Creating Communities Through Art

Creating Communities Through Art

Curated by Tia Bankosky, Drew Burton, Prerana Das, Anna Douglas, Peggy Fussell, Jung-Ah Kim, and Jessa Laframboise

Main Space and Project Room, Union Gallery

Community Wall, Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning

August 9–September 17, 2022

Academic Supervisor: Jen Kennedy

Co-Supervisor: Carina Magazzeni

Presented in partnership by Union Gallery + Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning

Through archival research and oral histories, Creating Communities Through Art starts to map the teaching and learning that takes place across Katarokwi-Kingston’s creative communities. Questions emerge about art making and other creative collaborations as forms of community-based learning, mentorship, and world making. The informal and reciprocal learning that happens through the processes of making art and sustaining communities is reflected in the artwork presented.  

As curators, we are interested in the importance of site-specificity and the diverse objectives that link Katarokwi-Kingston arts communities in unexpected ways.  We welcome a broad definition of the terms “art, community, teaching, learning, and collaboration” to engage with the informal and formal ways that community members learn together through the arts.  

Visitors are asked to consider the following questions while making their way through the exhibition:  

- What roles can art making and arts education play in creating community?  

- How does your community use art making to spark critical conversations, pass down knowledge, or enact social change? 

Jung-Ah Kim is a Ph.D. student in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. Prior to coming to Queen’s, she received her MFA in Documentary Media from Northwestern University (2019) in Chicago. Her areas of research include migration experiences, textile art in relation to time-based media, and media archaeology all contributing to developing a system of non-narrative filmmaking practice. Coming to this project, she is looking forward to expanding her interests and experience in conducting oral histories and working with communities that inform her curatorial practice.

Drew Burton is a PhD student in Art History at Queen’s University studying the censorship of queer art in American museums and galleries. His MA research focused on the scandalization and censorship of the art and biography of Egon Schiele. His PhD research builds on this research by extending key questions related to the social, political, and financial motivations that drive campaigns to censor and alter the presentation of modern art into the contemporary period. He has lived in Katarokwi/Kingston since beginning his education at Queen’s University in 2013 and serves as the Co-Chair of the Board of Directors at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. Currently, he is learning to embroider as a way to cope with the pandemic. 

Peggy Fussell is a PhD student in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. She studied visual communication at Pratt Institute and comes to this project with professional experience as an animator and museum educator. She has training in a variety of museum pedagogies and has created accessible experiences with art for all ages and abilities. These learning environments support intergenerational fun and learning outside of the classroom and include installations, obstacle courses, collaborative art projects and events in museums and arboretums. Currently, she is researching and making craft based animation and optical toys.

Tia Bankosky is in the one-year Masters of Cultural Studies program. She completed her Bachelor of Arts Honours in Indigenous Environmental Studies and Sciences at Trent University in 2021. Broadly, Tia is interested in exploring storytelling and justice. Through Cultural Studies, she hopes to learn more about the potential for stories in fostering empathy for others, developing understanding of equity, and facilitating reciprocal relationships with nature and more-than-human beings. Tia is very excited to be involved in this art-based pedagogy and storytelling research project with Union Gallery and the Tett Centre as a way to learn about the art organizations in Ka’tarohkwi and improve her research skills.

Prerana Das is a first-year PhD student at Queen’s University and her thesis aims to explore the impacts of intergenerational mobility among women on Darjeeling’s tea plantations in India. She is a documentary filmmaker and researcher with a particular interest in stories of migration, border politics, and processes of displacement. Her work strives for visual advocacy and often explores embodied histories within landscapes and spaces, as well as their relationship to cultural and personal memory. Prerana has worked as an oral historian and is excited to apply collaborative methodologies to the study of arts-based pedagogy in Katarokwi.

Jessa Laframboise is a feminist artist and art historian from Northern Ontario. She holds a BFA from Nipissing University, an MA in Art History, and a graduate diploma in Curatorial Studies from Carleton University. She currently resides in Kingston, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in the Art History program at Queen’s University. Jessa is interested in praxis-based, feminist-oriented research methods, autotheory, and blending creative writing techniques into her projects. Her research focuses on feminist art education, alternative centres, community-oriented collectives, and experimental programming and pedagogy developed by second-wave feminist artists. Jessa is currently working on a project that places the past and the present in conversation, reinterpreting and reactivating 1970s feminist art pedagogy to suit the needs and values of contemporary art students.

THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

This research project is generously funded by the Mitacs Accelerate Fellowship and co-presented by Union Gallery and the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning.