Artists In Canada Research Articles

Use of Subsidized Health Services by Artists in Canada: An Exploratory Study.

Creative and performing artists are often confronted with precarious employment and insufficient healthcare coverage. A clinic in Canada that provides specialized healthcare to artists offers eligible artists subsidized health services. We aim to compare the use of health services, demographics and health conditions between subsidy artist recipients (SAs) and non-subsidy artists (NSAs). We accessed existing data from 265 SAs and 711 NSAs and applied descriptive and inferential statistics to address our research questions. Musculoskeletal issues, stress, anxiety disorders, and depressive disorders are the most common health problems faced by SAs. Compared to NSAs, SAs were more likely to seek treatment for stress, but less likely to seek treatment for anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, chronic problems, and upper extremity problems. Future research may investigate the enduring effects of subsidized health services on SAs' health outcomes. Sustained positive outcomes are crucial for maintaining an artist's career and well-being.

Determining Autistic Aesthetics: How to Find Autistic Artists in Canada

Determining Autistic Aesthetics: How to Find Autistic Artists in Canada

On heartbreak, livelihoods and art: affect and crip desire in art making assemblages

ABSTRACT This article explores the affective dimensions of disabled, D/deaf, mad, and neurodiverse artists’ work through a livelihoods framework informed by the social and tacit dimensions of heartbreak. Heartbreak emerged during interviews with twenty artists in Canada in 2020, during a time of significant state-based policy changes that impacted disabled people’s livelihoods in the province of Ontario. Taken together, the artists’ stories form a rhizomatic cartography that takes crip wisdom and desire as significant elements of artmaking amid wider relational assemblages of affect. Drawing on Deleuzian and Guattarian concepts of desire and Puar’s difference-in/as-assemblage, researchers assert that although crip artmaking is not without joy, heartbreak is embedded in the politically aesthetic work of cultural production.

Critical Disengagement: The Epistemic and White Supremacist Violence of Theatre Criticism in Canada and the USA

This article examines recent controversies sparked by the critical reception of work by Global Majority theatre artists in Canada and the USA, including Yolanda Bonnell, Yvette Nolan, and Antoinette Nwandu. It argues that, when faced with works that fall outside of their presumed expertise and experience, critics commonly resort to a strategy of critical disengagement, which displaces the focus from the work and refuses to evaluate it on its own terms. Through an analysis of case studies, we elucidate the concept of critical disengagement and its three distinct categories, ‘othering,’ ‘imposing’, and ‘self-staging’. These acts are representative of larger patterns in dominant theatre criticism practices, which are descended from neoclassical and Enlightenment formulations of criticism, and centre around the ideals of fair judgement and critical objectivity. When applied to the work of Global Majority theatre artists by a largely white critical establishment, they enact, consolidate, and reproduce what Gayatri Spivak calls epistemic violence. During this pivotal moment, as theatre communities in the Global North respond to calls for racial justice and decolonization, this article sheds light on the often overlooked role of criticism in sustaining white supremacy within theatre production and reception, and stresses the urgent need to re-imagine critical practices. Signy Lynch is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto Mississauga and recipient of the Governor General’s Gold Medal (York University, 2022). She has published articles on theatre criticism and intercultural theatre in Contemporary Theatre Review, Canadian Theatre Review, and Theatre Research in Canada. Michelle MacArthur is associate professor at the University of Windsor’s School of Dramatic Art. She has published articles in Contemporary Theatre Review, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and several edited volumes. She is the editor of Voices of a Generation: Three Millennial Plays (Playwrights Canada Press, 2022).

Eisenbichler, Konrad. Forgotten Italians: Julian-Dalmatian Writers and Artists in Canada.

Eisenbichler, Konrad. Forgotten Italians: Julian-Dalmatian Writers and Artists in Canada.

Creative Enabling: Relations and Structures of Support for Disabled Artists

The levels of accessibility and accommodation for disabled theatre artists in Canada are diverse and varied. Without consistent infrastructures in place to support these artists, creative workarounds and new ways of creating have been developed. Becky Gold has worked with blind artist Alex Bulmer for nearly four years, navigating systems of support and accessibility (or lack thereof) within Bulmer’s various artistic projects. Together, they have come to an understanding about what support means to them and how it can best be nurtured and evolve from one project to the next. Drawing from their experiences of working together in Canada as well as from Bulmer’s previous experiences of support structures in the United Kingdom, this article highlights the need for support roles to be better understood as infrastructurally integral to the evolving culture of disability arts in Canada.

