became member of parliament for Hull in 1780 and later represented Yorkshire

Shortly after taking his seat he converted to evangelical Christianity

During an 18-year period, he regularly introduced anti-slavery motions in Parliament

The Slave Trade Act was passed in 1807 but it was not until 1833 that an act was passed giving freedom to all slaves in the British empire

He retired from politics in 1825 and died on 29 July 1833 and is buried in Westminster Abbey

Source: BBC History

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William Wilberforce, the politician who helped abolish slavery, has been brought back to life in a series of virtual reality films. Wilberforce's campaigning led to the passing of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which ended Britain's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.

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'Seven Migration Moments that Changed Britain' at the Migration Museum. In the exhibition a bar chart was created for the number of times migration was mentioned in the press in 2016 - a visual representation of the current debate.

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In a second blog for us, Assunta Nicolini, one of our regular volunteers, talks about how two of the seven moments in our current exhibition, No Turning Back, have caused visitors to raise questions about the complex relationship between race, migration and racism. Assunta is writing here in a private capacity.

A year and a half after the EU referendum, in which concerns about immigration played a major role, debates continue about what Britain's future migration policy should look like.

In the lead-up to the release of a new Immigration White Paper framing a future British immigration system, the Home Affairs Committee published a report - Immigration Policy: Basis for Building Consensus - highlighting, among other things, current public attitudes to the issue of migration. It is encouraging to read that, despite the apparent polarisation of views about migration, the majority of the British public remains very open to engaging in a constructive, open debate on the subject.

As a frequent and active volunteer at the Migration Museum, I have witnessed first-hand this willingness among visitors to our current exhibition, No Turning Back: Seven Migration Moments that Changed Britain, to engage constructively with the subject of migration. Regardless of visitors' background in terms of race, gender, age or migration story, one attitude stands out: the desire to learn about the migration history of this country.

Guiding the public through the selected seven moments - spanning centuries - means also that visitors are prompted to constantly connect and compare past events with present realities, and to find out more about some of the complex factors that shape migration. By engaging with debates about the difference between economic migrants and refugees, for example, or the complex relation between racism, race and migration, visitors are able to find their own answers, share their thoughts and opinions, and respond to questions and contribute to conversations started by other visitors to the exhibition. It's through this type of understanding that engagement becomes constructive.

To use just one example, the current exhibition encourages visitors to think about how British migration, historically, has been framed by race - to familiarise themselves with one of the most important themes in contemporary migration studies, the racialisation of migration. At its core, racialisation focuses on the process behind ideas of race and how they adapt to specific contexts and times. It allows us to understand how race, which is socially constructed, is used to exclude, discriminate and subordinate those who are considered inferior by a certain dominant group. From the colonial era onwards, 'dominant groups' in Britain have continuously racialised and cast as outsiders 'non-Brits' on the basis of skin colour or religion. What this means is that, regardless of who 'the Other' is, whether non-white or non-Christian, 'outsiders' are placed in a condition of inferiority. This mechanism is the main driver of what we know as racism.

The exhibition also explores the role of the media in shaping public opinion and reinforcing links between migration, race and religion. The Chart of Shame, a work by former journalist Liz Gerard that visitors can find in the 1905 'moment' of the exhibition, displays all of the front page migration stories published in British national newspapers in 2016 in the form of a bar chart. Even if they are often not surprised at what they see, visitors are nevertheless visually shocked by the amount of attention given to migration; a closer look then reveals the often negative, racialised language used in so much of the coverage. You don't need to be an expert in text analysis to count how many times derogatory terms referring to migrants and refugees are used, and to begin to think about how the use of this language feeds into and contributes to divisive narratives. The artwork, and the context in which it is presented, alongside a quote from Tony Gallagher, editor of the Sun, rejecting the suggestion that newspapers are responsible for creating divisive and hostile migration myths, gives visitors an opportunity to take in a large amount of data in one moment and to think critically about the role of the media in migration debates.

It is often at this moment in the exhibition that visitors display visible disappointment with, and even resentment towards, what they perceive to be a biased media, fuelling division in British society. Some ask, 'What can we do? I'm not a racist, many people don't even know their opinions on migration are racist . . . ' - to these questions the exhibition allows visitors to discern some answers, balancing moments of hostility and racism with times when the public in Britain stood up, united and fought racism. In the late 1970s, for example (and one more of the seven 'migration moments'), when racial tension was particularly high, people took to the street in thousands, united under the banner of Rock against Racism. For this migration moment (1978) there is a wealth of archive material and artworks that has prompted visitors to reflect on the racist attitudes of much-admired public figures such as Eric Clapton at the time, the role that grassroots cultural movements can play in changing attitudes, and to consider the need for similar grassroots movement now. Statements hanging from the ceiling provide first-hand testimony of many at the time. It is fascinating to see the reaction of younger visitors, many of whom were unaware of this historical moment, as well as those of people actively involved at the time. Whether they are learning or remembering, it feels like the exhibition is having an immediate, tangible impact.

