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Tactics and strategies of racialized artists:
some notes on how to circumvent the art world’s terms of inclusion
I have been thinking about what it means to be a racialized person in the arts, and what kinds of tactics and strategies we’ve developed to move through these spaces. We wear politics on our skin; to be racialized is to live, every day, with a myriad of projected assumptions. I no longer see this as a burden. In my writing, programming, and commissioning, I privilege the work and experience of Black women in particular—and Black, Indigenous, racialized or marginalized...
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Tanya Talaga at the ArtsEverywhere Festival
Tanya Talaga was the literary guest at the 2018 Guelph Lecture On Being Canadian (now the Guelph Lecture on Being). In the accompanying video she reads excerpts from her book Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City, which honours the lives of seven indigenous youth...
Police Violence and the Art of Organizing
ArtsEverywhere is working with Families United 4 Justice and the Forced Trajectory Project to co-produce a series of personal narratives by family members, in a small effort to create counter-narratives to those established by the media in collusion with law enforcement, and to encourage greater system transparency and accountability. Through...
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News & Events
The ArtsEverywhere Festival aims to spark rich dialogues about issues, ideas, and challenges that are of the interest to our Guelph & Region audiences, and of relevance and interest to our national and global audiences via ArtsEverywhere.ca. By bringing to the stage a diverse, informative, creative, and, sometimes, unlikely combination of speakers, artists, and musicians, the festival offers a program that connects to the ongoing work and needs of many organizations and individuals that wish to make the world a better place.
Latest Entanglement
Notes on Self-Censorship
A week after the opening of Dispatches from the Ghost Ship at the Queens Museum in July, artist Jacob Cohen was approached by his employers who relayed a threat levied by the Department of Corrections (DOC). The exhibition included over 650 drawings made by Cohen in his over four years working on Rikers Island. Beyond the implicit threat to his...
Recent Entanglements
The Cost of Progress
The destruction by fire of the National Museum in Brazil this week is a blow to the world’s cultural history. Buried near the end of a number of mainstream media articles about the massive loss of the museum’s collection (90% of the collection was lost, which equates to approximately 20...
Beyond the Spectacle: Contradiction, Uncertainty, and Imagination
(Banner image: Chto Delat, Monument to the Century of Revolutions, 2017, installation at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. Photo credit: Dmitry Vilensky.) Over the past couple weeks (months… years…) I have found it impossible to escape a constant barrage of images. Children in cages, violent civil unrest, collapsing economies and societies, and the...
Thin Bright Threads
I was busy and distracted when the most recent ArtsEverywhere post arrived with its heading “Putin’s Very Best Day.” As I clicked through various posts to get a sense of where the entanglements of Nikolay Oleynikov and Alessandra Pomarico would take me, I happened to land on “Make Problems Everywhere,”...
Threat of Stability
Last Sunday, one week before the Russian presidential elections, with my punk band I took part in a benefit gig to support five young antifascists who were recently kidnapped, detained, and tortured by the FSB special agency, called the Centre for Prevention Against Extremism. We had just finished singing Lucy—a bold’n’brazen...
I am the space of protest
I am the space of protest. (dedicated to those who take to the streets) This one is dedicated to protest. To those people who resist being jaded and all forms of nihilism, pessimism, discouragement, or comfort and instead, they take to the streets. They move their body outside, they enact...
Freedom Movements, Programs, and Archival Practices of the Black Queer Diaspora
In his essay, Michael Roberson reminds us that the immense resilience and creativity of the House | Ballroom community are deeply historical and politicized. Roberson writes from within “a freedom movement, a radical pedagogy, and a spiritual formation in response to race, class, sexuality, and gender oppression. … Since its history...