ART FOR SOCIAL CHANGE:

Image Credits: [1] Black Wimmin Artist, The Feast, 2019, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Photo credit: Solana

Cain. [2] Rebecca Belmore, The Named and the Unnamed, 2002, video. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin

Art Gallery. [3] Paul-Émile Borduas, Abstract in Blue, 1959, oil on canvas, 92.1 x 73.4 cm, Art Gallery of Ontario,

Toronto. [4] Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Christy Clark and the Kinder Morgan Go-Go Girls, 2015, acrylic on

canvas. Private Collection. Photo credit: Maegan Hill-Carroll, Vancouver Art Gallery. [5] Installation view of

General Idea, AIDS, 1988–90. Installation view from General Idea’s Fin de siècle, Württembergischer Kunstverein,

Stuttgart, Germany, 1992. Courtesy of General Idea and Württembergischer Kunstverein. [6] Curtis Talwst

Santiago, The Execution of Unarmed Black Men, from the Innity Series, 2014, mixed media, 9.5 x 9.5 x 11.4 cm.

[7] Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Burial at Oshawa (Part 6), 2019, digital photograph. Courtesy of the artists.

[8] Christi Belcourt, Water Song, 2010–11, acrylic on canvas, 201.5 x 389 cm. Collection of the National Gallery

of Canada, Ottawa. [9] Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Lesbian National Parks and Services, 1997-ongoing,

performance. Courtesy of the artists. [10] Shuvinai Ashoona, Oh My Goodness, 2011, coloured pencil and

Fineliner pen on wove paper, approx. 21 x 25.5 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

[11] Paraskeva Clark, Petroushka, 1937, oil on canvas, 122.4 x 81.9 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada,

Ottawa. [12] Black Wimmin Artist, The Feast, 2019, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Photo credit: Solana Cain.

[13] Black Wimmin Artist, The Feast, 2019, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy Now Magazine.

Photo credit: Samuel Engelking.

Every day, the news reminds us of the remarkable power to

drive change by participating in protests, boycotts, and

other forms of political expression. In the spirit of this

era of activism and social responsibility, we’re looking to

Canadian artists who have devoted their lives and works to

creating a more equal and just world by critically examining

contemporary culture, transforming popular attitudes and

preconceptions, and empowering people from marginalized

communities. Confronting the most pressing concerns of the twentieth and

twenty-rst centuries, the artworks featured below demonstrate the important

role of Canadian artists in envisioning a better world for future generations.

Sara Angel

Founder and Executive Director, Art Canada Institute

In 1987, the Toronto art collective General Idea (active

1969–1994) developed their iconic AIDS logo—a ri on the

American Pop artist Robert Indiana’s famous LOVE motif—

after being invited by the Koury Wingate Gallery in New York

to participate in an exhibition in support of the American

Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). While Indiana’s

piece celebrated the spirit of free love in the 1960s, General

Idea (whose members included Felix Partz [1945–1994], Jorge

Zontal [1944–1994], and AA Bronson [b.1946]) sought to mark how AIDS had

radically transformed the 1980s. Mimicking the rapid spread of the virus, General

Idea replicated and disseminated its AIDS logo in a variety of media, including

painting—as seen here—as well as wallpapers, sculptures, stamps, multiples,

and animated videos. In doing so, the group challenged the intense stigma and

fear around AIDS through art.

AIDS

by General Idea

Among Canada’s best-known performance artists, the

Winnipeg duo Shawna Dempsey (b.1963) and Lorri Millan

(b.1965) are the creators of the famous feminist performance

piece Lesbian National Parks and Services, 1997–present.

Dressed in uniform as Lesbian Rangers, Dempsey and Millan

have toured national parklands across Canada, Australia, and

the United States, exerting a self-described “visible homosexual

presence” and unsettling normative ideas of tourism, recreation,

and the natural landscape. Creating humorous, provocative, and feminist works

as collaborators since 1989, Dempsey and Millan believe there is still more to be

done. “It would be great if our work wasn’t still sort of on-point somehow, that

we felt dated, but I think some of the concerns are so present still,” says Millan.

