Image: D by fourth year Drawing and Painting student Damon Couto-Hill, winner of this year’s Indigenous Student Leadership Award.
Celebrating National Indigenous History Month at OCAD University
Join OCAD University as we observe National Indigenous History Month, honouring the history, heritage and diversity of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in Canada. See below an exciting list of free events and activities coming up throughout June that feature artistic brilliance by Indigenous community members, artists, designers, scholars and curators connected to OCAD U.
Wapatah Centre Presents:
Arctic/Amazon Knowledge Exchange Workshops
View four online Knowledge Exchange Workshops presented by Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge. Featuring conversations between Professor in the Faculty of Arts & Science and Director of Wapatah Centre Dr. Gerald McMaster and OCAD U Research Assistant Nina Vincent with authors and groundbreaking scholars, artists and performers Harald Gaski, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Ailton Krenak and João Paulo Barreto. Each Knowledge Exchange Workshop focuses on a key theme, as it weaves the dialogues around Land Relations, Contact Zones, Indigenous Ontologies, and Traditional Knowledge.
Available online now.
Image via Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Culture website.
Weweni Bizindan (Listen Carefully) at The Bentway
May 26 to August 21, 2022
Featuring work by the Ogimaa Mikana Project, a collaboration between Assistant Professor and Delaney Chair of the Indigenous Visual Culture program at OCAD U Susan Blight and Executive Director of the Yellowhead Institute and Advisor to the Dean of Arts on Indigenous Education at Toronto Metropolitan University Dr. Hayden King. Weweni Bizindan is a large-scale public art installation – a dialogue with the street – that contributes to discussions of the animate nature of our language and the world around us.
May 26 to August 21, 2022
In person
The Bentway, 250 Fort York Blvd.
Image by Susan Blight via Instagram.
Coffee Chats with Jordan Bennett at Onsite Gallery
June 9, 2022
Join OCAD U’s Indigenous Student Centre (ISC) and the RBC Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers (CEAD) for a conversation with Jordan Bennett, Mi’kmaq visual artist from Stephenville Crossing, Ktaqamkuk (Newfoundland). Bennett’s practice uses painting, sculpture, video, installation and sound to explore land, language, the act of visiting, familial histories and challenging colonial perceptions of Indigenous histories and presence with a focus on exploring the Mi’kmaq and Beothuk visual culture of Ktaqamkuk.
June 9, 2022 | 1 to 2 p.m.
In person
Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond St. West
Image via Jordan Bennett's website.
Mi’kmaq By Design Lecture Series at 100 McCaul St.
Jordan Bennett: Artist and Curators’ Conversation
June 15, 2022
Join Jordan Bennett in conversation with Ryan Rice and Lisa Deanne Smith about Bennett’s art, design and public art practice. Click here to reserve your tickets.
June 15, 2022 | 12 to 1:30 p.m.
In person
Room 230, 100 McCaul St.
Image via OCAD University's website.
Mural Launch at Butterfield Park
pi'tawita'iek: we go up river
June 15, 2022
The mural, pi'tawita'iek: we go up river by Jordan Bennett, curated by Lisa Deanne Smith, activates public space and in its multiple connections (to the land, between the artist and his ancestors and with our communities) widens our perception of Indigenous creativity. This new, public artwork is rooted in Bennett’s relationships with Mi’kmaq porcupine quillwork. Bennett brings forward and reimagines their graphic patterns, bright colours and inspiring stories. In visiting with these cultural objects Bennett connects with their visual language and furthers this visual conversation through his contemporary influences and experience. The mural received grant funding as part of ArtworxTO: Toronto's Year of Public Art 2021–2022 with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and TD Bank.
June 15, 2022 | 3 to 5 p.m.
In person
Butterfield Park, 100 McCaul St
Image: Mural for the City of St. Johns, Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) in collaboration with Eastern Edge Art Gallery for the Identify Festival of Indigenous Arts & Culture.
Exhibition Launch at Onsite Gallery
Souvenir
June 15, 2022
Jordan Bennett’s solo exhibition Souvenir, curated by Associate Dean of Arts & Science at OCAD U and Curator of Indigenous Art at Onsite Gallery Ryan Rice, draws upon his inspired intentions to visit, activate and respond to the innovative heritage embedded, woven and veiled in the richness of Mi’kmaq material culture and design. His interdisciplinary and intuitive approach grants new vitality to overlooked cultural expressions that carry elaborate Mi’kmaq cosmologies interpreted through customary geometric motifs embellished in a highly valued era of porcupine quillwork and basketry souvenir trade commodities that was thriving in the 19th century. The exhibition brings together Bennett's newly designed site-specific work, museum collection loans and installation to celebrate the vitality and influence of Indigenous aesthetic as contemporary practice.
Image: Ketu’elmita’jik (They want to come home) as installed at Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
June 15, 2022 | 5 to 7 p.m.
In person
Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond St. West
Consulting with the Ether at Toronto Reference Library
May 7 to July 30, 2022
Check out this free exhibition at the Toronto Reference Library, featuring works by OCAD University students enrolled in the fourth year Indigenous Visual Culture course, INVC 4904: Materials & Methods: Creation. Curated by Curated by Dehmin Cleland, Tiffany Hon, Grace Point and Katie Pretti, students in OCAD U's Indigenous Visual Culture program.
Image: 生井 (living wells) (2022) by Tiffany Hon, 3D printed objects.
On until July 30, 2022
In person
Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge St.