The Floyd Effect

Amidst anti-racism protests, Canadian art institutions are vowing to do a better job representing diversity. But how much will things actually change?

by

It's been called “the Floyd effect.” And the Canadian art scene is definitely among those affected.

The protests and riots following the May 25 murder of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis, by a white police officer has shaken North American society so profoundly that institutions of all types have begun to examine their own treatment of Black people. 

This includes art galleries across Canada that have been issuing spontaneous statements of solidarity with Black Lives Matter and promising to raise the profile of Black artists in their exhibitions and collections.

“We pledge to listen and learn in order to bring forth changes within our organization,” Daina Augaitis, interim director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, wrote June 5. “Doing so will increase the diversity of what we exhibit, what we acquire for the collection, whose voices we amplify, who walks through our doors and who gets hired.”

From the Winnipeg Art Gallery: “We recognize that galleries have historically been part of the colonial structure of perpetuating racism and oppression and we are committed to dismantling these systems.”

But will such statements result in action once the furor over Floyd’s death dissipates? 

In Victoria, Michelle Jacques sounds optimistic. Jacques is the chief curator of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and one of the most prominent Black women in the Western Canadian art scene.

“I hope that what the broader public’s eyes have been opened to since George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent protests will move us past the impasse of arguing over whether racism exists or not towards action and meaningful change,” says Jacques. 

“I am encouraged that the response has permeated the border and that we are looking at our own shortcomings in this place called Canada, and encourage us all to think about how racism and other forms of oppression create vast inequities in our own society.”

Inequities can be found in the most surprising places. In Winnipeg, for instance, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights has, amid the current debate, hired lawyer Laurelle Harris, who has expertise in mediation as well as women’s and Black studies, to lead a review following complaints of racism and other forms of discrimination at the museum.

There are some signs of positive change. While several of these developments predate the current debate, they could help create a bandwagon effect:

  • In Toronto, OCAD University has just hired five new Black tenure-track faculty – Angela Bains, Kestin Cornwall, Kathy Moscou, Michael Lee Poy and Marton Robinson – to address what dean Dori Tunstall calls the faculty of design’s "144 years of Black under-representation.”
  • Stan Douglas, a veteran multidisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, will represent Canada at the 2022 Venice Biennale, one of the world's most prestigious art events. His recent work Doppelgänger features two looped narratives on side-by-side screens that depict events on worlds that are light years apart.
  • Kapwani Kiwanga, born in Hamilton, Ont., and working in Paris, won the 2018 Sobey Art Award, for artists aged 40 and under. Her recent shows in Western Canada include one at Calgary’s Esker Foundation and another, Flowers for Africa, which considered Africa's transition from colonialism by recreating independence ceremony floral arrangements at Vancouver’s Or Gallery, an artist-run centre.
  • Luther Konadu, a fast-emerging Black artist from Winnipeg, last year won both the BMO 1st Art! competition for art school graduates and one of three New Generation Photography Awards from the Canadian Photography Institute, a prize that includes a show at the National Gallery of Canada.

Meanwhile, in Halifax, NSCAD University has just hired Charmaine Nelson from McGill University in Montreal, where she was the first tenured Black professor of art history in Canada. In her new role, she will develop the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery, the first of its kind in Canada. Nelson expects this initiative will encourage more Black students to enrol at NSCAD.

The recent debates, plus the higher death rate from COVID-19 among Blacks, have caused many people to take notice of anti-Black racism, Nelson says. The time is thus ripe for change. 

But it depends on leaders taking positive initiatives. For example, she praised the Nova Scotia government for supporting the NSCAD changes, but criticized Quebec Premier François Legault for denying there is systemic racism in that province.

The 2016 federal census identified almost 1.2 million Black Canadians – about 3.5 per cent of the country’s population. So, should they get 3.5 per cent of the space in exhibitions and collections? Or is the answer more complicated than that?

Nelson says solutions go beyond numbers. It's important, she says, that Black artists are not just exhibited in small, artist-run centres, but also in large, well-funded institutions that can finance catalogues and ensure a record is preserved for study by future scholars.

She notes that big museums periodically consult Black art professionals in the community when planning exhibitions. What this shows is that Black professionals are “outside rather than inside” the largest institutions and more need to be given full-time positions, she says.

One of the largest group shows at a major institution, Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art, was organized by the Royal Ontario Museum in 2018 and later traveled to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. 

It featured artists Sandra Brewster, Chantal Gibson, Sylvia D. Hamilton, Bushra Junaid, Charmaine Lurch, Esmaa Mohamoud, Michèle Pearson Clarke, Dawit L. Petros and Gordon Shadrach. Most are based in Toronto, but Gibson, whose work challenges hegemonic systems and the imperialist ideas embedded in everyday things, whether academic textbooks or kitschy souvenir spoons, lives in Vancouver.