LESBIAN NATIONAL PARKS

AND SERVICES

by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan

This still from The Named and the Unnamed, 2002, a video

installation by interdisciplinary Anishinaabekwe artist

Rebecca Belmore (b.1960), commemorates the lives of

missing and murdered Indigenous women. It documents

a performance in which Belmore stood on a street corner

in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, calling out names of

missing women written on her arms. After stating each name,

the artist tore owers apart with her teeth, acknowledging

how her subjects’ lives had been ruthlessly destroyed. In The Named and

the Unnamed, the video of Belmore’s performance is projected on a screen

embedded with approximately fty lightbulbs. One of the most important

contemporary artists in Canada, since the late 1980s Belmore has conceived

deeply political and poetic artworks examining issues of social justice and the

realities of Indigenous peoples.

THE NAMED AND THE UNNAMED

by Rebecca Belmore

This arresting abstract painting, composed of a vertical blue

“V” on top of horizontal black brushstrokes, was created by

the Quebec artist Paul-Émile Borduas (1905–1960) during

his self-imposed exile in Paris following the incendiary 1948

publication of his co-authored Refus global (Total Refusal).

As François-Marc Gagnon wrote in his Art Canada Institute

book on Borduas, the painter “launched a frontal attack on the

parochialism (esprit de clocher, as it was called) in Quebec, the

stiing dominance of Catholicism, and the narrow nationalism of the provincial

government under Premier Maurice Duplessis,” which laid the groundwork

for the province’s Quiet Revolution. Although the manifesto was signed by the

Automatistes—a group of artists led by Borduas—he was the one to experience

immediate, life-changing repercussions, including losing his job.

ABSTRACT IN BLUE

by Paul-Émile Borduas

In this boldly coloured painting by Vancouver-based Cowichan/

Syilx First Nations artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (b.1957),

three women in business suits wear masks loosely rendered

in a traditional Northwest Coast style. Jutting out of the

central gure’s mouth is a forked tongue, a snake-like feature

symbolizing her duplicitous character. Painted in 2015, the

work expresses the artist’s denunciation of Christy Clark, the

then-premier of British Columbia, and her support of the proposed

tripling of the capacity of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline. For over

thirty years, Yuxweluptun has created unapologetically critical paintings about

pressing issues such as oil spills, climate change, systemic racism, and the

legacies of colonialism and residential schools.

CHRISTY CLARK AND THE KINDER

MORGAN GO-GO GIRLS

by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

In this four-metre-long painting, Michif (Métis) artist Christi

Belcourt (b.1966) draws on her knowledge of Métis history

and beadwork traditions to depict an impressive variety of

medicinal plants, along with birds, insects, raindrops, and

dew. Composed of approximately 150,000 to 250,000 bead-

like dots of paint on a black background, this remarkable

work expresses the necessity of clean water in maintaining

healthy ecosystems. Based in Espanola, in Northern Ontario,

Belcourt is a prominent community activist for whom water protection is among

the most urgent environmental concerns. The Onaman Collective, which

Belcourt co-founded and connects youth to traditional knowledge and art skills,

produced a series of free, downloadable banners for protesters to use during

water and land protection events.

WATER SONG

by Christi Belcourt

This tiny sculpture by Edmonton-born, New York City-

based artist Curtis Talwst Santiago (b.1979) references the

fatal shooting of Michael Brown Jr., an African American

teenager, by a white policeman in the city of Ferguson,

Missouri, in 2014. The miniature diorama, which depicts

ocers engaged in a gunght while a Black man lies on

the ground, was modelled after preeminent Spanish painter

Francisco Goya’s The Third of May, 1808, 1814—a work that

documents the assassination of Spanish freedom ghters by the French during

the Peninsular War (1807–1814). Santiago’s commemorative sculpture is part of

his ongoing Innity Series (2008–present), which consists of intricate dioramas

within reclaimed jewellery boxes that compel us to look closely at contemporary

tragedies and consider how these events spark demands for social justice.

