May 06

Sarah Butterill, Mary Katherine Mcintyre, and Zeesy Powers on: critical pedagogy, research, and knowledge production

In late March OCAD University’s Dorothy H. Hoover library hosted the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. Now that the dust from the keystrokes has settled we’re getting caught up with Sarah Butterill, Reference Intern at the Dorothy H. Hoover Library who organised the Edit-a-thon along with fellow participants and editors Mary Katherine Mcintyre and Zeesy Powers.

Edit-a-thon Image[Image description: black and white image of a woman calling out the word ‘edit’, written atop a stylized megaphone]

SITE-SPECIFIC: What was the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon and what was the idea behind it?

SARAH BUTTERILL: The Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon was an event that we held here at the OCAD library on Saturday, March 22nd, 2014. It was a follow-up to a larger, international event that happened in February, organized by a group of activists in New York (more information here). On that day, hundreds of volunteers at dozens of events around the world (often in art school libraries) gathered to teach each other how to create and edit Wikipedia articles and added more than 100 women artists to Wikipedia, in an effort to make up for gender imbalances in Wikipedia coverage and in Wikipedia writers/editors.

On that day in February, one of the international satellite events took place here in Toronto, at Art Metropole. The women who organized that event, artists Amy Lam and Ella Dawn McGeogh, later approached me about hosting future edit-a-thons here at the library, in order to continue the work of that day and make use of the library’s resources for the project. Everyone at the library loved the idea, and we were really happy to be able to introduce the OCAD community to the project and get students involved. It was also exciting for participants to have access to our collections and databases. We began the event with a tutorial about Wikipedia and then spent the rest of the afternoon working on articles about women artists who either have bare-bones Wikipedia pages or do not have Wikipedia pages at all. In many cases it’s surprising which artists don’t have pages. For example, Toronto artists Diane Borsato, Tanya Mars, and the collective FASTWÜRMS have entire books published about them, but do not yet have Wikipedia pages.

SITE-SPECIFIC: What interested you about the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon and why did you participate?

MARY KATHERINE MCINTYRE: This past semester I took a 3rd year course called Cross-Cultural Currents in Craft (VISC 3B41). The first assignment was to research and write a Wiki for a craft-related subject not already published on Wikipedia. The meta-purpose of the assignment was to make us aware of the fact that relatively few women artists, and literally only a handful of women in craft practice, are represented on Wikipedia. When OCAD announced an Edit-a-thon at the Library, I saw this as a perfect opportunity to see if I could actually get published the article I wrote for class, on the Canadian silversmith and educator Lois Etherington Betteridge.

ZEESY POWERS: I love Wikipedia, and use it regularly as a starting point for research in a wide variety of topics. The lack of representation for women artists (not to mention women scientists, authors, etc.) is a big problem, especially as the initial stages of research shift to online formats. The content available on Wikipedia is entirely volunteer-generated, so if you see there is a gap in representation and you don’t do anything about it, there is a good chance that that gap will be perpetuated.

“I think the questions raised by the event are ones that we can always apply to our cultures/sub-cultures, such as who is overlooked and why? Who and what is celebrated or challenged? Who is writing the articles?”

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Apr 24

Audrey Hudson on: hip hop, intersectionality, and education

Image of OCAD U Faculty Adurey Hudson

Image of OCAD U Faculty Audrey Hudson

SITE-SPECIFIC: Hip-Hop & Convergence Culture is a new course at OCAD U that you will be teaching this summer. Can you tell us more about it and what led you to conceptualizing this course?

AUDREY HUDSON: I graduated from OCAD in 2002 from the Faculty of Design, with a major in Material Art & Design. I took courses from a wide variety of programs, trying to find my voice as a mixed race Black female in a historically Eurocentric field of study. When I was doing my undergraduate work, I did not have very many courses that spoke to me on a personal level, but I always tried to bring my lived experiences into my practice. Two years ago when I was invited to teach at OCADU, I was ready to come back and share my knowledge with students through the experiences I gained as an artist/designer, educator and graduate student. I knew, that in coming back to the school that I loved, I wanted to insert my voice into the curriculum, and have the stories of Black, Indigenous and artists of colour to be heard in the art/design world. My aim behind this course is to connect this subculture of post-modernity we call hip-hop, to design, media and education.

S: How can hip hop be used as a tool for decolonizing education?

H: Colonization was (or arguably is), a long, painful process, and decolonizing is an even longer one. The history of colonization and settler colonialism in Canada is often silenced and unspoken about in curriculum. In order for the process of decolonization to begin, we need to acknowledge the need for Indigenous sovereignty and work together, Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, to make this a reality. This means, educating one’s self about the knowledges that are silenced, and bringing them back into educative spaces. For me, hip-hop is a way to bring these rich knowledges and voices into pedagogical spaces and discuss histories of colonization, race, representation and sovereignty. I view hip-hop as a tool to begin decolonizing education because of the attention to minority voices and to the powers it speaks back to. Hip-Hop artists such as, A Tribe Called Red, JB the First Lady, Shad, K’Naan, and Wab Kinew are just a few Canadians who have taken up the work in their music. Here is an example:

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Apr 02

Site-Specific Explores the Politics of Representation and Critical Pedagogy

Spring 2014 – Site-Specific explores the Politics of Representation in art & design and Critical Pedagogy.

Who is represented by art and design that is being produced currently? Who has been and continues to be represented by art and design has become part of the historical canon? Whose histories are taught – and whose are left out? How can we come to a more encompassing practice of representation?

What is critical pedagogy, and what does it mean in an art & design context? How does critical pedagogy influence our ways of communicating and understanding both academically and visually? Similarly, how does critical pedagogy interact with the politics or representation? And how does it all tie together and help us think about curriculum differently?

Click ‘leave a reply’ under each post and share your thoughts, ideas and responses.