Image by Anabelle Chassé for Artexte and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2021

Artexte and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts team up for Art+Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thon

Online

March 13, 2021 — 2PM to 5PM — Discussion at 4PM

Schedule

  • 2:15 PM: Initial training offered in French and English for people with no prior experience editing Wikipedia articles;
  • 2:15 – 4:00 PM : Edit-a-thon;
  • 4:00 – 5:00 PM : Discussion with Geneviève Wallen and Michaëlle Sergile;

 

As part of the Art+Feminism campaign, Artexte and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts are teaming up and inviting you to highlight the work of artists and authors from groups that are underrepresented in Wikipedia, including women, indigenous people, people of colour, and people from the LGBTQ2S+ community, with a Wikipedia Art+Feminism edit-a-thon.

For this first collaboration, Artexte and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts are teaming up and inviting the public to take part in a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, followed by a discussion between artist Michaëlle Sergile and independent curator Geneviève Wallen.

 

Listen to their discussion here : 

 

In order to assist participating editors in finding reliable information sources and drafting and making improvements to Wikipedia pages, Artexte’s librarians will offer training in French and English. The MMFA’s Archives department and Artexte’s librarians have also assembled some digital files from their collections of publicly accessible documents as well as documentation on a selection of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of colour) artists who have shaped the contemporary art landscape but do not yet have a Wikipedia page or whose pages need to be translated or updated.

Whether you’re a Wikipedia buff or neophyte, you’re invited to contribute to the writing of a text in this edit-a-thon, which constitutes a great international effort to correct persistent biases of inequality and underrepresentation in this free encyclopedia with respect to women, BIPOC and LGBTQ2S+ artists.

 

Biographies: 

Michaëlle Sergile is an artist and independent curator working mainly on archives, including texts and works from the postcolonial period spanning from 1950 to today. Her artistic work aims to understand and rewrite the history of Black communities, and more specifically of Black women, through weaving. The artist uses the lexicon of weaving – a medium often perceived as artisanal or feminine – to question the power relationships enmeshed with gender and race. She has exhibited at the ArtHelix gallery in New York and the Miami Art Fair, and has participated in several group exhibitions in Montreal, including at Place des Arts, Art Mûr gallery and the Conseil des Arts de Montréal. She also received several prizes and scholarships during her academic career, including a grant from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC). She is currently project manager and curator for the Nigra Iuventa platform, where she co-curated the first exhibition created by and for Black women in Quebec. In February 2020, she co-curated the exhibition Je sais pourquoi chante l’oiseau en cage inspired by the autobiography of American author Maya Angelou. Most recently, she co-curated the exhibition Data Thieves: What Our Archives Pass on to Us, in collaboration with Massimadi at the Never Apart gallery.

 

Geneviève Wallen is an independent curator and writer based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal and Tkaronto/Toronto. Wallen’s practice is informed by diasporic narratives, intersectional feminism, intergenerational dialogues, BIPOC alternative futures and healing platforms. Her current research focuses on the notion of longevity as a methodology of ongoing resistance and care work in the arts. Her most recent curatorial projects include: Made of Honey, Gold, and Marigold (2020), on view at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, and, Little Musings (2020), an online collective correspondence in partnership with MICE Magazine and co-facilitated with artist Eve Tagny. Wallen has contributed essays for C Magazine; the anthology Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada edited by Deanna Bowen; and co-authored “Souped Up: Slow Building of Support Networks Through Commensality” in The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, by Gregory Blair and Noa Bronstein. She is the Exhibition Coordinator at FOFA Gallery, a member of the YTB Gallery collective, the co-initiator (with Marsya Maharani) of Souped Up, a themed dinner series conceived to carve spaces for care and support-building among racialized curators and cultural workers, a member of the Black Curators Forum, and a member of the advisory committee for the BLACK PORTRAITURE[S]: Toronto, Absent/ed Presence conference (BPTO).