CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS: CANADIAN ART, SUMMER 2020 - Guest Editors: Denise Ryner and Yaniya Lee

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS: CANADIAN ART, SUMMER 2020

Guest Editors: Denise Ryner and Yaniya Lee

This issue invites reflection on aesthetics, Blackness and Black art histories—discussions that have previously been sidestepped in mainstream contemporary art. Guest editors Denise Ryner and Yaniya Lee are continuing conversations from the “Bodies Borders Fields” symposium (Nov. 22 to 24, 2019), which brought together artists, writers and thinkers to re-imagine a conversation about “black” as a concept and medium from a 1967 issue of artscanada (the predecessor to Canadian Art). Contributions to this issue will be nuanced expansions on the omissions of the original panel, which was held in 1967 and published in the issue, and the gaps of racialized memory in Canadian contemporary art history in general.

We are interested in analysis that examines the current attention to Black canadian art, and our unhistoricized presence in Canadian art history. With the increased interest in Black cultural production, institutions are responding with policies of inclusion and equity. What do these shifts in attention to Blackness look like? Can (or should) they be made permanent? In what ways are artists and art workers still attempting to push for even further change? How does art address and archive this moment? How is Blackness thought alongside Indigeneity? How is Blackness being thought and re-thought? What restrictions are being put on Blackness? What are the limits of representation in regards to Blackness? 

We’re interested in ideas of absented presence, of how movement and sound figure as Black aesthetics, in ideas of opacity and the relationship between Blackness and visuality/ocular regimes of capture. In addition to contemporary contexts, this issue will explore the historic groundwork laid by CELAFI or CAN:BAIA or the State of Blackness conference, and the work of path-finding curators like Pamela Edmonds and Andrea Fatona in Canada and curators like Okwui Enwezor, Thelma Golden, Koyo Kouoh and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung internationally.

We invite contributors to think alongside the work of contemporary theorists and poets like Dionne Brand, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Katherine McKittrick, Charmaine Nelson, M. NourbeSe Philip, Christina Sharpe and Rinaldo Walcott, as well as artists like Buseje Bailey, Sandra Brewster, Deanna Bowen, Justine A. Chambers, Michael Chambers, June Clark, Tau Lewis, Aisha Sasha John, Denyse Thomasos, Tim Whiten, Wayde Compton and many others.

TO SUBMIT:

Proposals should be attentive to the entanglements of aesthetics with the political/social forms of Blackness. This is an opportunity to propose writing that will focus on the aesthetics of Blackness and the interrogation of Blackness through visual and multi-media. We welcome: 

– case studies on specific exhibitions or cultural events 

– profiles on artists or curators 

– accessible examinations of aesthetics specific to local Black practices and communities

– ideas for reviews, interviews or other story types  

We encourage debates around artists, art workers and representations of Blackness within institutions and the nation-state, knowing, of course, that institutions and nation-states innately function to stratify, exclude, and individuate. 

Please send a short pitch (150 words max) outlining the idea for your proposal. Please include 1 or 2 writing samples or links to previous work, your CV and any other information you feel is relevant. 

Please send to pitches@canadianart.ca with “Summer 2020” in the subject line. 

DUE: JANUARY 14, 2020