No Turning Back is indeed a powerful exhibition, effective in addressing crucial themes around migration and encouraging the public to learn, engage and develop informed opinions. Through historical narratives and artworks visitors are given the tools to engage with and challenge many contemporary migration myths and misconceptions. In doing this, the exhibition contributes to the recommendations provided by the latest Home Affairs Committee report: 'We cannot stress enough the importance of action to prevent escalating division, polarisation, anger or misinformation on an issue like immigration. To fail to address this risks doing long-term damage to the social fabric, economy and politics of the United Kingdom.'

Having a Migration Museum in which Brits and non-Brits alike can learn about and interact with this country's history of migration is more important now than ever before - particularly when the debate around migration is so intense and people are showing a willingness to engage constructively.
Assunta Nicolini is working on migration and asylum in conflict areas while completing her doctoral studies at City University, London.

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The public's engagement with migration debates

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In a second blog for us, Assunta Nicolini, one of our regular volunteers, talks about how two of the seven moments in our current exhibition, No Turning Back, have caused visitors to raise questions about the complex relationship between race, migration and racism. Assunta is writing here in a private capacity.

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in 2013 the V&A developed a separate incentive to collect artefacts as soon as they became 'newsworthy'. Although I would argue this isn't necessarily a new tactic, the idea behind this was to use everyday objects to tell a wider story and thus engage people more with current debates and events across the globe.

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News: the architecture and design department at the V&A museum in London has acquired Katy Perry Lashes (pictured) and Primark jeans as part of a new "rapid response" strategy for collecting objects as soon as they become newsworthy, to reflect the changing way fast-moving global events influence society (+ interview).

The V&A is thought to be the first major museum in the world to adopt such a strategy, which is radically different from traditional methods for curating design and manufactured objects.

"The rapid response collecting strategy is a new strand to the V&A museum's collections policy, which can respond very quickly to events relevant to design and technology," senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital Kieran Long told Dezeen.

Items acquired under the scheme so far include the Katy Perry Lashes that Long examined in his most recent Opinion column for Dezeen, the first 3D-printed gun and a pair of jeans purchased from high-street retailer Primark that were made near the Plaza factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which collapsed earlier this year.

Whereas the museum has traditionally collected objects that have already earned their place in design history over time through their inclusion in books and exhibitions, this new strategy allows the curators to respond immediately to contemporary issues.

"We felt that the world works a little bit differently these days," Long explained. "There are global events that take place and have a bearing on the world of design and manufacturing, which give certain objects a certain relevance at that moment."

The strategy is being shown for the first time through an exhibition at the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture.

Long and colleague Corinna Gardner invited Shenzhen citizens to choose an everyday object that could tell a visitor something important about present-day Shenzhen. "These objects together tell a story about that city in this moment and offer a broader, more wide-ranging portrait of one of the most interesting, fast-changing cities in the world today," said Gardner.

One of the objects on show is a bra without underwire. "Shenzhen is the electronic manufacturing hub of the world and many of the factory workers are female," Gardner said. She explained that security checks on the way in and out of the factory usually involve a metal detector so workers choose to wear non-underwired bras in order to avoid beeping on the way through and having to undergo a physical search, where there is a a high rate of abuse.

"For me, the idea that a non-underwired bra is a valued currency in Shenzhen is a design narrative that tells you about the sexual politics of manufacturing in that city," added Gardner.

One of the benefits of this new approach is that the museum preserves objects that have little value and would therefore otherwise disappear.

"Sometimes it can be these very banal objects that can go away and are impossible to retrieve, because lots of valuable things are kept by people," said Long. "The kinds of things that Corinna [Gardner] was collecting in Shenzhen, if you tried to do that in two years time, you wouldn't find those things. They would have gone because the city changes so fast."

The exhibition continues in Shenzhen as part of the Biennale until February. From April the V&A will dedicate a new space in its twentieth-century galleries at the museum in London to displaying objects they've collected with the Rapid Response approach.

Long joined the V&A at the beginning of this year following a career in architecture journalism and a role as assistant director to David Chipperfield at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. In his first Opinion column for Dezeen, he called for an overhaul of the way design is curated in the twenty-first century and set out "95 Theses" for contemporary curation.

Here's an edited transcript of the interview with Kieran Long:

Rose Etherington: What is rapid response curating?

Kieran Long: The rapid response collecting strategy is a new strand to the V&A museum's collections policy, which can respond very quickly to events relevant to design and technology. The traditional way that the V&A collects objects is based on the idea that an object would prove its value over time by becoming a part of design history, being frequently cited in books and so on. These ways of proving an item's value obviously take time.

We felt that the world works a little bit differently these days. There are global events that take place and have a bearing on the world of design and manufacturing, which give certain objects a certain relevance at that moment.

Rose Etherington: Can you give me an example?