Sur Gallery

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

An Auto-Ethnographic Entrée en Matière and Mise en Contexte

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

Colonial Art from Spanish America in Québec

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

Artistic Responses to Coloniality in the Americas

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

Arts from Latin America at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

Introduction to the Dialogues on Latin American Art(ists) from/in Canada

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

Encounters with “Latin American Art” in Canada

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

Participating in the Age of Pandemic

On 13 March 2020, researchers Mariah Horner and Jenn Stephenson were worried that their investigation into participatory theatre would come to a halt. Since 2019, Horner and Stephenson have attended and collected over seventy-five participatory theatre performances by Canadian creators, analyzing the dramaturgical structures at play that invite audiences into the co-creative space with artists. Marking a trend, Stephenson and Horner paired this catalogue of participatory dramaturgies with effects of the larger cultural zeitgeist that provides participants with the language and practice in meaningful and participatory play. When COVID-19 hit, social distancing and pandemic-response plans required a different kind of global participation. Although physically disconnecting us from others, public health agencies asked their citizens to collectively participate in new practices that would redefine our relationship to space and each other. When this article was submitted in mid-July, millions of people around the world were participating in something for the common good. Although participatory artists are finding themselves unable to cross the same physical barriers to co-creating work as they could before the COVID-19 pandemic, Horner looks at the ways participatory creators employ their practices in this new reality of social distancing. In “Participating in the Age of Pandemic,” Horner investigates how participation is possible at six feet apart, looking to participatory artists in Canada who are defying the loneliness of isolation by inviting intimacy and love into their socially distanced performances.

Konrad Eisenbichler, ed. Forgotten Italians: Julian-Dalmatian Writers and Artists in Canada

Konrad Eisenbichler, ed. <i>Forgotten Italians: Julian-Dalmatian Writers and Artists in Canada</i>

The Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance: Indigenous Self-Government in Moving Image Media

The Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance:Indigenous Self-Government in Moving Image Media Karrmen Crey (bio) In 2014, the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival hosted "indigiTALKS: Following that Moment," a session that focused on experimental video projects created by Indigenous artists in Canada in the early 1990s. Their work was framed as an origin point for the ideological and formal strategies developed by subsequent generations of Indigenous artists who not only challenge colonial representations of Indigenous people but also test and reflect on the video apparatus and its role in these meaning-making activities.1 This session emphasized the role that the Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance (AFVAA), an Indigenous media-and arts-based organization, played in this history as a catalyst for the rise of Indigenous media in Canada. Four years later, at the 2018 festival, this sentiment was reinforced through a retrospective for one of the AFVAA's original and core organizers, Marjorie Beaucage (Métis), an accomplished experimental filmmaker, activist, and community leader in Canada.2 Lisa Myers (Anishinaabe), the curator of both sessions, is [End Page 175] not alone in recognizing the AFVAA's contributions to the Indigenous media wave that began in Canada in the early 1990s.3 However, its public acknowledgment at imagineNATIVE, the largest Indigenous media festival in the world, recuperates the AFVAA's role in this phenomenon and in the development of contemporary understandings of Indigenous media as a creative practice and a cultural category. One of the AFVAA's goals was to support the development of an Indigenous media language that links Indigenous cultural politics of the era with the formal features of screen representation. The AFVAA operated on the principle of Indigenous self-government, a term arising from Indigenous sovereignty movements of the latter part of the twentieth century in North America. Indigenous self-government refers to the inherent right of Indigenous peoples to govern themselves according to their own nation-and community-specific political traditions and structures.4 Consistent with this principle, the AFVAA advocated for Indigenously controlled programs and resources within Canadian cultural institutions. The AFVAA's mission was to enact institutional self-government by "visioning new partnerships, based on Self Government [sic] principles, with cultural institutions and funding agents."5 These partnerships were intended to support the development of an infrastructure for Indigenous media and arts by creating dedicated resources and Indigenously controlled spaces within these institutions to sustain Indigenous creative production. The exact design and operations of these spaces were necessarily open and undefined in order to parallel the principle of self-government: Indigenous self-government does not have content per se, or, in other words, there is not one prescriptive form of self-government that can be applied to different Indigenous communities and nations; instead, self-government must be developed and tested on the ground as the right and purview of Indigenous communities.6 The AFVAA's partnerships echoed these premises but also sought to extend them into art and media production, where the politics of self-government was to be exercised and represented through experiments with the formal features of media technologies. The AFVAA thereby contributed to the production of an influential and widespread discourse of Indigenous media that weds cultural politics to the textual and technological features of moving image media, as I will discuss in a small sample of the organization's activities. The roots of the AFVAA were established in April 1991 at a meeting that brought together forty-five Indigenous filmmakers, performers, artists, and journalists to create an organization that would promote and practice [End Page 176] Aboriginal self-government in the arts.7 The AFVAA subsequently took shape as a group consisting of a thirteen-member Steering Committee with representatives from regions across Canada and established artists and media practitioners as advisors, including Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki), Wil Campbell (Cree-Métis), Bernelda Wheeler (Cree, Assiniboine, Salteaux), and Maria Campbell (Métis).8 The AFVAA's mission was to bring Indigenous politics into the cultural sphere by "promot[ing] and encourag[ing] the interdisciplinary art form of film and video production" along with creating "new cultural storytelling forms within the principles, values and traditions of Aboriginal Self Government...

