13 Conversations About Art and Cultural Race Politics

his summer, I spent time with the collection of interviews comprising (2002). Introduced to me by my predecessors, this publication was described as an exercise in archiving, historicizing, revising and reframing Canada’s artistic landscape from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Published by Artexte Editions, and edited by Richard Fung and Monika Kin Gagnon, this anthology focuses on how racialized artists, critics and curators mobilized against the homogeneity of the artistic fabric at that time. Fung and Gagnon’s 11 contributors—Cameron Bailey, Dana Claxton, Karma Clarke-Davis, Andrea Fatona, Sharon Fernandez, Gaylene Gould, Richard William Hill, Ken Lum, Scott Toguri McFarlane, Alanis Obomsawin and Kerri Sakamoto—were invited to contemplate issues related to cultural production, access, education, globalization, race politics, post-racial ideologies and neoliberalism. From interruptions within institutions—such magazine or The Pomelo Project, many policy moments, alternative platforms and projects conducive to inter-communal dialogues live herein. Contextualized and compartmentalized in six chapters (“Framings,” “Art or/+Politics,” “Into the Institution,” “Imaginative Geographies,” “(CAN) Asian Trajectories” and “Speculations”), the book traces a history that shaped the cultural climate not only at the beginning of the new millennium but also, as it turns out, the one in which I’m operating today.