Kieran Long: One example I have here in my office is a pair of Primark jeans. These jeans were made around the Plaza factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which collapsed in April this year, killing a thousand people. Those Primark jeans wouldn't usually enter our fashion collections. Knowing that they were made in that factory, however, gives them a particular relevance and tells us something about contemporary manufacturing and about building codes in Bangladesh, about western consumerism, about lots of issues.

We thought that if we had those jeans in the museum, the day after that event, there's something very visceral about that and the object's ability to tell that story.

Rose Etherington: Was acquiring the 3D-printed gun an early application of this strategy?

Kieran Long: When Cody Wilson released the plans of the gun online, that was the moment that design changed. If we had had the rapid response strategy then, we would have printed one the next day probably and just got it on display immediately.

Rose Etherington: What else would you file under rapid response?

Kieran Long: This year The Telegraph newspaper ran some stories about working conditions in Tesco distribution warehouses. One of the things that they were talking about were the WT4000 wearable devices manufactured by Motorola that people in their distribution warehouses would wear. Basically they measure how many times you put something in a box on a production line.

Whenever I show this product, people are shocked that we think of wearable technology as the lovely things that you publish on Dezeen like Nike Fuel bands. Actually wearable technology is a reality for thousands of working people in this country. It's a kind of neo-Fordist, time and motion study-type device that means people can get fired if they don't put enough things in a box. A brilliant piece of industrial design but also a very frightening one.

Rose Etherington: What does this mean for the role of the curator?

Kieran Long: I don't think it's really any different to any traditional role of the expert curator in some ways. We are not stopping anybody from collecting in any way that the V&A has always collected. It's just about moving more quickly and responding to events in the world. We have the tremendous luxury of being paid to develop rigorous world-class expertise about the objects that we collect.

I think that time and that investment we put into the expertise should also be focused not just on beautiful objects by famous designers and by leading artists, but also we should be looking at views of social and cultural change about manufacturing, about global supply chains, about things that really are a part of design and manufacturing that affect the lives of many people all over the world.

Rose Etherington: Does it also mean looking in other places for objects to collect than a curator traditionally would?

Kieran Long: Yes. It's quite interesting, every time I talk about rapid response collecting internally, you find that some people in the history of the V&A museum have always done it this way. In 1989 when the Iron Curtain came down there was a big moment when the prints collection here collected a whole range of propaganda posters for the ex-USSR and the GDR and so on because they had the understanding that these things would disappear.

With the removal of that barrier, this Russian propaganda stuff became very important, so we now have one of the few complete collections in the world of propaganda posters and this kind of material. That was brilliant thinking, very reactive and very timely.

Rose Etherington: How will the objects collected with the rapid response method be displayed within the V&A museum?

Kieran Long: From April 2014 we'll have a modest space by the twentieth-century galleries. We'll have six cases that we will be able to use for these objects. People will come in and see things that have been in the news, things that have just rolled off the production line and been made into prototypes.

Rose Etherington: Do you think that the V&A's future visitors will want to see Primark jeans?

Kieran Long: One of the things you realise when you work in an institution like the V&A, with 160 years of history, is you do think about the long term and I really believe people will look back and want to find a pair of Primark jeans in our collection. I really believe that. They will look back in the archives and newspapers and they will know the size of that business and the dominant position they have on the high street. Sometimes it can be these very banal objects that can go away and are impossible to retrieve, because lots of valuable things are kept by people.

The kinds of things that Corinna [Gardner] was collecting in Shenzhen, if you tried to do that in two years time, you wouldn't find those things. They would have gone because the city changes so fast. Things are very fragile and not given value by people. What a great role for a museum to keep safe the things that might not otherwise be safe.

Rose Etherington: How does this fit into the V&A museum's history?

Kieran Long: The museum itself is very self-consciousness about the way it does collect and document it's own history. Hopefully people will look back and say there was this moment when the V&A got this new team with Kieran Long, Corinna Gardner, Louise Shannon and Rory Hyde and they all sat around and they had this new idea. They all stuck around for five or ten years and here is the group of things that they collected.

There are examples of that throughout the museum's history. The famous circulation department of the 1950s and 1960s were collecting contemporary things in a really innovative way and that department was closed and integrated into other departments, but people are now doing PhDs about their work. They hold them up as an innovative, leading-edge group of thinkers at that time. Of course we aspire to that and we're ambitious, and we want to be a part of this great museum's history.

Rose Etherington: What about picking things which seem a good idea at the time but history processes otherwise?

Kieran Long: We may be wrong on some decisions but as long as we're rigorous and careful and we follow our own parameters, it will have interest.

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Interview with Kieran Long on rapid response collecting at the V&A

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News: the architecture and design department at the V&A museum in London has acquired Katy Perry Lashes (pictured) and Primark jeans as part of a new "rapid response" strategy for collecting objects as soon as they become newsworthy, to reflect the changing way fast-moving global events influence society (+ interview).

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Taken from a lesson plan created for the National Museum of the American Indian. Video about belonging - a piece that contextualises the experiences of the American Indian. Research in 'sensory' experiences Bell (2017), suggest that using materials that enhance visual experience (videos, smells, sounds, etc.) increases the learning experience of an exhibition as well as enhancing empathetic reactions to display.

