Blackity
Summer 2021
This spring Joana Joachim returns to Artexte’s stacks for a research residency focused on Black Canadian art histories. To date there has only been one art historical anthology written with the express purpose of mapping Black Canadian art history across time. Towards an African Canadian Art History peels back the layers of this shared past and lays bare its particular stakes in Canadian society (2019, 8). Among these stakes is the stubborn, cyclical, dis-remembering of Black Canadian artistic practices within art institutions on Turtle Island. Using the “Black Canadian Artists Bibliography” compiled by EAHR as a starting point, Joachim traces the trajectory of contemporary Black Canadian art as witnessed by the collection from 1965 to 2020. Her aim is to underscore key moments and people to consider the thematic, aesthetic or conceptual threads linking them.
Dr. Joana Joachim will join Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts as Assistant professor of Black Studies in Art Education, Art History and Social Justice in 2022. Her research and teaching interests include Black feminist art histories, Black diasporic art histories, critical museologies, Black Canadian studies, and Canadian slavery studies. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral work, There/Then, Here/Now: Black Women’s Hair and Dress in the French Empire, examined the visual culture of Black women’s hair and dress in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, investigating practices of self-preservation and self-care through the lens of creolization as well as historical and contemporary art practices. She earned her PhD in the department of Art History and Communication Studies and at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill University working under the supervision of Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson. In 2020 she was appointed as a McGill Provostial Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Institutional Histories, Slavery and Colonialism.