Konrad Eisenbichler (ed.), Forgotten Italians: Julian-Dalmatian Writers and Artists in Canada

Konrad Eisenbichler (ed.), <i>Forgotten Italians: Julian-Dalmatian Writers and Artists in Canada</i>

Riding the Cyclone: One Actor’s Take on the Rollercoaster Journey of Atomic Vaudeville’s Ride the Cyclone

Canadian Theatre Review interviews Kholby Wardell, who has played the role of Noel Gruber in every iteration of the musical Ride the Cyclone, by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell, from its first workshop in 2008 in Victoria, BC to its Off-Broadway run at the MCC Theater in the 2016–17 season. Wardell discusses the development process of the show and articulates some of his thoughts about how the show has evolved over its many iterations. He also discusses differing audience responses to the show, its comedy, and its core themes, and he talks about the many contributions made to its development by a variety of theatre artists in Canada and the US.

A Conversation with Tanya Harnett and Jeff Thomas

ABSTRACTIn a conversation between urban-based Iroquois photographer and curator Jeff Thomas and Tanya Harnett, an artist and professor at the University of Alberta and a member of the Carry-the-Kettle First Nation in Saskatchewan, the two artists discuss their own experiences as Indigenous artists in Canada (and on an international stage), how they see their artistic practices engaging with identity issues and social issues, and the responsibility they feel as artists to their communities, particularly to the young people in their communities. In this wide-ranging conversation, Thomas and Harnett reflect on place, family, residential schools, social responsibility, ethics, truth, and reconciliation, always coming back to the stories told and the questions posed by photographs and photography-based art.

Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility ed. by Roland Sintos Coloma et al. (review)

Reviewed by: Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility ed. by Roland Sintos Coloma et al. Fritz Luther Pino Roland Sintos Coloma, Bonnie McElhinny, Ethel Tungohan, John Paul C. Catungal, and Lisa M. Davidson, eds. Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. 464 pp. 10 images. $85.00 hc. $37.95 sc. Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility is a groundbreaking book that explores the racial construction of Filipinos in Canada. As an edited collection, it brings together for the first time scholarly works, research findings, literary compositions, and visual art photos of Filipino scholars, academics, community activists, and critical artists in Canada, as well as non-Filipino Canadians whose works are situated in Filipino-Canadian studies. It aims to interrogate what it means to be a Filipino in Canada by engaging in the concept of visibility and invisibility. Building on the works of critical race and feminist scholars, the authors argue that visibility or producing a positive image is not the solution to invisibility or the potential way to disrupt White supremacy. Rather, it is by interrogating and deconstructing both the positive and negative images that continuously benefit the mainstream culture. With a highly critical and scholarly tone, the five parts and twenty chapters of the book [End Page 223] demonstrate such interrogations and deconstructions of Filipino stereotypes as well as discuss Filipinos’ experiences of racialization in Canada. Part 1 contains the first three chapters with the title Difference and Recognition. It begins with the book editors’ chapter that outlines the socio-political issues, theoretical, and philosophical underpinnings of the terms visibility and hypervisibility. It discusses the genealogy of Filipino-Canadian scholarship and offers critique to the limits of Canadian liberal multiculturalism. Such is a helpful resource for scholars, academics, researchers, and community activists. The remaining two chapters under this part interrogate the description of Filipinos as innately nurturing: that such a description places Filipinos to affect-related jobs just to satisfy Canada’s need for cheap labour (Chapter 2). Filipinos are then de-professionalized and occupy the low-paying jobs in Canada (Chapter 3). This part then ends with a song-poem (My Folks) by Carlo Sayo and Jean Marc Daga. Part 2, Gender, Migration, and Labour, opens with a photo essay entitled SCRAP by Reuben Saramugam and Bryan Taguba, showing “the story of the struggles and resistance of Filipino women in the Live-in caregiver program” (95). These stories continue in Chapters 4 through 9 with analysis from the lens of history, women and labour studies, anthropology, political science, and diaspora and ethnic studies. The authors of these chapters reveal how race operates through gender to sustain the dominant groups’ racial and class position in Canada. A picture of Darna (a Filipina superhero) carrying a balikbayan (return to country) box by artist Celia Correa opens Part 3 entitled Representation and Discontents. Darna depicts Filipino “migrant realities of distance and absence that are lived and transformed in concrete and idealistic terms” (221). This part contains chapters 10 through 14 that examine the meaning of “Filipino” in cultural productions such as in a museum, textbooks, and public libraries, as well as in the works of Filipino artists and activists. These chapters reveal that the racialization of Filipinos in Canada is not only through structural policies and social encounters, but also in the everyday consumption of tangible and aesthetic materials that fuel the imagination and psyche of Canadians. Part 4 entitled Youth Spaces and Subjectivities opens with a visual art called Colour Correction by Eric Tigley. He draws his inspiration from Beyond Colour Lines, a spoken word piece by Conely de Leon, author of chapter 18. Together with De Leon, the authors of chapter 15, 16, 17, and 19 focus on the experiences of violence, racism, and displacement of Filipino youth in Canada. By engaging with these issues, they reveal the long-term, multi-generational, and spatial effects of racialization. The authors also discuss how the youth politicize the meaning of their identities through artwork, music, performance, and community organizing in order to counter stereotypical narratives. [End Page 224] Since the book voices out the racialized, classed, and gendered experiences of Filipinos in Canada, in the afterword (Part 5...