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Native Knowledge 360Â°â€" Northern Great Plains Culture and History: How Do Native People and Nations Experience Belonging?

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This online lesson for grades 9-12 explores the significance of homelands, kinship systems, and nationhood for Native Peoples of the Northern Plains. Discover the rights and responsibilities of belonging to a Native Nation and the role of customs, values and traditions.

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Image from 'Dear Difficult Body' exhibition from Aarhus' Steno museum. Teenagers are asked to give feedback on the exhibition and their opinion, and ordered by gender.

Link: http://www.jutlandstation.dk/uncovered-nudity-not-taboo-danish-society/

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Steve Martin's exhibition entitled 'The Idea of the North' at the AGO displayed a Twitter feed with a hashtag asking what people associated with the North. This not only makes feedback engaging and rapid response, but it also opens the discussion up to other platforms.

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Comedian Steve Martin has been an art lover and collector of fine art for decades. Now he's co-curator of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario titled The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, featuring more than 30 major paintings by the revered Canadian painter and co-founder of the Group of Seven.

"I always thought it was going to be a big hit," Martin said of the exhibition.

"I've always felt, just wait 'till they see these paintings all in one room."

Canada through an American lens

Group of Seven paintings are front and centre in the hearts and minds of Canadians for their representation of the country's rugged northern landscape and for the sense of national identity they imbue.

But the showing at the Hammer Museum marked the first major exhibition of Harris works in the United States. That show included some of his most significant paintings.

As Martin tells it, "I do own a couple of small panels that I bought through the years that I just really like. In fact, that's how this whole thing got started. I had a small panel hanging in our house and Annie Philbin was over, and she said, 'Who's that?' And I said 'Don't get me started,' and here we are."

'I thought I discovered him'

Martin finally agreed to take on the project, hoping to make Harris as famous in the U.S. as the Canadian icon is at home.

"I thought I discovered him, then I realized Canada knows all about him," Martin told CBC's Wendy Mesley in an exclusive television interview earlier this month.

"I felt a little foolish. I thought he was unknown."

The fact that few Americans seemed aware of Harris's work, while Martin had adored him for decades, finally spurred the comedian on to take on the job as curator.

Over a period of several years, Martin travelled across Canada to choose the right pieces for his exhibition.

Abstract idealized images of Canada

Martin said he first saw Canada's North when he went to the Yukon on a film shoot. There, the landscape reminded him of a Harris painting.

"I was helicoptered to the location and would fly through these mountains. I thought: `This is Lawren Harris,'" he told Mesley.

"Oftentimes, you know, a painter will paint a landscape and you think, 'That's not really what it looks like.' And then when you actually go see the landscape, you go, 'Oh, I see. He actually did paint it exactly like it is.'"

While the Hammer Museum's version of the show provided an initial introduction to Harris's masterworks for an American audience, in Boston, his paintings were shown alongside American abstract artists.

"In Boston, we were able to bring Harris together with the important early American artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and Marsden Hartley," Hunter said during Tuesday's chat.

"And the work really held up, really strongly."

Martin also discussed the progression of Harris's oeuvre from realism to abstractionism over time.

"If you look at Harris's work you will see paintings of specific places. He's looking at the scene and painting it or maybe doing a drawing and taking it back to the studio. But then later, you see formal pictures like Isolation Peak,which are non-existent places that he's composing. And then you see a painting like the Imperial Oil picture and it's just theory," Martin said.

"It's like the theory of a mountain ... and that's where theIdea of North comes from."

Those sparse, austere, empty northern landscapes have helped shape Canada's sense of identity, even as the majority of Canadians today live in cities far to the south.

Updated for Canadian audiences

The AGO exhibition has been expanded for a Canadian audience readily familiar with the paintings of Harris. There are an additional 20 works that feature the artist's early career that serve to situate him as a Toronto artist.

Harris's "bold vision of the North, the one that so many people love, really comes out of this place," according to the AGO's Hunter.

Artistic contemporaries

The expanded exhibition in Toronto also includes historical work of several photographers, Harris contemporaries who also documented the Ward in Toronto in the early 1900s.

"It was a tough, emerging modern city that was really hard on working people and really hard on newcomers," Hunter said.

"Harris dealt with that in his work. He wrote about it in his poetry. He spoke quite openly about being troubled by the human condition that he saw.

Beyond Harris

The Toronto exhibition also features work by several contemporary Canadian artists, including four commissions, that further explore the idea of the Canadian identity and landscape.

Anique Jordan's print series 94 Chestnut at the Crossroads, according to the exhibition catalogue, is "a powerful image of resistance against the violent systemic erasure of black histories and bodies in the city."

Landscape on film

The exhibition's prologue and epilogue serve partly as a critique of Harris, but also a critique of Canada and the stories that we've consistently told, said Hunter.