THE EXECUTION OF

UNARMED BLACK MEN

by Curtis Talwst Santiago

ART FOR SOCIAL CHANGE:

ELEVEN TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS

Canadian artists throughout history have created works

that challenge the status quo. Striving for equality and social justice,

these pieces present meaningful change in the face of challenge.

In this powerful drawing, Kinngait (Cape Dorset) Inuk artist

Shuvinai Ashoona (b.1961) draws connections between

tragedy in her community, particularly as a result of high

suicide rates, and the 2011 tsunami in Japan, which had a

profound eect on her. In the foreground, an otherworldly

gure carries the lifeless, mangled body of a youth in its arms.

Texts on the gures’ clothing in English and Inuktitut reference

the tsunami. The word tsunami resembles the Inuktitut word

sunamii, meaning “what else.” Nancy G. Campbell, author of Shuvinai Ashoona:

Life & Work, elaborates, “The wordplay of tsunami and sunamii refer to the

cycles of tragedy. The prefab dwelling in the background signals the setting as

Cape Dorset, not the torn coast of Japan.”

OH MY GOODNESS

by Shuvinai Ashoona

The composition of this work by the Toronto art partners

Carole Condé (b.1940) and Karl Beveridge (b.1945) is based

on the famed Gustave Courbet painting A Burial at Ornans,

1849–50, in which the rural townspeople at a funeral are

treated as subjects of an important history painting. In this

staged photograph, Condé and Beveridge mirror the format

of Courbet’s work and feature a group of contemporary

protestors outside a manufacturing plant. The demonstrators

confront men in suits carrying a funeral casket adorned with a wreath and sash

that reads “JOBS.” The piece was created in response to General Motors’ decision

to close their Oshawa plant in 2019. Collaborating with trade unions on creating

staged photographic works since the mid-1970s, Condé and Beveridge included

members of UNIFOR Local 222, which represents the GM workers, here.

BURIAL AT OSHAWA (PART 6)

by Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge

Among the rst Canadian painters to explore political subject

matter in the 1930s, Paraskeva Clark (1898–1986) expressed

support for striking Chicago steelworkers in her most

signicant work, Petroushka, 1937. In this painting, the

Russian-born Toronto artist depicts a crowd of people on

the street watching a puppet show in which Petroushka, a

stock character, is portrayed as a worker being exploited and

subjugated by capitalism (the banker) and law enforcement (the

police ocer). Christine Boyanoski, author of Paraskeva Clark: Life & Work,

writes, “The crowd responds to the performance with catcalls and clenched

sts—an anti-fascist symbol of unity, strength, and resistance used here to

indicate [Clark’s] support for their cause.”

PETROUSHKA

by Paraskeva Clark

In January 2019, over one hundred Canadian Black women

and gender non-binary artists and arts workers gathered

in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Walker Court for The Feast,

a performative dining exchange in which members of the

virtual collective Black Wimmin Artist met in person for

the rst time. Founded in 2016 by Toronto artist and curator

Anique Jordan, the organization is named after the rst

Canadian exhibition exclusively dedicated to the work of Black

women artists. The Feast marked the thirtieth anniversary of this exhibition,

which was organized by the Diasporic African Womyn Art (DAWA) collective.

Jordan states, “I started Black Wimmin Artist as a resource-sharing network … to

support the work of Black wimmin and gender non-conforming artists. I always

felt that the artists I grew up around were not visible. It was important for me to

create a platform that encouraged each of us to claim our space as artists.”

THE FEAST

by Black Wimmin Artist

THANK YOU TO OUR BENEFACTORS

The ACI is a not-for-prot educational charity that receives no government

nancing or public support. Our work is made possible by an important

circle of friends, patrons, and benefactors. If you would like to support

our important work, please see this page.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it.

READ PAST NEWSLETTERS

Black Wimmin Artist, The Feast, 2019