Pam Patterson

Pam Patterson (PhD), Assistant Professor, TS, has, for almost 50 years, been active in the art, performance, disability, and women’s communities. Her research, performance, visual work, curating and teaching have focussed on embodiment in art practice, the “body” or haptic in art, women and health, disability, women’s studies and feminist art education. Her articles, reviews and research have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, books, and exhibition catalogues. Her book, Enacting Learning: An Arts-Informed Inquiry with the Bay Area Artists for Women’s Art (BAAWA) was published by Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrücken, Germany. She was also Director of Research for the Canadian Society for Education through Art (CSEA) and acted as an ambassador for OCADU and OISE, University of Toronto for the Canadian Association for the Study of Women and Education (CASWE)

Patterson has directed graduate and undergraduate courses and programs for various Canadian institutions. She was Head, Fibre, and Curator for Art in Public Spaces, The Banff Centre and, for over 10 years, facilitated school programs and taught performance, installation, multi-media and drawing in the studio program at the Art Gallery of Ontario and in Youth Studio (a program she founded) at the Toronto School of Art.

Patterson has been teaching art education, contemporary art, criticism and curatorial practice, materials and the Anthropocene, and coordinating the Art and Design Education Lab in the Faculty of Art since 2010. She also supervises MFA students in the School of Graduate Studies. Starting in 2019 she took on the additional role of Director, 113Research, a community-based, research-creation student-curated gallery site at OCAD U.

In 2022, she founded the OCADFA Disability Caucus and is now co-leading, with Roman Romanov, Karin Von Ompteda (FoD, OCAD U) and Matt Hawthorn (University of Derby, UK), the Creative Research Inclusive Practices Lab (CRIP Lab) at OCADU. She is also a Research Fellow for the Master's in Art Education Program at NSCAD.

Since 2004 she has been co-directing WIAprojects, a feminist interdisciplinary program in community-based, arts-informed, feminist-inspired research. For WIAprojects, she mentors emerging trans and women artists and curators and curates exhibitions, performances and events. WIAprojects, now sited at Gallery 1313, also publishes various documents and monographs.

As a queer disability performance and visual artist, Patterson has exhibited and performed across Canada and internationally solo, and with Leena Raudvee as ARTIFACTS. Works include performance/videos: Distended Topographies at EdgeZones, Miami and Red Square for TorinoPERFORMANCEART International Festival, Turin, Italy.

OVERVIEW:
My practice is performative and engages with/in diverse locations of/in culture. It is a practice that honours the self, the other(s) and the knowledge that is co-created. It is a practice that engages the self as a whole, a conversation among multiples -- diverse perspectives, experiences, modes of thinking and expressing. My study is in flux, in motion, as a place of multiple, interdisciplinary arts practices. I work from the specific, the personal, and the local to explore structures, concepts, divergences and connections.

CV with publications, teaching, research, curation, writing, exhibitions and performances can be viewed at http://www.pampatterson.ca/.

AREA(S) OF EXPERTISE:
ART(S) EDUCATION, CRITICAL, CULTURAL AND CURATORIAL STUDIES, MUSEUM STUDIES, PERFORMANCE ART, DISABILITY STUDIES, RESEARCH-CREATION