"I think the challenge for Harris is that in choosing that path for very particular reasons, it also opens him to criticism for, in a sense, that kind of cleansing or erasure that happens in his work [and] can also be seen as an ignoring of a wider culture."

Another of the contemporary pieces is a specially commissioned film by Toronto directors Jennifer Baichwal and Nick De Pencier. It is surreal visually, recalling Harris's northern landscapes while also examining the human impact on our planet.

Idealized vision of Canada

Hunter offers a final perspective on the enduring contribution Harris made in shaping our idea of Canada.

"Harris was very successful in the teens and 20s in supporting an argument for a Canadian art, a very nationalist perspective," he said.

"That really stuck. And that stuck even at the point later when Harris moves off into producing many of the works that you see in this exhibition, which are about something more spiritual and more transcendant."

Watch Wendy Mesley's full interview with Steve Martin on The National on Thursday June 30 at 9 p.m. ET on CBC News Network, 10 p.m. ET on CBC Television (10:30 NT) or online at CBC.ca/thenational .

The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris is on display at the AGO July 1 to Sept. 18.

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Steve Martin curates Lawren Harris exhibit at the AGO | CBC News

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Comedian Steve Martin has been an art lover and collector of fine art for decades. Now he's co-curator of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario titled The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, featuring more than 30 major paintings by the revered Canadian painter and co-founder of the Group of Seven.

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"Thread Bearing Witness is a textile based art project currently being undertaken by artist Alice Kettle in response to the current issue of migration. It is made up of several strands, one of which is the ‘Stitch a Tree Project’. This part of the project invited the wider community to stitch individual trees in response to the refugee crisis, a way of bringing individuals together to create discourse and to show solidarity for displaced people and asylum seekers across the globe.

Whilst many of the trees have been sent in from sewing groups, schools and individuals from around the world, the project was also set up for a time in the Winchester Discovery Centre. Here stitchers could come and sit and sew, discuss what migration and displacement meant to them, and watch the larger piece of work unfold."

https://alicekettle.co.uk/thread-bearing-witness-2/

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This week, Zachary Stocks (@Museumorphosis) continues to share with us a project he created called Heritage Organizations for Rural Social Equity (HORSE). This is the second part of a 4-part series. In this post, he discusses the foundational philosophy behind HORSE, outlining why museums should serve as sites for social action, and why that work is [...]

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This week, Zachary Stocks (@Museumorphosis) continues to share with us a project he created called Heritage Organizations for Rural Social Equity (HORSE). This is the second part of a 4-part series. In this post, he discusses the foundational philosophy behind HORSE, outlining why museums should serve as sites for social action, and why that work is [...]

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This is a network for BAME cultural professionals - whatever career stage, working as freelancers (at least 50% of this work is in museums, galleries, archives and heritage) or as staff members in organisations.

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This exhibition sought to explore the challenges faced by museums to interpret objects in a 'constantly shifting society'.

Something like this could be conducted in the 'contact zone' on a small scale with an object from the collections.

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Object Retrieval was a mass participation art project that took place from 15-21 October 2009 on a converted Routemaster bus in the main UCL (University College London) Quad on Gower Street, London. A single object from the UCL Pathology Collection was exhibited on the bus and explored by thousands of people from their own personal or professional perspective for 7 days, 24 hours a day.

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Image taken from the Contemporary Slavery Gallery in Wilberforce House, Hull.

This board features articles about current issues surrounding slavery, updated weekly.

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Eurocentrism still sets the terms of restitution of African art

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Eurocentrism still sets the terms of restitution of African art

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Just an interesting article about France's 5-year restitution plan.

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France has a long history-ever since André Malraux served as the first minister of culture (1959-69)-of using art patronage as a means of promoting soft power in Africa. For this reason, commentators immediately discerned political motives behind President Emmanuel Macron's promise in November 2017 to formulate a five-year plan for the "temporary or definitive restitution of African cultural heritage to Africa." They suspected that Macron sought to deflect anger over French immigration policy and the presence of French troops in West Africa. Some critics also perceived the gesture as a cheap means to shed France's colonial legacy. The matter gains urgency at a time when France is losing its economic edge in its former colonies to China, e.g. in the competition for lucrative oil contracts off the coast of Senegal.

Nonetheless, political analysis has lost out in the press over the past year to moral outrage fueled in part by the endless reproduction of a bogus statistic claiming that "90-95% of African heritage is to be found outside the continent in the major world museums." The authors of a recent report on restitution prepared for Macron attribute this statistic to Alain Godonou, who estimated in 2007 that the "inventories" of individual African museums "hardly ever exceeded 3,000 cultural heritage objects." Godonou's claim about the size of African collections is sometimes dramatically wrong. For example, some of the most celebrated works in the African art canon belong to the Nigerian National Museum and an interim report submitted to the Ford Foundation by Foster + Partners in 2008 estimated that the collection of the flagship institution in Lagos comprises 50,000 works of art dated from 900 BCE - mid-20th century. To put this in perspective, Musée Quai Branly has estimated their African holdings to be 70,000 objects.

Even more seriously, what would it mean to say that 90-95% of African cultural heritage is abroad? What is or is not included in the definition of "heritage"? From my own research, I know that large camps of Eastern Pende boys in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were initiated in 2018. The boys learned approximately 125 songs, spent 2-4 hours/day perfecting their dance techniques, and mastered a corpus of proverbs necessary to participate in public trials as well as the protocols for dancing masks. According to Godonou's calculus, the only thing in the initiation that might qualify as "cultural heritage" (patrimoine) would be the wooden face mask stripped from the body of the performer as opposed to the great wealth of artistic or cultural practices that cannot be transferred as easily to European-style museums.

An online petition favouring Belgian restitution explains better what is actually being argued: "More than 90% of classical African works of art are outside of Africa." In other words, what the statistic highlights are the art forms admired by early modernists such as Picasso and Matisse. "Classical" in commercial galleries is a term that most often refers to African works collected during the first half of the colonial period, ca. 1885-1930. Such a selective view of what constitutes cultural heritage continues the colonialist paradigm that African cultural achievement should be defined by European criteria. It also perpetuates the misguided notion that African cultural production effectively died in 1885 and everything produced thereafter is illegitimate and debased in quality.

It is important to understand the Eurocentrism of Godonou's statistic for two reasons. First, it is essential for Macron's mission because he wishes to confine questions of restitution to objects from Africa. The powerful lobby concerned to protect works from Greece, Egypt, and China need not fear. Sub-Saharan Africa is argued to be a case apart because of its cultural impoverishment.

Second, although many mundane artefacts appear in the inventories of museums, the importance of figurative sculpture in the framing of worthy heritage has made it hard for African institutions modeled on European national museums to make themselves relevant for local audiences. Colonials followed by representatives from UNESCO and various NGO's have been building museums in Africa for 80-100 years. It is time to ask why they have not been particularly successful in cultivating African constituencies. The reasons are complex. For example, a minority of ethnic groups is responsible for the sculptures celebrated in African art surveys. Is it justified for a national museum to spend precious resources glorifying a handful of ethnic groups? Furthermore, many of the sculptures collected were religious icons and religious change in the 20th century has often made their very existence controversial. Africans have led cataclysmic iconoclastic movements for a variety of reasons since the 1910s in West and Central Africa and the phenomenon continues into the present.

For Macron's ongoing economic agenda to be effective, the perception of France in Africa must change quickly. Thus, it is revealing that his recent report recommends "swift" action five times over. However, as analysis of a single statistic reveals, the complexity of issues surrounding restitution demands careful substantive and nuanced research. In a blistering exposé of what he calls the "white savior industrial complex," the US writer Teju Cole warns: "If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement."
* Z. S. Strother is Riggio Professor of African Art at Columbia University, New York

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Eurocentrism still sets the terms of restitution of African art

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France has a long history-ever since André Malraux served as the first minister of culture (1959-69)-of using art patronage as a means of promoting soft power in Africa. For this reason, commentators immediately discerned political motives behind President Emmanuel Macron's promise in November 2017 to formulate a five-year plan for the "temporary or definitive restitution of African cultural heritage to Africa."

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"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change." Audre Lorde, 1978
Earlier this year, I was part of a group of co-curators invited to set up an exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG) which would use the Museum's collection to confront history in new and challenging ways. The attempt is worthy - reflective of movements like 'Rhodes must fall' and 'why is my curriculum white', which call for a radical reassessment of history, an awareness of how colonial processes impact our present times. However, the exhibition brought into focus an important question - one of whether large British institutions like BMAG can and should promote 'decolonial' thinking, or whether, in fact, they are so embedded in the history and power structures that decoloniality challenges, that they will only end up co-opting decoloniality.

At the start of the project, we toured the permanent nineteenth-century exhibition together. One of the museum staff drew our attention to the labelling - the authorial voice of the museum - and the way that certain objects are deemed 'valuable' and therefore are placed in central positions, most of which are paintings by white men. In this time period, it seemed as though brown and black faces only appeared in Orientalist paintings, images which created a fantasy version of the rest of the world as underdeveloped, static, feminine. One such painting we saw languished in a corner, depicting a veiled woman whose mouth was literally being covered twice (by a veil and a man's hand). Someone muttered: "I'm tired", and everyone laughed.
Museums are not neutral
Museums are not neutral in their preservation of history. In fact, arguably, they are sites of forgetfulness and fantasy. The way exhibitions are constructed usually assumes a white audience and privileges the white gaze. The white walls signified the choices of white people, their agency, their museum collections, and the endeavours of colonialists. To many white people, the collections are an enjoyable diversion, a nostalgic visit which conjures up a romanticised version of Empire.