Only a few studies have examined diversity in Canadian exhibitions, despite persistent calls from some to create systems that would track such data, including the racial and ethnic background of curators and artists whose work is held in collections.

“As the saying goes, knowledge is power,” says Nadia Kurd, a curator at the University of Alberta Museums Art Collection who has organized exhibitions by visible minority artists. 

“Gathering and tracking collections information is a key starting point to address anti-Black racism, as well as many other inequities,” says Kurd. “I also think that it’s an established fact that Black, Indigenous and People of Colour have been under-represented in both collections and staffing of arts institutions … for a very, very long time.”

The most recent comprehensive look at the composition of solo exhibitions of living, contemporary artists came in the 2019 book Diversity Counts: Gender, Race, and Representation in Canadian Art Galleries by Anne Dymond, a University of Lethbridge art historian.

Dymond studied the period from 2000 to 2010, tracking 5,000 exhibitions at 130 public museums, galleries and artist-run centres. 

Smaller galleries tended to have a better track record than large public institutions. She particularly praised the Vancouver Art Gallery, which “had significantly more exhibitions of Asian artists and artists of colour generally than other comparable galleries.” 

Some 38 per cent of the VAG’s solo exhibitions in the decade went to visible minority artists, mainly Asian and Indigenous. The Winnipeg Art Gallery was also praised for its many Indigenous exhibitions. 

She found fewer visible minority exhibitions were held at other large institutions, such as the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

At the AGO, only 15 per cent of solo exhibitions went to visible minority artists – this in a city where half the population identifies as visible minority. 

More recently, the AGO has featured shows by Toronto-based Black artists Sandra Brewster and June Clark, as well as American Mickalene Thomas, who explores how Black women are represented in popular culture. (Black American artists have also been featured at recent shows in Alberta, including Nick Cave at the Glenbow in Calgary and Alicia Henry at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge.) 

Dymond describes the record of the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal as “shockingly bad.” Of 138 solo shows, less than 14 per cent were by racialized artists, this in a city where almost a third of people identify as visible minorities. There was only one Indigenous exhibition – by B.C.’s Brian Jungen – and none by a Quebec Indigenous artist, she says.

“The numbers make clear that at many institutions, we are not even close to equity … and that too often our most prestigious institutions tell a story that is far too white and too male.” 

Nor is there any guarantee the situation will improve, she says. For one thing, changes in leadership can help or hurt equity. For example, her study found that during Marc Mayer’s tenure, first at the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, and then at the National Gallery, the number of solo exhibitions by women at both institutions decreased considerably. At the Montreal museum, where Mayer was director from 2004 to 2008, the percentage of solo shows by women dropped from an average of 47 per cent to 20 per cent. After he left, it went back up to 47 per cent. 

Dymond also discovered many curators are resistant to logging the race or ethnicity of artists. They fear such statistics could ultimately hamper their creative freedom or prompt racial quotas.

In Saskatoon, jake moore, director of the art galleries and collection at the University of Saskatchewan, says anecdotal evidence, not just statistics, about racial inequality is important.

“As empirical data may be less easy to find, it is important to consider the anecdotal as legitimate source,” says moore. “Oral histories are often where the truth lies, or at least hold the story that complicates the dominant narrative. Just as women’s communal knowledge has been disparaged as ‘old wives tales’ in overt misogyny, we must listen carefully to the anecdotal and oral to not replicate historic violences.”

Mayer, while at the National Gallery, unleashed a national controversy in 2010 by saying “excellence,” not race, ethnicity or geography should determine what art is acquired by the institution. 

But who decides what is “excellent?” Is it the same white curators and managers who have exerted almost total control at the gallery since its inception? 

Today, the director and all the senior curators at the National Gallery are white women, with the exception of Greg Hill, who heads the Indigenous section. Would Black or Asian curators possibly have different opinions as to what is “excellent?” Definitely, says Charmaine Nelson.

The “excellence” debate surfaced when Emily Falvey, a Montreal-based curator and now the director of the Owens Art Gallery in Sackville, N.S., spearheaded a petition with Milena Placentile, another curator, that was signed by 500 artists and curators from across the country, to open the National Gallery’s doors to more visible minorities. 

“I don’t think much has changed,” says Falvey. “From what I see, the leadership in most Canadian galleries is still majority white. Speaking for the Owens, we don’t have any policy yet, but we are currently doing a diversity analysis of our collection with a view to updating our acquisitions policy.”

It leaves one wondering how to know when “the Floyd effect” has really changed things for the better.

It’s not a numbers game, says Victoria’s Michelle Jacques.

“As long as we are counting how many Black artists are getting shows or being collected, or thinking about their participation as a ‘fair share,’ we know things are unfair,” says Jacques. “When every artist, no matter what cultural background they come from, has equal chance at opportunities, we will have achieved parity.” ■ 

PS: Worried you missed something? See previous Galleries West stories here or sign up for our free biweekly newsletter