Against the Nation: Rethinking Canadian Art History in the World
The history of Canadian art is a transnational history. Canadian art historiography, however, is strongly rooted in national narratives. As a settler-colonial nation, the country itself cuts across dispersed territories of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. Taken one way, the prefix trans in transnational — which signals many possible relationships across, between, and beyond geopolitical national boundaries, as well as those that fundamentally challenge or change them — describes the material and epistemic violence of Canada’s formation. Taken another way, it offers a methodology for unsettling colony-to-nation narratives of Canadian art history and for thinking about the relationships between art, nation, and nationhood, and between local, regional, and global cultures, in new ways. Reframing Canadian art history in light of global networks focuses on the exchange and flow of ideas, peoples, artistic connections, and institutions beyond political borders.
Building on the foundational work of scholars such as Monika Kin Gagnon, Charmaine Nelson, and Alice Ming Wai Jim, this panel invited papers on any period that considered Canadian art as a site of cultural encounter and transnational connections. We were particularly interested in transnational approaches to Canadian art that decenter/denaturalize a unified nationalist history which reinforces and reinscribes a narrative of white, male, heterosexual, colonial settlement, and the near exclusion of Indigenous, Black, people of colour, immigrants, women, queer and trans people. How can transnational Canadian art histories activate decolonial and anti-racist politics in scholarship and pedagogy?
Session Convenors:
Jen Kennedy (she/her), Assistant Professor, Department of Art History and Art Conservation, Queen’s University
Devon Smither (she/her), Associate Professor, Department of Art, University of Lethbridge.
Speakers:
Samantha Burton (she/her), Assistant Professor (Teaching), Department of Art History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California
Mary Bell Eastlake’s “Other” Mothers
This paper looks at the work of Mary Bell Eastlake, a white settler Canadian painter and jewelry designer who pursued a remarkably global career in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First trained in Montreal, the artist left Canada for a Parisian art education in the 1890s. Making her homebase in England, Eastlake travelled to China, Japan, Polynesia, South America, and beyond.
This paper will examine a series of pastel sketches of Maori mothers and children Eastlake produced in Aotearoa New Zealand. I look at these images in relation to other representations of motherhood produced by the artist, as well as the scientific work of her brother James Mackintosh Bell, then-director of the New Zealand Geological Survey. The Bell siblings undertook their careers with an eye towards bringing knowledge about the region back to Canada. Eastlake’s work not only encourages us to investigate the possibilities of a transnational Canadian art history, but opens up a framework that allows us to think about cultural networks beyond the colony-to-metropole relationship. Instead, her work invites us to consider what the study of transnational connections between and among settler colonies themselves might contribute to our understanding of the history of Canadian art.
Marcus Jack (he/him), The Glasgow School of Art
Revisiting Norman McLaren: Complicity and Subterfuge
A gay man, ex-communist and pacifist, experimental artist-filmmaker Norman McLaren (1914–1987) arrived in Canada in 1941, escaping war in Europe and the social conservatism of his native Scotland. Within the shelter of the National Film Board in Ottawa and latterly Montréal, McLaren and his cadre of collaborating artists, musicians and dancers—often women, often queer—produced many cherished works of film, not least including the Academy Award winning Neighbours (1952). Some borne as proof of concept, exercises in pure technique, others servicing a more explicit imperial armature in the promotion of war bonds, postal campaigns or anti-gossiping enforcement, McLaren and his collaborators’ body of work betrays an unresolved tension between freedom of expression and security. Through moments of complicity and subterfuge, on-screen and off, a complex narrative emerges about the parts permissive and prohibitive relationship between one minoritised artist and the national institution. Dubbed ‘the most protected artist in the history of the cinema’ by long-time mentor and documentarian John Grierson, McLaren’s case can instruct the way we might better think about institutionalised artistic practice as compromised or otherwise disreputable. Drawing upon new oral testimonies and archival research undertaken at repositories in Canada and Scotland, this paper offers a corrective to established narratives underwritten by still unchallenged reproductions of historic homophobia and institutional interest. Reconstructing contexts of state-sponsored artistic production in the mid-twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic, this paper asserts a rethinking of artists’ instrumentalisation within programmes of cultural nation-building.
Gabrielle Moser (she/her), Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto, Canada
Extra-curricular: photography, race, and education in the University Settlement House of Toronto, 1946-56
The Settlement House movement, established in the 1880s in England and the United States, was a transnational pedagogical experiment that foregrounded extra-curricular activities—particularly art and music classes, theatre productions, recreational sports clubs, Sunday evening dances, and summer camps, but also language classes, library facilities, homework rooms, medical clinics and inexpensive lunchrooms for nearby factory workers—as vital means for providing “lessons in citizenship and cooperative organization” (James 2001). Imported to Toronto’s Ward neighbourhood in the 1910s—a site of an influx of non-European immigration, inadequate infrastructural and civic support, and poor living conditions that middle class residents worried would disrupt the moral fabric of the city—settlement house activities were fastidiously documented by amateur photographers: particularly at the University Settlement House, founded by faculty and students from the University of Toronto and located behind the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario). This paper examines the University Settlement House’s photographs from the 1940s and 50s, now held in the City of Toronto Archives, to demonstrate the ways photography, race, and extra-curricular activities came together as a public education project of assimilation and settlement, and how community members used these technologies for acts of resistance through acts of social de-segregation and transnational alliance. Following the idea that photography is an “itinerant language” (Cadava and Nouzeilles 2013), I argue that the use of photography, race and citizenship in the settlement house is relevant not only to the history of Canadian visual culture, but to a growing field of global photography histories that study the ways photographs circulate among publics around the world.