For many people of colour, collections symbolise historic and ongoing trauma and theft. Behind every beautiful object and historically important building or monument is trauma. As the historian and writer, Nana Oforiatta Ayim has said : "In the British Museum, you have the African galleries, and it's like, 'This drum is from 1500 Ashanti,' but there is nothing else about it. You don't know what it is used for, what context it's from, how it was brought here, who stole it. The museum as it exists today is so much an imperialist project and is so much about power". The craftsmanship, the display case, the beauty of the institution that collects and protects its imperial hoard: the way items are described, the way they are catalogued and what gets shown and what remains hidden; all work to deny, retreat, and forget.

As the project proceeded, we were given presentations by the curators about the acquisition history of the museum collections. Many of the collections pertaining to Empire were donated by colonialists, merchants, collectors, or just "taken". One of the most famous (and controversial) objects is the Buddha Sakyamuni, who greets visitors at the museum entrance. The statue was discovered by British railway engineer E B Harris in north-east India in 1861; he transported the statue from India and sold it to a West Midlands industrialist for £200. It was destined for the museum of Birmingham, whose foundries had produced many of the rails, sleepers and carriages for the East Indian Railway. Where museum objects come from and the circumstances surrounding their acquisition are seen as secondary to the value of allowing the British public access to "history". Often it takes repatriation campaigns to highlight these issues.
Joseph Chamberlain
The museum itself sits on Chamberlain Square. The Square (alongside many of Birmingham's buildings and locations) is named after Joseph Chamberlain, who is celebrated as the 'father' of Birmingham. He has a whole display in #ThePastIsNow dedicated to restoring historical accuracy, highlighting his role as the British Secretary of the Colonies. Chamberlain is comparable to Cecil Rhodes in his unwavering belief in imperial expansion and the superiority of the 'British race'. We gave him room to explain his imperialist, racist ideology, exploring how his social reforms in Birmingham were made at the expense of the colonies.

Although the connections between Empire and Birmingham run deep, this story is rarely represented within institutional spaces in the city. As the project continued, it was clear that there were so many stories and not enough time and money to do justice to them. Each of the displays we went with could easily have whole been exhibitions, whole buildings, dedicated to their decolonialisation. The pressures of the project led to difficult questions, including whether these histories could translate into Birmingham museum in a way that was truly radical. It was going to be a challenge, a struggle, for everyone involved.
We were all wary of being tokenised
The museum staff were aware of this in theory, but I don't think they were prepared for us in practice. We were intent on drawing attention to the museum as an imperial structure that is intimately tied to systemic whiteness. We also strove to highlight how individuals reproduced institutions. In meetings, we threw out phrases like 'white fragility' and 'systemic racism' to staff who had, perhaps, never been confronted in this way. Although we were allowed creative freedom within the exhibition and were encouraged to be candid, it often felt like the price of our honesty was any future chance to work with the museum or, worse, that it might jeopardise further decolonial projects. Though we were encouraged to be upfront, we were never sure where we stood. Meetings could be very tense.

Though a large part the project involved managing other people's emotions, it also meant managing our own emotions. All of the co-curators of #ThePastIsNow are women of colour with diverse heritages. As such, we all deeply felt the weight of responsibility to represent and narrativize the perspectives of our communities. At the same time, we were all wary of being tokenised. (Plans to have our photos in the exhibition were scrapped for instance) We wanted to be sure we were not being exploited; that underlying anxiety was difficult to shake off. There was always a power struggle at work, and it often felt like there was a 'scramble for the museum' in terms of how the stories would be told, how much we could say, how open we could be.

Decolonising is deeper than just being represented. When projects and institutions proclaim a commitment to 'diversity', 'inclusion' or 'decoloniality' we need to attend to these claims with a critical eye. Decoloniality is a complex set of ideas - it requires complex processes, space, money, and time, otherwise it runs the risk of becoming another buzzword, like 'diversity'. As interest in decolonial thought grows, we must beware of museums' and other institutions' propensity to collect and exhibit because there is a danger (some may argue an inevitability) that the museum will exhibit decoloniality in much the same way they display/ed black and brown bodies as part of Empire's "collection". I do not want to see decolonisation become part of Britain's national narrative as a pretty curio with no substance - or, worse, for decoloniality to be claimed as yet another great British accomplishment: , two world wars, one world cup, and decolonisation.

Rather than place the onus on people of colour - either as facilitators or as an audience for the museum - we need to flip the narrative and ask how the museum can facilitate the decolonial process for its majority white audience in a way that does not continue to exploit people of colour. Key to this is accepting that the museum needs us; we do not need the museum. Institutions need to stop considering giving access to BAME people's own cultures something they should be grateful for, and they should definitely ensure that 'focus groups' and visiting curators are remunerated adequately for their work.

This came to a head at the last meeting. We raised these issues - about emotional labour, about not receiving adequate pay for the work we were doing, and about the fact certain key decisions were made without us - and explained that the co-curation process betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding of what decoloniality is and who it is for. We argued that words and systems that hide exploitative practices such as 'volunteering', 'zero-hour contracts', and 'diversity' have no place in a decolonial project. Too often people of colour are rolled in to provide natural resources - our bodies and our "decolonial" thoughts - which are exploited, and then discarded. The human cost, the emotional labour, are seen as worthy sacrifices in the name of an exhibition which can be celebrated as a successful attempt by the museum at "inclusion" and "decolonising", as a marker that it - and, indeed, Britain - is dealing with its past.
Decolonising is challenging
After this, the co-curators were emailed the interpretation (the exhibition text). To our dismay, it was written in the same neutral voice that we had critiqued weeks earlier. We were told that we could 'edit' the text, but there would be little time to make larger changes. There was nothing to be done: we had to set aside questions like am I being exploited and would a white man accept this and what about self-care so that we could "decolonise". Four of us locked ourselves in a room and collectively re-wrote the entire interpretation. We spent hours arguing about wording and grammar - what would be added to the story, what would we leave out - on the history of Birmingham and eugenics, partition, Kenyan independence, the environment... All the while we were concerned that our efforts might not be accepted, and that our passion might be edited away.

I know that the museum staff also had a lot to lose. Later, I met up with our wonderful research assistant and she explained how certain curators were put in difficult positions, where their reputation was at risk because of what we wrote. I empathise - decolonising is challenging. It means institutions reflecting on their processes and practices critically. It means acceding privilege, and that is almost always painful. Decoloniality is also challenging because it is necessarily unreachable, necessarily indefinable. The legacies of European colonialism are immeasurably deep, far-reaching and ever-mutating, and so decolonial work and resistance must take on different forms, methods and evolve accordingly. However, one thing that I am sure of is that decolonising is a process we must all work on . Curating #ThePastIsNow was hard - but I recognise in that difficulty something was changing within us all, that there was the possibility we could work through that difficulty together. The co-curators were learning how institutions work and think, and institutional actors were learning about how institutions can better serve their communities.

In the end, the museum accepted our re-write. And when I walked into the exhibition gallery, it was undeniably moving: objects are properly contextualized as souvenirs of traumatic histories. And those histories are narrativized from our perspective. Works of contemporary art from artists such as Donald Rodney, Keith Piper, Lubaina Himid, Vanley Burke sit next to orientalist pieces on a salon wall; there are mirrors on the wall, prompting you, the viewer, to see yourself as part of the exhibition, part of the process.

I'll admit that there were tears. Even though the process was challenging, I couldn't help it: we got Audre and Malcolm on those white museum walls.
#ThePastIsNow is showing at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery until the 12 of March 2018. Main image:William Holman Hunt - The Lantern Maker's Courtship, A Street Scene in Cairo If you enjoyed reading this article and you got some benefit or insight from reading it buy a gift card or donate to keep Media Diversified's website online. Or visit our bookstore on Shopify - you can donate there too!
Sumaya Kassim (@SFKassim) is a writer and researcher. She is a contributor to the essay collection Cut From The Same Cloth (Unbound, 2018) which you can pre-order here. You can find the co-curators on twitter @AbeeraKamran @aliyahhasinah @helloiamariam world @SKbydesign

All work published on MD is the intellectual property of its creators, and requires permission to be republished. Contact us if you have any questions.

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"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change."

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An interesting TED Talk about the importance of museum decolonisation.

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"Decolonising" the museum space | Museums Association

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A new model for how museums should collect, exhibit artifacts

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A new model for how museums should collect, exhibit artifacts

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A new model for how museums should collect, exhibit artifacts

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Asian news hub covering geo-political news and current affairs across Asia

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'Where do We Fit In?' Black and Asian British History on the Curriculum

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'Where do We Fit In?' Black and Asian British History on the Curriculum

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The talk in this link has been created into a podcast available at the bottom of the page. Interesting discussion on how to teach Black and Asian British history with schools - can be applied to museums as well.

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'Where do we fit in?' Black and Asian British History on the Curriculum | Institute of Historical Research

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This event brings together scholars, artists and activists to discuss the presence and absence of black and minority ethnic Britons on the UK's National Curriculum and seeks to celebrate the contributions of Britons, of all backgrounds, to the history of the United Kingdom.

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Interesting way to contextualise and display pieces at the Horniman museum.

Link: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/gallery/in-pictures-around-the-world-in-five-objects-at-london-s-horniman-museum

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I know I have given a lot of examples of 'post-its on the wall' type spaces for feedback. However, this wall was so overwhelmingly full I wanted to include it. I think it's important to ask the right sort of questions to engage with visitors and this one worked well as it was quite a personal question. A lot of the answers were 'mum' but then there were other examples of women (Michelle Obama, Ruth Bader-Ginsberg) that I think contributed to the discussion nicely. People can choose what level of engagement they want to give with a question like this.

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Display taken at EPIC - The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin.

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Photograph taken from display at Derby Museum that includes the origins of the pieces on display (traded, gifted, found, looted, stolen).

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In the gallery marked 'Connection' at EPIC - The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin there is a projector that projects a feed from Twitter using the hashtag #epicmuseum

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A non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.