Art History Speaker Series: Heather Igloliorte & Carla Taunton

The Department of Art History Speaker Series is pleased to welcome Dr. Heather Igloliorte and Dr. Carla Taunton.

"New Directions in Writing Indigenous Art Histories:  Theories and Methodologies for Canada and the US"
Friday, October 23, 2020
4 pm
Online via Zoom

This talk explores Dr. Igloliorte's and Dr. Taunton's current co-edited book project and considers productive, decolonial, sovereign and Indigenous specific approaches towards the writing, exhibiting, teaching, framing, and theorizing of Indigenous art.

Registration for this free event is required. Please register using the following link.

Dr. Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk from Nunatsiavut (Labrador, Canada), holds the Tier 1 University Research Chair in Circumpolar Indigenous Arts and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec), where she also serves as the Special Advisor to the Provost on Advancing Indigenous Knowledges. In the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology, Heather Co-directs the Indigenous Futures Cluster (with Prof. Jason Edward Lewis), which will soon become the Indigenous Futures Research Centre. Igloliorte has been an independent curator for fifteen years. She currently has two exhibitions touring nationally and internationally, and is working, as the lead guest curator of the inaugural exhibition INUA, towards the opening of the new national Inuit Art Centre at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2021.  Her nationally touring exhibition SakKijajuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut (2016-2019) received an Award of Outstanding Achievement from the Canadian Museums Association in 2017. Her research, which centres Inuit and other Indigenous knowledges in the understanding of circumpolar and North American Indigenous art and art history, has been published by Duke University Press, TOPIA, Art Journal, and McGill - Queen’s University Press, among others; she has three forthcoming co-edited volumes coming out in 2020-21; and her essay “Curating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: Inuit Knowledge in the Qallunaat Art Museum,” was awarded the 2017 Distinguished Article of the Year from Art Journal.  

Dr. Carla Taunton is an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University and the Special Advisor Decolonization and Social Justice (NSCAD) and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the department of Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. Taunton is a white-settler scholar whose areas of expertise include arts-based critique of settler colonialism, Indigenous arts and methodologies, contemporary Canadian art, museum and curatorial studies, as well as theories of decolonization, anti-colonialism, and settler responsibility. Currently she is co-editing a special issue on arts-based critiques of settler colonialism to be published in spring 2021. Taunton is a co-founder and collective member of the Art and Activism Collective (Halifax) and her recent collaborative research projects include: Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Moving Image Heritage (2018-2024), This is What I Wish You Knew: Urban Aboriginal Artists (2015-2018), and Art and Activism (2012-ongoing). Her recent publications include “Performing Sovereignty: Forces to be Reckoned With” in More Caught in the Act (2016), and “Embodying Sovereignty: Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada,” in Narratives Unfolding (2017). She has published in Journal of Canadian Studies, PUBLIC, TOPIA, McGill-Queen’s University Press among others. She was a curatorial team member for the National Gallery of Canada’s international Indigenous exhibition, Abadakone (2019) and has served on numerous community-based and national advisories and councils..